The history of Russia’s peatlands is closely entangled with the environmental issues of our time. Although most peat extraction in central Russia ceased decades ago, the legacy of this history is ongoing. Drainage and industrial exploitation have turned peatlands from carbon sinks into powerful carbon emitters. Recognizing how this issue is rooted in a larger history of economic growth adds depth to our understanding of the current planetary predicament. Even though Russia may not soon become an ally in efforts to cure degraded peatlands, writing their history constitutes an important step in addressing the ecological amnesia surrounding these ecosystems and in developing more caring relationships with them.

This chapter describes how conceptual learning is mediated by interactions, the environment and a range of semiotic modes. Using a case study approach, Illustration of Practice 3.1 presents four-year-old children’s dance-play and drawing-telling as exemplars of powerful forms of meaning-making and communication. The nexus between theory and practice is illustrated through an innovative model that supports children’s creative dance improvisation and experimentation, and links to graphic and narrative modes. Children’s sophisticated levels of thinking, feeling and relating are addressed, and the role of the teacher is foregrounded with regards to supporting transformative learning outcomes for young children.

In this chapter we first look at the DP-hypothesis, the idea that nominals are DPs rather than NPs, and that NP is a complement of D. We then refine this idea, motivating a tripartite structure for the nominal, analogous to what we saw for the clause in the previous chapter. Next, we focus on the argument structure of nominals, comparing and contrasting with argument structure in the clause. Finally, we briefly describe the ways in which grammatical functions are marked in nominals, again contrasting this with the clause.

This chapter explores the nature of online participation as it pertains to political communication. The discussion uses the notion of the public sphere to help understand more about how this concept has changed and needs recalibration to account for a digital public sphere. Audiences are no longer simply passive recipients of information about politics; instead, they can simply and quickly become active participants. In explaining how this can occur, the chapter looks at three examples from recent research that highlights the power of participatory culture in the online space. The first area relates to Internet memes, which are multimodal artifacts capable of simply and economically communicating political expression and engagement. Research has shown that the simplicity of their creation and spread facilitates an avenue to political engagement that would have been absent in the past. The second area focuses on online activism and how online platforms help it proliferate. A final instance of political communication and participatory culture discussed emerged from Twitter/X as a form of “issue public,” where an online discourse community arose out of a satirical response to some particular political commentary. Taken together, these areas highlight the crucial role of social media in contemporary political communication.

Drawing on research conducted in Iran’s criminal justice system, the chapter explores the linkages between mercy in criminal justice and the increasingly global turn away from social justice movements based on logics of human rights and toward care-based appeals, such as humanitarianism. The latter is just one major arena of increased reliance on and appeals to care or “care work” over claims to inherent rights; others include charity, aid, and philanthropy. In Iran’s “victim-centered” criminal justice system, in homicide and other major crimes, the victims’ families possess a right of “exact” retribution. That is, victims’ immediate family members may exercise their right to have a perpetrator executed. In these cases, however, victims’ family members may also forgo retributive sentencing and forgive the perpetrator. A variety of interests – legal, social, religious, and even economic – shape the concerns of victims’ families as they consider whether to exercise the right of retribution by forgoing rather than executing it. While being merciful or seeking mercy may possess qualities associated with a “seasoning” of justice, the inclination toward mercy and merciful grants, such as granting pardons to persons convicted of crimes, is both a legitimation and entrenchment of an absolute sovereign over the judiciary or the legislative branch, as in Iran. As the chapter argues, this normalization of the resort to mercy has the capacity to reduce everyone in society to a potential supplicant with broader implications for the quest for social justice and legal reckoning.

Morocco has experienced numerous ethnic shifts throughout its long history, and a succession of human populations, cultures, and legal codes have strongly molded the different traditions of the country. This paper focuses on High Atlas Amazigh Peoples, who are deeply intertwined with their local environment through the agdal system, a customary institution of territorial and natural resource governance. The agdal-like systems are centered in the control and resilient management of a myriad of natural resources but most importantly pastures, forests, and water, and in the face of constant uncertainty and scarcity, support the Amazighs to adapt and preserve their rights and biocultural diversity in an increasingly globalized context.

This chapter concentrates on changing provision for retirement over time. In the first years of the republic when funds were scarce and civil wars constant, reform was repeatedly thwarted by recurring conflict both internal and external. Lack of funds further aggravated the State’s inability to provide. Acute instability, commonly known as ‘the anarchy’ followed, making attempts to reform the retirement system futile. In the mid 1840s the Peruvian State was able to provide pensions thanks to the advent of money linked to the sale of the bird-dung fertilizer called guano. President Ramón Castilla was able to pass new legislation and pay more. And it was at this point that institutionalization started to really gather pace. During the fourth period the State continued to provide generous pensions, but this was not enough to ensure stability and at mid-century civil war returned, impacting retirement policies. Finally, the fifth period is concerned with the policies implemented after mid-century when the military court, the fuero was dismantled. State capacity grew and more attention was given to following regulation and ensuring entitlements had been legally acquired.

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.

This chapter focuses on Antarctic ice core science and the reconstruction of hydroclimate and weather regimes. It covers ice core site selection, temporal resolution, sampling methods, isotope and chemical measurement, dating chronologies, and ice coring projects and databanks. Antarctic precipitation and snow/ice accumulation regimes are key parameters for ice core analysis, including precipitation type and air-mass source, together with processes driving snow accumulation, and surface mass balance characteristics related to temperature, surface wind field, and surface microrelief: sublimation, evaporation, blowing snow, condensation, and surface meltwater. Coastal ice cap, ice shelf, and landfast ice behaviour is reflected in snow accumulation, temperature, and meltwater production. A detailed treatment of stable isotope analysis of water and the relationship to air masses and weather regimes covers spatial and temporal isotope–temperature relationships as the basis for paleothermometry, Antarctic ice core isotope–moisture source relationships to Southern Hemisphere air masses, and air mass trajectory analyses applied to reconstruct isotope–weather regime relationships.

This chapter uses the context of Michael Field’s letters and shared journal to discuss fin-de-siècle illness and disability, focusing on ‘hysterical blindness’ and cancer. The long-standing notion of Michael Field as an isolated dyad is placed in tension with Talia Schaffer’s work on Victorian ‘communities of care’. The chapter asserts that we need to consider audience when we read Michael Field’s representations of illness, and, using a queer, crip, lens suggests that Bradley and Cooper’s writing about their embodied selves is strategic, like the name Michael Field itself.