Chapter 9 considers how the experience of illness is represented linguistically, focussing on two contexts. In the first case study, collocational patterns were examined in order to show how people represented the word anxiety. Different patterns around anxiety were grouped together in order to identify oppositional pairs of representation (e.g., medicalising/normalising). The second case study involved an examination of the ways in which cancer was constructed in a corpus of interviews with and online forum posts by people with cancer, family carers, and healthcare professionals. Using a combination of manual analysis and corpus searches, we considered how metaphors were used to convey a sense of empowerment or disempowerment in the experience of cancer. More specifically, the analysis of metaphors around cancer revealed insights into people’s identity construction and the relationships between doctors and patients.

A pressing need exists to understand how, when, and why to adjust and build upon urban environmental policies that can influence a city’s capacity to foster and enact climate adaptation and mitigation. The objective of this book has been to define what we can learn from past urban environmental crises and resulting policy transitions that might be applicable to understand how climate change will manifest as crises in cities and what can be done to help accelerate urban climate action. In this chapter, we more directly turn our attention to learning what the book’s case studies reveal about these objectives. The case studies illustrate how existing urban environmental practices can be adjusted and enhanced to better grapple with the challenges of climate change. The analysis provides the groundwork for a set of innovative recommendations on how to perceive the urban climate crisis and how to consider new urban climate change policies. A key overall conclusion is that we should do all we can to learn from previous urban environmental crises as they will continue to inform us moving into the future.

This chapter of the handbook takes up the issue of moral development in adolescence. The authors’ wide-ranging discussion touches on how differences in temperament, gender, familial and peer relationships, and lived experience influence the timing and outcome of adolescent moral development. Regarding the role of temperament, for example, high-reactive individuals may be more prone to impulsive behavior that violates moral norms, whereas low-reactive individuals may be more likely to conform to moral norms because they are more sensitive to the threat of punishment. On the importance of interpersonal relationships, weak attachment to caregivers in adolescence is associated with impairments of empathy and a greater propensity for antisocial and immoral behavior. Peer influence is another key predictor of both antisocial and prosocial behavior in adolescence. Further, moral development in adolescence critically depends on the maturation of capacities for empathy and self-conscious emotion, a process that is shaped by the individual’s lived experience.

This chapter brings the sensory potentialities of material objects used in Roman ritualized activities into discourse concerning the nature and production of ancient religious knowledge. By combining perspectives derived from lived religion and material religion it is argued that religious agency should be understood as the product of the intertwining of human and more-than-human things within assemblages. Lived experiences of this production of agency, in turn, cause people to feel and consequently think in certain ways, ultimately producing what can be categorized as distal and proximal forms of religious knowledge. The chapter uses the example of the frieze of the Vestal Virgins from the Ara Pacis Augustae to argue that different forms of ancient religious knowledge were actively created through a multiplicity of lived experiences of ritualized action that brought human and more-than-human material things together, rather than existing only as something that was expressed through ritual behaviours. Exploring the Vestals’ experience of ritualized encounters with material things makes it possible to establish new understandings of the real-world lived experiences and identities of these priestesses, offering significant insights into how individualized forms of religious knowledge could be sustained even in the context of shared communal or public rituals.

From painted embellishments on altars and temples, marble flooring, dyed sacrificial ribbons and even the colouration of ritual animals, colour was an inescapable aspect of religious experience. Polychromy was not only decorative, it created a visual medium with which those navigating sacred spaces could interact, together with the written word and the language of shape and form. Colour could communicate to the ancient viewer associations of its source; the significance of both where its pigment or dyestuff was harvested and the journey it undertook, both in terms of manufacture and simple geography, in order to arrive before the observer. The very conception of ancient sight, with rays reaching from the eyes in a particularly haptic process of sensory feedback, meant that looking at colours was for the ancient viewer an experience in itself. How would visitors to the sacred spaces of the ancient world have ‘read’ the visual cues surrounding them, and how could the design of colours in ritual spaces influence the reactions and emotions of those witnessing sacred activity? This paper seeks to investigate and unpick some of the chromatic language found in religious spaces to better inform an understanding of ritual activity in Greco-Roman society.

Processions were among the earliest ‘moving pictures’ in which the brain could develop the cognitive process of ‘reading’ a landscape and embedding a memory through sensory experiences. Salutaris’ foundation, a text inscribed outside the theatre at Ephesus which records the organization of a ritual procession for Artemis, tends to be treated as a factual guide by scholars, rather than as aspirational script for an event: repeated legal clauses, claims of control and permanency, and the white marble on which it was carved, underwrite the vivid sensual experience and transiency of a ritual event. This paper endeavors to contextualize Salutaris’ foundation by incorporating directives of the text together with an analysis of the procession as a practical event and an emotional experience. As a sensorial experience, one can explore aspects of the performance that could not be controlled: the weather, the attitude of the audience, and the behaviour of the performers. Did aspirational directives of ritual behavior come to fruition in a ritual event? How did the experience of an event shape its role and meaning? This cognitive approach provides insights to both the ritual event and the ways that processions could be read by the viewer.

How do we experience ritual? What role does this experience play in the perception and codification memory? This chapter begins by considering the relationship between senses, cognition, and memory in ritual experiences, in particular, the complex interplay between ritual performance, emotions, and material objects, together with the limitations of script-based approaches to surviving accounts. Situating the volume within current debates on religious ritual in the ancient world from the perspectives of cognitive science of religion and sensory studies, this chapter explores how variability in ritual experiences can be assessed through cognitive approaches to rituals as lived experiences. Having outlined why this volume is timely, necessary, and how it contributes to challenging established views and furthering debate surrounding ritual experiences in the Roman world, the introduction also addresses the challenges of cognitive assessments and how these challenges are met across the volume, through a variety of different contexts and approaches. Lastly, the introduction briefly presents each of the five case studies, drawing on common themes and issues explored in each case study, and considering the global relevance and transdisciplinary applications of scholarship in this volume.

This chapter explores some of the practices, interactions, and preferences of readers and fans as part of their lived comics cultures. Engagement with the medium has taken various forms, from casual readership and sharing titles among friendship groups in childhood, through to being a collector. Beyond simply involving reading comics, fandom can incorporate a range of other activities as part of an enhanced commitment to the medium, and various activities are touched upon. Further, it looks at how readers, both historically and today, have accessed their comics in varied formats and across many genres in Britain and the USA, linking their lived experience with production. In looking into these issues, the chapter engages with the work of various publishers, genres, and titles. It also engages with how reading comics and participating in fandom intersects with both age and gender, which this chapter adopts as lenses to look at constructions of childhood and comics reading. A final aspect of the chapter relates to how fan and reader interactions in these spaces and participation in activities often vary according to gender. Indeed, it can be argued that comics reading and collecting has been heavily gendered regarding both production and reception.