This chapter analyses the changing reception of ‘declinism’ and its evolving depiction in British postmodern fiction. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there existed a tradition of characterising Britain by its lack of enthusiasm for science, the indifference of government to commerce, and the low status of research and development, industry, and engineering. Numerous political scientists, economists, columnists, and historians drew on ‘decline’ as an interpretative framework despite many disagreements about its meaning, evidence, causes, and remedies. At mid-century, postmodern British writers created analogies between narratives of national decline and stories of individual dissolution. Following the Thatcher administration, they offered nascent critiques of ‘declinism’, presenting it as a discourse rather than historical fact. Finally, late-twentieth-century writers joined the growing ranks of professional historians who sought to debunk ‘declinism’ and caution against nostalgia for a halcyon past that may not have ever existed.

More than 40,000 people went missing in the ex-Yugoslavia armed conflicts where the fate and whereabout of almost 10,000 of them is still unknown. Since then, various initiatives at the national and the regional level have been made to carry out search and identification processes, but the reparative mechanisms available to families of persons who disappeared have remained underdeveloped, and largely differs within the region. This chapter sheds a light on the recent legislative developments and a jurisprudence in the ex-Yugoslav republics that used to be the most affected by conflict; Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia (Kosovo and Metohija), focusing on the differences in the level of the international obligations for the states in the Region arising from both: different ratification status of relevant international law instruments and the different status in terms of the EU accession processes. The special attention was paid to the direct and ex-tempore applicability of those international law instruments, considering the complexity of the constitutional organisation of the states, but also the different time frames which the states apply when define ‘the state of war’.

One of postmodernism’s legacies is ironically that, once it is assumed to be over its characteristic self-consciousness about its own historicity has come to permeate ‘post-postmodern’ culture. This chapter considers why critics and theorists were so keen, especially in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century, to declare postmodernism over and to identify what has replaced it. What does this preoccupation with periodicity mean for a society which – due to advances in digital technology – now shares, more widely, a similar uncertainty about its own position in history? The work of some notable twenty-first-century British writers – aware of writing in postmodernism’s slipstream – can usefully be seen as responding to this question. The chapter examines three in particular: Ali Smith’s The Accidental, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Each of these novels conveys a historical ‘out-of-time-ness’, which implies that, ghost-like, the postmodern has both ended and continued.

The introductory chapter details what is gained by using the concept of social role when studying power relations in Late Antiquity and how it ties in well with ancient ideas about why people act in the way they do. It shows how Late Antique thought and practice conceptualized social hierarchies in moral terms and argues that precisely the expectation that social and moral hierarchies coincide injects the dynamism in social interactions that this book chronicles. It also underscores that society was conceived of as held together by justice and shows how this was intertwined with hierarchical conceptions of society and the cosmos.

In order to be effective mathematics educators, teachers need more than content knowledge: they need to be able to make mathematics comprehensible and accessible to their students. Teaching Key Concepts in the Australian Mathematics Curriculum Years 7 to 10 ensures that pre-service and practising teachers in Australia have the tools and resources required to teach lower secondary mathematics.

By simplifying the underlying concepts of mathematics, this book equips teachers to design and deliver mathematics lessons at the lower secondary level. The text provides a variety of practical activities and teaching ideas that translate the latest version of the Australian Curriculum into classroom practice. It covers the challenges of middle year mathematics, including the current decline in student numeracy, as well as complex theories which teachers can struggle to explain clearly. Topics include number, algebra, measurement, space, statistics and probability. Whether educators have recently studied more complicated mathematics or are teaching out of field, they are supported to recall ideas and concepts that they may have forgotten – or that may not have been made explicit in their own education.

Authored by experienced classroom educators and academics, this book is a vital resource for pre-service and practising Years 7 to 10 mathematics teachers, regardless of their backgrounds and experiences.

The agricultural practices associated with the green revolution assumed their fullest form in the state of Punjab and are commonly associated with the launch of HYVs in 1964-66. But in reality, Punjab had been undergoing a process of agrarian transformations for a long time. Punjab developed as the subcontinent’s most productive agrarian region during colonial times. Though the partition disrupted the region’s agricultural infrastructures, the state embarked upon a massive phase of rebuilding under the leadership of a handful of bureaucrats with a technocratic vision. These efforts were tailored to build a system of productive agriculture to restore the province’s pre-partition preeminence. The pursuit of productivity trumped every other agenda in Punjab and a spell of regional technocracy took hold. The American experts arriving under the Indo-US treaties and those sent over by the American foundations believed that the modernization of Indian agriculture must start from Punjab. When the HYVs arrived, Punjab was readier than any other region.

In order to be effective mathematics educators, teachers need more than content knowledge: they need to be able to make mathematics comprehensible and accessible to their students. Teaching Key Concepts in the Australian Mathematics Curriculum Years 7 to 10 ensures that pre-service and practising teachers in Australia have the tools and resources required to teach lower secondary mathematics.

By simplifying the underlying concepts of mathematics, this book equips teachers to design and deliver mathematics lessons at the lower secondary level. The text provides a variety of practical activities and teaching ideas that translate the latest version of the Australian Curriculum into classroom practice. It covers the challenges of middle year mathematics, including the current decline in student numeracy, as well as complex theories which teachers can struggle to explain clearly. Topics include number, algebra, measurement, space, statistics and probability. Whether educators have recently studied more complicated mathematics or are teaching out of field, they are supported to recall ideas and concepts that they may have forgotten – or that may not have been made explicit in their own education.

Authored by experienced classroom educators and academics, this book is a vital resource for pre-service and practising Years 7 to 10 mathematics teachers, regardless of their backgrounds and experiences.

In order to be effective mathematics educators, teachers need more than content knowledge: they need to be able to make mathematics comprehensible and accessible to their students. Teaching Key Concepts in the Australian Mathematics Curriculum Years 7 to 10 ensures that pre-service and practising teachers in Australia have the tools and resources required to teach lower secondary mathematics.

By simplifying the underlying concepts of mathematics, this book equips teachers to design and deliver mathematics lessons at the lower secondary level. The text provides a variety of practical activities and teaching ideas that translate the latest version of the Australian Curriculum into classroom practice. It covers the challenges of middle year mathematics, including the current decline in student numeracy, as well as complex theories which teachers can struggle to explain clearly. Topics include number, algebra, measurement, space, statistics and probability. Whether educators have recently studied more complicated mathematics or are teaching out of field, they are supported to recall ideas and concepts that they may have forgotten – or that may not have been made explicit in their own education.

Authored by experienced classroom educators and academics, this book is a vital resource for pre-service and practising Years 7 to 10 mathematics teachers, regardless of their backgrounds and experiences.

Chapter Four contends that the electronic amplification of false and misleading election-related claims poses a significant threat to American democracy. To address that threat, we urgently need government regulation of companies that provide electronic amplification services. However, the Supreme Court has created a body of First Amendment doctrine that places Congress in a constitutional straightjacket, making it almost impossible for Congress to enact the type of legislation that is urgently needed to protect our democracy. This chapter sketches the outlines of a proposed federal statute that would restrict the electronic amplification of election-related misinformation. It explains why any statute along those lines – indeed, any statute that might be moderately effective in protecting American democracy from the threat posed by the electronic amplification of misinformation – would almost certainly be deemed unconstitutional under the Court’s current First Amendment doctrine. Therefore, the Court must revise its First Amendment doctrine to help save American democracy.

Development scholars have honed their theories on notions of state-led programs and projects in which the subjects of development are mere recipients of state bequest under elitist planning and implementation. In contrast, the nationwide community development project launched in India in 1952 under the umbrella of the Indo-US treaty of technological cooperation aspired to build participation in planning and development from below. This bureaucracy-led program envisioned instilling a “will to improve” among communities. The notion of “community” had a wide currency in India at a time when refugees from Pakistan were streaming into the nation after partition and officials were engaged in the conjoined task of organizing refugees and organizing rural populace into productive communities. The program was laced with technocratic principles of communitarian sociology. While the program met the metrics of development in the initial pilots, the nationwide spread of community blocks seemed to languish, calling into question the program’s principles and methods.

This chapter explores disciplinary offences in professional tennis, namely anything but doping, corruption, fraud or similar offences. These disciplinary offences are typically found in relevant codes adopted by the three key tennis actors. They involve physical violence on and off the courts; audible obscenity, visible obscenity and verbal abuse; indiscipline and how it has actually contributed to the commercialization of the sport in many ways; the case of grunting; coaching infractions; and Wimbledon dress code. The chapter examines the adjudication and enforcement of disciplinary rules and how these have been transformed with modernity, further touching upon issues of race and mental health and their function in the enforcement of disciplinary rules. The case of Osaka is explored in detail, whose refusal to play certain tournaments as a result of her mental health was viewed as a breach of the WTA’s rules.

With one or two exceptions, British postmodernism came late, but it showed remarkable staying power. Not less remarkable is the fact that it never was very postmodern. Although it freely uses the postmodern techniques and strategies that we are familiar with, it avoids the narcissistic self-referentiality, the play for the sake of play, the radical relativism, the so-called decentring of the individual, and other vices that postmodernism has often been accused of. Its play with the conventions of realism is affectionate rather than hostile and betrays a compassionate interest in the individual and in larger social concerns rather than an affinity with postmodern theory. The argument draws on both early and recent postmodern fiction by writers such as Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Nicola Barker and David Mitchell.

This chapter examines the politics of school closure, which represents the “third-rail” in education. I argue that school closures closely follow a “bootleggers and Baptists” model of politics. Bootleggers provide the behind-the-scenes financial and organizational resources to shape policy, while the Baptists serve as the movement’s more sympathetic and earnest public face. In the context of schools, the bootleggers are school employees who worry how school closures will affect their jobs, while the Baptists are local community members who want to keep their neighborhood schools open. A large-N quantitative analysis examines both the causes and consequences of closure. I find that: (1) although closures appear to disproportionately affect communities of color, the disparities are explained by school enrollment patterns and differences in achievement that are correlated with the racial composition of students; (2) on average, building closures neither improve nor reduce average student performance on math or ELA exams in elementary and middle school grades; and (3) school closures modestly accelerate student enrollment losses and significantly decrease teacher employment.

This introductory chapter establishes the two prevalent framings of climate governance and politics, namely an antagonism between the pursuit of stability and of re/politicization. The chapter’s first section, on stability, introduces to the field four novel understandings of stability: as the status quo, as engineering lock-in, as policy lock-in, and as long-term emissions reduction pathways. Next, re/politicization is explored, and we likewise develop four forms of re/politicization: as broader sociopolitical change, as partisan competition, as discourse, and as scholarly praxis. In each of the two sections, we illustrate our four novel forms with examples from the book. Finally, the chapter’s concluding section provides an overview of the five thematic parts that structure the volume, which are Movement Politics, Political Economy, Comparative Politics, Global Politics, and Reflections.

Chapter 9 discusses the Mexican government’s 2021 lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court against seven American gun manufacturers to recover the costs to the Mexican government because of gun violence in Mexico. The chapter sets forth statistics documenting the escalating incidence of gun violence in Mexico, attributable to the illegal gun trafficking from the United States and used by Mexican drug cartels against Mexican citizens. The narrative focuses on the American border states and gun defendants responsible for the flood of guns into Mexico. The chapter discusses Mexico’s basis for its lawsuit, and the claims alleged sounding in tort theories of negligence, negligence per se, and public nuisance. This discussion details the defendants’ responses and the district court’s dismissal of the lawsuit, based on PLCAA immunity. The court examined the question of the extraterritorial application of PLCAA to events occurring outside the United States. On appeal, the First Circuit Court reversed the district court’s dismissal, holding that PLCAA did have extraterritorial application but that a PLCAA exception permitted Mexico’s lawsuit to proceed. The chapter ends with a discussion of the pending certiorari petition to the U.S. Supreme Court by Smith & Wesson.