Historical tensions over race and nation have bubbled over time and resurfaced again since the Brexit vote in the forms of increased racism and a “hostile environment.” British Muslim identity and belonging has been a complex process of negotiation in the British Isles and beyond. This chapter explores how transnational Muslim identities in Britain form digital interconnections and face disruptions in an increasingly securitized global architecture in which the digital serves as a place of contestation and surveillance. Through summary close readings from selected writings by Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Ayisha Malik, and Zaffar Kunial, this chapter emphasizes how Muslim writers translate the limits of a national English identity for migrant groups after Brexit through new representations of enclosed spaces such as gardens and parks.

In 1995, Thabo Mbeki’s keynote address at a G7 meeting, lauded by Tim Berners-Lee, underscored the Web’s potential to revolutionize global social and political landscapes, particularly emphasizing its significance for Africa. This chapter looks at the impact of digital technology on African literature. Using Chimamanda Adichie, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Brittle Paper as anchor points, it examines how digital technology and culture are reconstituting literary audiences, making space for the emergence of new knowledge domains and transforming the production infrastructures. It concludes that digital culture is the epistemic context in which twenty-first-century African literature exhibits some of its most defining characteristics.

Regardless of where you sit, digital is here to stay, and hiding from it won’t change that. Rather, understand it, learn, and accept the benefits and risks as inseparable entities. By understanding digital, we may just understand our patient a little more too. Stepping beyond the patient, and looking at it from a clinical perspective, the world of digital and its application to healthcare has so much more to offer. For mental health services in particular, there is a wide range of digital opportunities to support teams to work differently. This can range from apps, chatbots, online assessments, monitoring and therapies, virtual reality, virtual administration, electronic prescribing and much more. Obviously, it is paramount we consider issues such as safeguarding, cybersecurity and privacy, but the genie is out of the bottle and digital is here to stay!

The internet has expanded access to the works of Michael Field by making them freely available in digital form. This chapter explains how digital editions differ from print editions and raises questions about whether we should consider them as the same text or not. It identifies the basic types of digital editions, describes how the process of creating them can introduce changes into the text, and discusses how minor textual changes can affect how we interpret what we read. Two common options for encoding digital texts are introduced, and we consider the promise of textual encoding to enmesh the text within the ‘semantic web’.

The twentieth century was a period of radical transformation in the materials, resources and technologies available for music. Pierre Boulez was at the forefront of these developments, yet at the same time he displayed a curious ambivalence towards them. This chapter shows how, as a powerful cultural figure committed to the project of modernity, Boulez embraced the technologies of the new age, particularly through his guiding of the programme of activities undertaken at the music/scientific research centre IRCAM, which he helped to found in Paris in the 1970s. It also shows how, in his own compositional work, he displayed an ambivalent and musically conservative attitude towards new technological developments, leaving the details to others, while maintaining a quite traditional view of musical composition and performance. The chapter explores the conceptual, historical and cultural contexts for Boulez’s engagement with technology, and examines some of the works he composed using the technological resources developed at IRCAM.

This chapter considers the promises and potential pitfalls of the digital era for Latino/a/@/x/e literature. It begins with an exploration of the multiple iterations of the virtual project/website El Puerto Rican Embassy over the last twenty-nine years as a way to think with evolving attitudes about Puerto Rican nationalism and its relationship to Nuyorican identity. The conversation then shifts to think about the potential dangers of relying on digital archives as safe repositories for Latino/a/@/x/e history. After all, with these new forms of digital power, come new responsibilities, including the need for a steady stream of resources. As exciting as the possibilities for redefining Latin@s online may be, the precarity that Adela Vázquez, Jaime Cortez, and Pato Hebert’s queer, Cuban comic Sexile (2004) currently faces makes clear that the expectation that cyberspace serve as a catchall for the margins may foster a false sense of security that risks reproducing new forms of digital exile.

A new economic model begins to emerge. After the turn of the century, the worldview made of free markets, globalization, and liberal democracy met multiple crises. While the political pendulum swings back toward government control, economists and independent agencies should promote balance, mitigating the tendency toward the extremes of public opinions divided into opposite camps. The tendency toward a stronger presence of the government in the economy must be controlled; the perimeter of open and competitive markets should not be restricted to the point at which they lose their creative force. In this book we reflect on these developments through the prism of one of the most ancient and fundamental societal institutions: money. Money is a mirror of society; it reveals the drivers, contradictions, strengths, weaknesses, and failures of society at large. We build on two convictions. The first is the value of history, to tell us what money is, what purpose should it serve, and how best it should be designed and governed. The second is that the fundamental purpose and requirements of money do not change through time or space. What changes are the manifestations of money. Technology is part of this process and should be used to serve money’s purposes better.

This chapter offers an overview of the arguments and key contributions of the book. The book has shown that while clientelism and resource constraints have rationed the provision of public goods and social benefits, across the past century, Indians have engaged in deliberate debates about what an Indian ‘welfare state’ should look like. The ideas and principles on which earlier policies were conceived have remained influential. India’s welfare regime today is shaped by decisions taken and resources allocated in the past. Even moments of expected rupture such as the onset of economic reforms in 1991 - or, as this chapter goes on to show, the 2014 Lok Sabha elections which brought the Narendra Modi-led BJP to power on a platform promising an end to a culture of ‘entitlements’ - have seen underlying stability in the context of India’s welfare regime. This said, there have been substantial areas of divergence over time in both the approach to social policy implementation and the philosophy of citizenship that underpins welfare commitments. The chapter ends by looking ahead to the future of welfare, underlining the continued significance of state-level policy innovation.