This chapter explores the capability approach (CA) in relation to decent work (DW) and flourishing at work, presenting a nuanced framework for understanding and enhancing employment quality. Decent work encompasses job security, fair wages, safe working conditions, and respect for workers’ rights. Flourishing at work extends the concept of DW by considering how work contributes to well-being, personal growth, and fulfilment. Combining the frameworks of DW and flourishing at work with the CA offers a comprehensive understanding of the role of work in human development. The connections among capabilities, DW, and flourishing at work are deeply intertwined, as all three concepts focus on enhancing human well-being, dignity, and growth potential. By integrating DW, capabilities, and human flourishing, policymakers, organisations, and civil society can move beyond compliance with minimum standards (decent work), centre human agency and diversity, and aspire to lives of emotional, psychological, and social well-being.

The First World War both established and altered norms for the treatment of prisoners of war across the globe. In the Pacific, Japan had already been internationally celebrated during the Russo-Japanese War for its supposed exemplary treatment of prisoners, a practice which continued, albeit with some notable alterations, when the Japanese took some 4,800 German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war in 1914. The other main holder of prisoners of war in the Pacific was the British Empire, with camps dotted around its various colonies and dominions, many of which would be reused in the Second World War. These camps served as sites for containing undesirables, spaces to dispatch the spillover from other colonies, or, in the case of Tanglin camp in Singapore, a site of anti-imperial rebellion. This chapter looks at captivity within these two empires during the First World War, not only to highlight differences and similarities with captivity in Europe, but also to trace how a camp network in the Pacific region was developed and modelled on broader patterns of internment.

Although Argentina maintained a neutral stance throughout the Great War and most of the Second World War, the country actively engaged in a humanitarian mobilization facing both conflicts. The significant influence of European immigration and the dynamic cultural and economic connections with the Old Continent played a pivotal role in this regard. This chapter examines the evolution of the government and civil society’s involvement in humanitarian initiatives throughout the period, emphasizing the continuities and shifts.

The first illustrated book published in the colony of New South Wales was a short, richly ornamental work about Australian birds. Reading this publication, John William Lewin’s Birds of New South Wales (1813), this chapter shows how in the imperial worlding of British Romanticism, colonized nature became coopted into the self-romanticizing stories of early settler colonists. The first tranches of Britain’s invasion of Australia brought immigrants schooled in the then-contemporary literature of sensibility. Translating the special cultural value of nature, and, as this chapter shows, songbirds in particular, to radically different environments, proved an important operation in the colonial project. But as this study shows, choices made in the depiction of birds by colonists like Lewin reveal some of the tensions between ways of feeling about birds promoted by an imported poetic culture, European conventions of natural history representation, and the lives and lifeways of birds themselves.

The duties of chaplains were moral as well as spiritual. Although personal probity stood to reap military dividends, the moral well-being of the soldier was pursued for its own sake in the 1950s, its importance reflected in ‘padre’s hour’ and in the activities of the Army’s many church houses. After National Service, waning confidence in padre’s hour entailed a rethink, with US models adapted for an Army-wide programme of ‘Character Training’. However, this was insufficient to offset the effects of the ‘permissive society’ on Britain’s all-volunteer Army. By the 1980s, verdicts on its moral condition could echo age-old prejudices against professional soldiering in general. The end of the Cold War, the increased prospect of humanitarian and counter-insurgency operations, and the professional emphasis on the importance of the ‘strategic corporal’ placed a new premium on the moral education of the soldier. Informed by the McGill Report of 1999, and reflecting a new emphasis on ‘Values and Standards’, chaplains played a leading role in promoting ‘moral understanding’, their contribution felt through ITD 11 and MATT 6 and, as confidants and advisors, by commanding officers in the War on Terror.

This chapter looks at Thomas Moore’s attempts to maintain a midway point between post-Napoleonic conservatism and emerging radical reform movements. It looks at his biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the context of wider debates about the nature of Whiggism and its suitability to the political moment. Moore’s attempts at moderation ran aground on the shores of Irish history, as his work increasingly moved to prose in order to make explicit political tensions that had been implicit in his poetry.

A principle and practice of sufficiency informs Immanuel Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), which concludes by condemning the rapaciousness of Europeans. Responding to that too-muchness, the philosopher experiments with the thought of what he calls “mere hospitality.” Hospitality is not opposed to inhospitality but a species of inhospitality that welcomes the possibility of being alone, together rather than either alone and apart or together as one. Because human beings cannot forever part ways on the curved surface of the planet, and because they must also live among each other on one and the same planet, if they are to live at all, they are obliged, against their inclinations to fight or flee, to dwell alongside others whom they do not necessarily wish to be nearby. The earth’s surface speaks a bare truth to an enclosed, Europeanized world, a world in which so many are denied a place: It is enough.

Taking as its occasion the Hindi verse of Suryakānt Tripathi “Nirala,” this chapter delineates how the two-way traffic of translating romanticism in South Asia brings us to rethink the concept. In Hindi, romanticism was first designated swaćhandatāwād and then ćhāyāwād. The first term signifies a speaking in “one’s own meter,” and a speaking of “one’s own desire”; it has obvious and important resonances with the ideology of national self-determination in South Asia, which too was called swaćhandatāwād. The second term, which gestures to a “shadow-voice,” emerges from within swaćhandatāwād as an immanent critique of the notion of self-identity inherent in the discourse of “one’s own.” In translating both these renderings of romanticism back into English we must find a way to think their contradictory coincidence, and the way that Nirala’s verse offers us, also leads us to a rethinking of romanticism’s longer, transnational history.

This chapter’s wide-ranging account of the Latinx literary history of Los Angeles offers a narrative that is both spatial and temporal. It draws a throughline from the Spanish-language newspapers of the 1870s to modern and contemporary narratives of barrio life (Yxta Maya Murray, Mona Ruiz, Miguel Durán) and the transnationalism of Héctor Tobar and Graciela Limón. López-Calvo and Sae-Saue highlight the irony that despite the centrality of Latinx histories and communities to LA’s development, histories indeed that precede the city becoming “American,” Latinx writing has always been treated as a marginal part of its literary history. This body of literature, the chapter argues, not only records and memorializes the persistent spatial and social marginalization of LA’s Latinx communities but acts as a refusal of such processes, becoming in itself the community of political resistance it so often represents.

It is little wonder that Los Angeles, a city of compulsive self-narration, has birthed a tradition of autobiographical literature with local particularities. A uniquely LA tradition of memoir, autobiography, and autofiction come to the fore in this chapter. Allmendinger identifies three key strands of LA life writing: the Hollywood tell-all (Barbara Payton, Christina Crawford), the gang memoir, (Rafael Pérez-Torres, Freddy Negrete) and a third, more diffuse grouping – writings by women in which frank and personal explorations of gender and sexuality predominate (Eve Babitz, Maggie Nelson, Wendy C. Ortiz). While these three forms of reflection on lives lived in Los Angeles appear disparate, Allmendinger identifies in them a shared refusal of (White, male, straight) “master” narratives of Southern Californian consciousness.

Chapter 13 explores the concept of mathematical identity and how both students and teachers come to see themselves in relation to mathematics. It examines the impact of maths anxiety – particularly in the early years of teaching – and how identity is influenced by community, context, and experience. The chapter highlights the importance of understanding and responding to diverse school settings, including rural, regional, and remote communities. You will also consider how to meaningfully embed the Australian Curriculum cross-curriculum priorities – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and sustainability – within mathematics lessons.

This chapter traces an English Romantic poetics of heteromasculinist expression, a key example where heterosexual love dictates which works are worth reading globally as serious literature, to late eighteenth-century translators who “straightened” the famous Persian poet Shamsoddin Mohammad Hafiz Shirazi (ca. 1325–89) into a model of world literature. From Sir William Jones’s A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771) to Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát (1859), English translations that equate classical Persian poets with Anacreon (570–488 BC) – the Greek lyricist renowned for his bawdy drinking songs dedicated to beautiful male youths – transmitted to Romantic lyricism queer practices of imitative poetry-writing. Such contrasting social-literary relations counteract the heteronormativity universalized by colonial (mis)translators in homophilic collaboration with their Indo-Persian instructors. A salient example is the Lucknow-born Muslim nobleman Mirza Abu Talib Khan (1752–1806), whose Hafiz-style “Ode to London” shows how contentious were the (homo)erotic Romantic poetics of untranslatable genders for reading world literature straightly.