The introduction explains the nature of the study, its motivation, its basic structure, and its organization. It draws special attention to the way the book offers a novel interpretation of Aquinas’s account of individual happiness that is remarkably interesting philosophically. It also emphasizes the roles of individual happiness, common happiness, and Holistic Eudaimonism in Aquinas’s efforts to produce a unified ethical system in which law, virtue, and grace also have an important place.

This chapter considers how, with animals recognised as a part of nature, legally enshrined ‘rights of nature’ could provide a basis for animals’ legal subjecthood. The chapter centres on the case of Estrellita, an Ecuadorean woolly monkey who was declared to be a subject of rights under Ecuador’s constitutionally enshrined rights of ‘pachamama’ or ‘Mother Earth’. Yet, while Estrellita’s case highlights the potential for rights of nature to serve as a source of animals’ legal subjectivity, the chapter stresses caution. First, several rights-of-nature provisions have arguably co-opted Indigenous ideas, and served to justify continued resource extraction under the guise of living in balance with nature. Second, rights-of-nature provisions maintain the ontological human/all-other-nature divide that exists in current legal systems. Finally, the rights of nature may operate as a kind of ‘eco-coverture’ by encapsulating the interests of individual animals within the sphere of nature’s interests, thereby limiting the potential scope of animals’ legal protection. The chapter concludes that we can do better than grounding animals’ legal subjecthood in the rights of nature.

This chapter follows Joyce’s exilic trajectory out of Dublin to embrace a rejuvenated Europe, from early efforts at modernizing Ireland against the archaizing tendencies of the Irish Revival to a modernist program entailing the choice of Europe against England. Joyce found a model in Italian writers like Vico and Ferrero, who rejected the myth of the purity of a national identity and trusted that a universalized history would bring different groups together, thus heralding today’s Europe, a community of nations in which Dublin is the capital of the only English-speaking country. Such a ‘globalatinized’ Europe ought to be able to critique previous imperialist tendencies and practice hospitality by an openness to minorities in concordance with the linguistic melting pot announced by Finnegans Wake.

Finnegans Wake and confession, in both secular and religious contexts, are each examined through the lens of the other. The aim is to ‘de-confuse’ the fusion, thrice repeated in the Wake, of ‘confession’ and ‘confusion’. Eight observations are illustrated through close reading: i) confession directs the text in two chapters, Shem’s in I.7 and HCE’s in II.3; ii) both present as public not private confessions; iii) there is no auricular confession; iv) widespread inadvertent confessions found in the Wake’s ‘fallen’ language, supposedly Freudian slips, are a source of sense-making power; v) any confession is always a qualified confession – blame is always dispersed; vi) there is no torture leading to involuntary confession; vii) the book doesn’t operate within the tradition of classical confessional texts; viii) it knows that confession split Christianity and projects that split onto the dialectical operations of the narrative. The chapter argues for the productive and overlooked potential of ‘syntagmatic’ or narrative approaches that read the text as sequential form, and it suggests that the plurality of narratives undermines theoretical generalizations of the human as ‘a confessing animal’.

Knowledge about colonial warfare’s violence was transferred between empires in complex ways. Though differing in degree and over time, British, German and Dutch actors were willing to observe and learn from the colonial wars of others. Writings on colonial warfare became increasingly transimperial in scope from the 1890s onwards, even if this came too late to shape practice and was often distorted by authors’ own agendas and national stereotypes. Observer missions in foreign colonial campaigns were also regular, though their focus was seldom on colonial violence. Whether actively transferring or not, these modes of observation fed knowledge into an ‘imperial cloud’ (Kamissek/Kreienbaum) and reveal that the practitioners of colonial war rarely found the violence of others conspicuous, a fact which gives the lie to exceptionalist historiography. Actual transfers mainly took place through the intra- and transimperial mobility of European and non-European, mostly non-elite, individuals. They lived in frequently highly transnational colonial societies, and a striking number moved from one colonial frontier to the next, forging recurring connections I denote as the ‘routes of violence’.

Ecocriticism is catching up with James Joyce. Moving beyond the heritage of Romanticism’s binary opposition between human and nonhuman nature, contemporary critics have explored the entanglement of nature, culture, and the built environment in Joyce’s works. This chapter focuses on Joyce’s evolving presentation of the human body as a natural–cultural entity. His early fictions depict the body as a humbling counterweight to notions of transcendence, especially to Catholic ideas glorifying the spirit. The evolution of his thinking culminates in his portrayal of the body, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as a site of constant transformation, where the human and the nonhuman interpenetrate and shape each other. An influential concept of material ecocriticism is Stacy Alaimo’s ‘trans-corporeality’, which reveals the interlinkage and imbrication of our bodies with each other and ‘more-than-human nature’. Thus, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, even biologically dead bodies of the solar system intersect the characters’ lives, through both their material environments and the senses, microbes, and atoms of their bodies.

This chapter examines how linking school assignment to students’ residential addresses via geographic attendance boundaries drives inequities in public education. Because “perceived” (but not actual) school quality is capitalized into home values, property value concerns encourage segregation and exclusion, a phenomenon I describe as “education NIMBYism.” I argue that the overrepresentation of homeowners in local school board elections creates problematic political incentives for office holders, in contrast with Fischel’s “homevoter hypothesis” predicting that the political influence of homeowners makes government work better and more efficiently. I also show how the capitalization of school quality into home values can create unintended consequences and offset efforts to improve the lowest-performing schools.

This chapter presents an alternative to legal personhood and the rights of nature as the means to better include animals within the scope of legal justice. It offers the Principle of Multispecies Legality as not merely an account of animals’ legal subjectivity but of the legal subjectivity of all those beings and entities that have – or that we might, as a democratic society, choose to recognise as having – interests. The PML holds that interests-bearing entitles one to recognition as a subject of the law, with the capacity to take legal action and have one’s interests considered impartially. In rejecting sentience as the grounds of animals’ politico-legal inclusion, the PML’s account of legal subjectivity provides for animals alongside existing sentient and non-sentient legal subjects, like humans and corporations. It also leaves the door open for other valuable entities that currently lack legal subjecthood, such as plants, fungi, bodies of water, and ecosystems. The chapter argues that the inclusivity of the PML is beneficial not only for animals and other non-human entities but also for those humans whose legal subjectivity remains tenuous under existing personhood paradigms.

The aim of this chapter is to gain a deeper understanding of the subject of rights, legal personality andrights of petition in international law in the run-up to the inclusion of rights of petition to the ECtHR in the ECHR. The analysis shows that there was a nascent debate on whether international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) could acquire legal personality and file complaints on behalf of victims of injury at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague but the extension of legal personality to corporations and the grant ofrights of petition to individual persons was not part of that debate. However,corporations had historically enjoyed legal personality in civil and common law systems. Thelegal persona was a mask or legal fiction to facilitate ownership and transfer of property by groups of individuals and corporations. The analysis suggests that the malleability of the fictitious ’legal persona’accommodated a multiplicity of political conceptions of the nature and aims of the corporation, facilitating the inclusion of legal persons as subjects of rights in A1P1.

Discussing the historiography, this section posits the need to move away from national-exceptionalist theories of colonial violence and the military-historical search for national doctrines of colonial warfare, instead recognising the extreme violence of fin-de-siècle colonial wars as part of a transimperial Colonial Way of War. Research should take into view several empires and the shared thought behind such violence. Europeans racialised colonial warfare and infused it with performative aims and imperial anxieties. Such racialised notions eventually became more important than structural constraints in determining extreme colonial violence. Cross-imperial connectivity explains the highly transimperial character of this knowledge, a connectivity that rested mainly on human, colony-to-colony mobility and on transnational colonial populations. Researching this requires rethinking ideas of imperial networks and reservoirs of knowledge. The introduction also offers definitions of ‘knowledge’ in relation to colonial warfare and of ‘extreme’ violence (arguing that there was a qualitative difference between colonial and ‘European’ wars at the time) and discusses sources and periodisation.

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.