The Introduction sets the scene by outlining the lives of the book’s main protagonists, young women in Calabar, and the types of uncertainty that shape their lives. The discussion builds up an understanding of the complex and opaque social terrain that these young women must deftly navigate as they work towards a future marked by marriage. In urban Nigeria, the belief in the unseen compounds other political, economic, and physical uncertainties that shape everyday life, contributing to an understanding that nothing is ever quite as it seems. The discussion outlines how young women, far from only falling victim to the irregularities of life in Calabar, turn uncertainty into a resource that they can use to manage their reputations and realise their much hoped-for futures. As well as establishing how the book contributes to anthropological and Africanist literature on uncertainty, the Introduction also opens the debate on the time of youth in Africa by focusing on feminine livelihoods and respectability. The Introduction also provides context of fieldwork and research methodology and provides a chapter outline of the rest of the book.

What were the global dimensions of hunger during the First World War and its aftermath? By reviewing the causes, worldwide scale, and national specificities of wartime starvation, the development of transnational food and humanitarian networks can be explored. These linked hungry Europe to not only the United States but also to Japan, Australia, and various Scandinavian, South American, Middle Eastern, and African nations. The global experience of hunger helped to create and expand empathy for civilians and displaced populations abroad, above all for children as the iconic symbols of war victimhood. The saga of widespread hunger initiated by the First World War illustrates how humanitarian crises generated new approaches as well as emotional linkages between hungry populations and aid workers, transforming global public opinion.

This chapter analyzes how authors addressed the countercultural and radical scenes that came to prominence in LA during between the late 1950s and the late 1960s. Saul notes that Joan Didion looked back on the 1960s and early 1970s as a period of moral and psychological decay. Meanwhile, though, Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964), Alison Lurie’s The Nowhere City (1965), and Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) offered a more sympathetic and nuanced approach to the bewildering combination of social upheaval and liberatory promise that the city offered in this period – beyond the powerful dichotomy that Mike Davis would later call “sunshine and noir.” Saul presents the recent resurgence of interest in the works of Gavin Lambert and Eve Babitz as evidence of growing readerly appetites for a richer and more sophisticated literary picture of this complex moment in LA’s history, with Lambert and Babitz functioning as counterparts and counterpoints to Isherwood and Lurie respectively.

This chapter attends to Los Angeles’s long and varied history of journalistic writing. For Chihara, the LA Times, which grew in prominence along with the city itself in the early decades of the twentieth century, incubated writing about the developing city not only in its own pages but also in the resistive responses to its advocacy on behalf of capital. Chihara then turns her attention to the New Journalism-era writings of Joan Didion and Eve Babtiz, in which personal positionality is as unapologetically present within text as within the city – even as the two differed markedly in their subjectivities and styles. In Jonathan Gold’s restaurant reviews of the 1990s and 2000s, food is only ever part of the story: Gold uses the global tastes and smells of LA’s culinary culture to hymn, critique, and grieve the city itself. In conversation with writer Matthew Specktor, Chihara considers the material challenges faced by contemporary writers in Los Angeles – the decline of traditional journalism; the rising cost of living; corporate consolidation of creative industries – and wonders if careers in LA reportage like those of Didion, Babitz, and Gold are still possible.

In this chapter, Bill Mohr examines a longstanding Los Angeles poetic ecosystem that, instead of pleading for cultural legitimacy at the feet of East Coast tastemakers, has always rejected the doctrinaire. The renegade versification of LA, Mohr argues, is exemplified by deep investments in performance cultures and recorded media – rejections of print culture’s hegemony notwithstanding LA’s own vibrant magazine and small press culture. Mohr ranges over the Beat-adjacent Venice scene of the 1950s, the Black poets who emerged from Watts in the 1960s, the punks of the 1970s and 1980s, LA’s motive role in the development of “Stand Up” poetry, the queer poetics of Eloise Klein Healy and Judy Grahn, Charles Bukowski’s dissolute verse, Douglas Messerli’s Language poetry, and the recordings of Harvey Robert Kubernik’s Freeway Records. Through this diverse history of unconventional scenes and approaches, Mohr shows, LA has developed an entirely unique poetic culture.

The First World War confirmed combat operations as the ultimate test and practical justification for Army chaplaincy, inspiring G. A. Studdert Kennedy’s famous admonition to ‘Live with the men, go where they go … share all their risks, and more, if you can do any good.’ This, however, was constrained by circumstance. Chaplaincy’s standard expression was garrison or station ministry, increasingly among a sizeable population of soldiers’ families. This was not a milieu in which the wisdom of Studdert Kennedy (aka ‘Woodbine Willie’) could be easily followed, and chaplains generally became familiar with their soldiers through exercises (the longer the better) or on operations. However, the latter varied enormously. In Cyprus, chaplains were targets for EOKA; in Northern Ireland, they went largely unmolested. Both were a far cry from battlefield ministry in the Falklands, the Gulf War or the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While the War on Terror, especially in Afghanistan, highlighted the controversial question of chaplains bearing arms, its nature and longevity enhanced the role and stature of the chaplain, enabling the wisdom of Studdert Kennedy to be applied to striking effect.

Chapter 3 introduces the concept of Big Ideas in mathematics—such as number sense, algebraic thinking, and spatial reasoning—and how these support deep learning. You will consider ways to develop and connect key mathematical ideas, using strategies like Fermi problems to promote critical and creative thinking.

Language teacher educators (LTEs) are a core group of stakeholders who greatly influence the development of future language teachers and, by extension, their future learners. In this exploratory study, we sought to investigate the emotional experiences of five English LTEs from Austria with the help of semi-structured interviews. The data were analyzed inductively, in multiple stages, and revealed how the LTEs’ emotions were influenced by the interplay between their personal psychologies and the socio-cultural contexts in which they lived and worked. These findings support an integrative theoretical perspective on LTE emotions interconnecting the social and psychological facets of emotions. The analysis also showed how the LTEs’ emotions varied in valence depending on the context with a notable difference between their emotions in the classroom compared to their emotions in respect to their workplace more generally. As such, the findings raise fascinating questions about the saliency and weighting of emotions across contexts even within one job.

This introduction reflects on the conceptual benefits, challenges, and limits of putting into conversation military history and global history. It regards the two world wars as times of both disruption and heightened connectedness. Severed trade, breaches in diplomatic relations, enforced immobility, and economic sanctions were paired with new connections, contacts, networks, emulations, and reroutings. Four key perspectives define the volume’s approach. First, decentering the study of the world wars widens the geographic, chronological, and social scope of historians’ outlook, introducing a more diverse historical narrative. Second, focusing on the mobility of people, ideas, and goods, which the world wars both engendered and deepened, raises important questions about what was absorbed, adapted, and rejected as part of these circulations. Third, emphasizing encounters helps to show the impact of global warfare at the local level, highlights the transformation of individual and collective identities, and forces a reflection on the lives of those who remained untouched, at least apparently, by faraway events. Finally, this volume explores global languages: the shared systems of conceptualization and communication – including commemorative practices and international and humanitarian law – which developed on account of the world wars’ extreme violence.

This chapter offers a history of critical and theoretical writing about the literature of Southern California. Docherty argues that the origin point for LA literary criticism is not, as often supposed, Edmund Wilson’s The Boys in the Back Room (1941) but USC MA student Margaret Climie’s 1925 thesis. Early critical responses to LA’s literature, including those of Climie, Wilson, and Franklin Walker, at least acknowledged that literature existed in Southern California, but largely dismissed its quality. Docherty identifies David Fine as the critic who embodied LA literary studies’ coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, but argues that Fine contoured an LA canon subject to certain limitations of form, period, and social perspective. Since the turn of the millennium, the chapter shows, increasing numbers of scholars have offered multiethnic and multiformal critical approaches to LA writing commensurate with the kaleidoscopic diversity of the city’s contemporary literature and indeed the city itself.

We step inside a closed-door customs committee meeting in Brussels, following Louise and her colleagues his chapter offers a rare, immersive account of a customs committee working group, where twenty-seven member states, interpreters and Commission officials grapple with the minutiae of classifying consumer goods – from vacuum cleaner parts to decorative balloons – amidst a whirlwind of digital tools, linguistic compromises and political maneuvering.

Through vivid ethnographic detail, we reveal how EU law is crafted. Here, the classical diplomat – negotiator, mediator, generalist – confronts the realities of digital mediation. Through Louise’s eyes, and in rare ethnographic detail, we witness the labour of multilingual lawmaking: interpreters juggling languages and distractions, delegates scrolling for images to clarify a product’s classification and the relentless clicking of keyboards as twenty-seven member states haggle over every word, comma and image in a three-column Word document.

This chapter reveals how digital technologies, while promising efficiency and speed, also fragment attention and introduce new layers of complexity. The negotiation room becomes a microcosm of the EU’s ‘Brussels effect’ – its power to set global standards – where the mundane (classifying vacuum cleaner parts or decorative balloons) intersects with the monumental (shaping trade, safety, and environmental rules for 500 million citizens). As interpreters and diplomats alike rely on digital tools to bridge linguistic and political divides, the chapter asks: How is the craft of diplomacy transformed when screens and algorithms mediate human judgement? And what does this mean for the future of EU governance, as AI begins to reshape the invisible labor that keeps the Union running?