In this chapter, Nicole Seymour and Zia Salim observe that two paradigms dominate the cultural imagination of Los Angeles’s environmental conditions. One is a suspicion that the city’s “nature” is troublingly artificial – a water-hungry metropolis imposed on what is often erroneously described as a desert. The other is a notion of LA as environmentally extreme, disastrous, and even apocalyptic, not only in its wildfires but also in tectonic activity, drought, and flood. These paradigms often overlap, human action reaping a harvest of natural disaster. Through a capacious literary archive that stretches chronologically from Don Ryan’s Angel’s Flight (1927) to Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (2021), however, Seymour and Salim find that LA literature does not always propagate these twin paradigms uncritically; rather, they are often challenged and complexified.

“Slavery and abolition” are simultaneously ubiquitous and obscured in the Romantic era. While contemporary scholarship now makes slavery more apprehensible, it has also become a representative limit for what Blackness can mean and do in the period. The two sections in this chapter seek to revise Romantic notions of resistance and of libertation. The first, on slavery, looks to the period’s slave rebellions and figures of enslavement to propose new means of reading Romanticism and new modes of Romantic reading. The second looks to “abolition” for a revolutionary alternative to Romantic amelioration. Both sections turn to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “destituent power” to explore how slavery and abolition continue to trouble our ideas of captivity and liberation, institutionalization and revolution.

This chapter explores the rich history of LGBTQ+ writing in Los Angeles – and demonstrates how that literary history is inextricably bound up in a history of political activism. Edgar presents the history of queer LA literature as one that begins with the landmark ONE Inc. v. Olesen case of 1958. In this watershed struggle for free speech, the LA-based gay magazine ONE struck a blow of free speech and against the suppression of queer culture. The chapter positions ONE Inc. v. Olesen as the origin point in the story of queer literary LA, an arc that then stretches through such writers invested of such varying formal, stylistic, and political inclinations as John Rechy, Gore Vidal, Brett Easton Ellis, Eloise Klein Healy, Nina Revoyr, Gil Cuadros, and Michael Nava.

This chapter begins by introducing the school renewal model, emphasizing two foundational insights: the bifurcated nature of the educational system and the win-win relationship between principal and teacher leadership. It then highlights the importance of leadership density for school renewal, illustrating four key avenues for increasing the collective engagement of educators in sustaining meaningful change. This chapter also examines the roles that policymakers at various levels, along with researchers, can play in supporting school renewal through enabling conditions, responsive policies, and the expansion of knowledge. Finally, it argues that the renewal model offers a comprehensive approach to school improvement by effectively balancing external pressures with internal capacity and responsiveness.

Los Angeles literature’s historically marginal place in the American canon can partly be attributed to the prominence of “popular” literatures in its cultural production. Perhaps no literary genre has made such a dramatic journey from critically dismissed literary margins to the critically lauded literary-lauded mainstream as science fiction, a genre in whose development Los Angeles played a significant role, as David Sandner demonstrates throughout his chapter. Sandner’s narrative takes us from early zine culture in the 1940s and 1950s, via Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (famously written at UCLA on rented typewriters), to countercultural works of the 1960s and 1970s. Beyond this point, Sandner identifies LA, in all its multiethnic complexity, as playing an inevitably central role in the genre’s diversification, represented in the form of Ernest Hogan’s pioneering Chicano science fiction and Pasadena native Octavia Butler’s frequent collocation of Southern California settings with both speculative worlds and speculations on Blackness. Other counter-futures and alternate histories are found in works by Kim Stanley Robinson and Sesshu Foster.

This chapter discusses the physics of the role of photons in transmission lines. In particular, two-conductor lines, where it is wrongly assumed in the initial chapters that electrons travel near the speed of light. By examining the properties of photons and electrons, it is demonstrated that photons carry the energy whereas the electrons in the conductors guide them. The link between photon momentum and radiation pressure is established. The implications of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle are used to discuss the extent of photons. Also included is a discussion on the detection of photons. Finally, two transmission line circuits are considered to illustrate the physics between the performance of either a single and many photons in these circuits.

This chapter highlights the interlaced histories of race-making and warfare in the early twentieth century, exploring how the emboldened demands for racial equality emerging across the globe during the First World War altered the conceptual foundations of white supremacy in the United States. Knitting together the case studies of Mexican rebels in southern Texas and Indian anti-colonialists in San Francisco and New York, it recounts the international origins of a coalescing national security logic used to justify unequal categories of citizenship. Namely, white Americans’ successful denunciation of various quests for increased social rights as inherently foreign not only enforced a racially exclusionary definition of loyalty to the nation and its war effort but also fueled the rise of discriminatory investigative practices at the hands of the modern surveillance state. Indeed, the First World War triggered a dramatic and permanent transformation in the American intelligence apparatus, which increasingly essentialized nonwhite groups as untrustworthy on the basis of their assumed liability to foreign subversion.

In April 2016, in the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks, a more severe criminal prosecution policy was implemented, and terrorism cases involving individuals returning from the Iraqi-Syrian front were systematically transferred to the Special Assize Court. Previously heard at the 16th Chamber of the lower court, the Assize Court now had the authority to impose much longer prison sentences for these cases. These are the ’second generation’ trials. Most of these cases involved ’returnees,’ often without victims or civil parties, and sometimes even without the defendants themselves, who were presumed dead. These cases also included a second type of trial in which terror acts were committed.

The Assize Court has the authority to impose the most severe punishments. However, appearing before the Assize Court entails a prolonged judicial process that is unique to this jurisdiction. This chapter examines the tensions and dynamics that arose following the 2016 change in prosecution policy and the transfer of cases to the Assize Court. Beyond judicial disagreements, unexpected outcomes emerged as the court came to know the accused more closely, revealing a more complex reality.

If emotions constitute a central part of teachers’ professional lives (Hargreaves, 1998), it is plausible to hypothesize that becoming and being a language teacher educator could be a highly emotional process as well. To date, while research on teacher emotions has been highly vibrant and fruitful, scant attention has been paid to teacher educators’ emotions, particularly in the field of second language education (Yuan et al., 2022). As documented by existing literature (e.g., Izadinia, 2014; Yuan & Yang, 2022), teacher educators often face various challenges (e.g., a heavy workload and the research-practice divide) in their daily work, and they may struggle with the emotional and intellectual distance between their current professionalism and the expected performance in teacher education (Intrator & Kunzman, 2009; Nazari et al., 2024). Nevertheless, the emotional state of teacher educators is interconnected with their personal well-being, as well as the motivation and quality of teachers, ultimately influencing classroom instruction and student learning (Day & Leitch, 2001). Scholars (e.g., Hagenauer & Volet, 2014; Johnson & Golombek, 2020) have thus argued that teacher educators need to foster and maintain a sense of control over their emotions to facilitate their teaching of teachers.

The Introduction chapter provides an overview of the book’s content and approach. It explains the philosophical importance of Beauvoir’s varied output, including not only her essays but also her novels and memoirs. It presents the rigorous yet personal reading of Beauvoir’s works that characterises the book, as well as its focus on their relevance for reflecting on current issues. The Introduction also provides an overview of the reception of Beauvoir’s work and the prejudices that have obscured the philosophical importance of her writings, notably sexism and an unwarranted exclusion of her novels and memoirs from her philosophical output.