This chapter chronicles the wide range of theatrical styles at the end of the nineteenth century. In addition to the melodrama, farce, and pantomime popular throughout the century, the period saw the development of more experimental forms such as the well-made play and Naturalism. Michael Field as dramatists were both inspired and confounded by this range of theatrical possibility. While their prose drama A Question of Memory was performed by J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre Society, the majority of their dramatic work – written in intricate verse, historically rich, and often requiring elaborate staging – proved unperformable during their lifetimes. The chapter argues that in this Michael Field were representative of late-Victorian women dramatists more broadly: while many of the plays associated with the New Drama told women’s stories, the act of telling remained the prerogative of men.

Chapter 8 explores the potential of smart courts to enhance transnational access to justice in an increasingly interconnected world. The chapter highlights the jurisdictional complexities, such as identifying competent courts and handling conflicts of jurisdiction, and discusses how AI and technology can assist in these areas. It also addresses the challenges in determining applicable law, verifying the identity of foreign litigants, cross-border electronic service and collecting digital evidence abroad. The chapter delves into the difficulties of cross-border virtual hearings, including time zone differences, legal restrictions on video transmission, sovereignty concerns and data protection challenges. Additionally, it examines the enforcement of foreign electronic judgments and the role of technology in international asset tracing and smart contract enforcement. While technology holds promise for improving transnational access to justice, the chapter concludes that significant obstacles remain, including issues of sovereignty, mutual trust and stringent data transfer regulations, which require international cooperation and harmonization of legal standards to overcome fully.

This chapter details the fragmented nature of the last sixty years of Aboriginal land repossession across Australia, both in terms of the nature of the rights and the level of restitution. Exploring the limited and uneven national Aboriginal land rights picture in 2024, we argue for an appreciation of the federal dimension of land rights policymaking. Uneven land restitution has resulted not just from spatially varying degrees of land commodification and the differing trajectories of land rights movements, although these were crucial. We aim to demonstrate that shifting state–Commonwealth (or Federal) relations within the Australian federation – crosscut against differing support from states and Commonwealth governments over time, and differing Commonwealth Government attitudes to federalism – led to a spatially uneven set of legislative land rights regimes across Australia. To do so, we narrate the varied responses to the Aboriginal land rights movement across the country in the wake of the Woodward Royal Commission in 1973 with an eye to the federal dimension. We argue that while the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke governments from 1972 to 1991 all failed to legislate national land rights, they did so for very different reasons, leaving the land rights agenda to the states. Ultimately, it was the centralizing power of the High Court that brought about a national but inadequate and partial resolution to the Aboriginal land question. Finally, we provide a series of maps and tables describing the jurisdictional variation in rights and interests in land restored to Indigenous Peoples at present.

This chapter focuses on dance and learning in the early years, presenting a theoretical framework that reflects the changing Australian cultural context for dance. Building upon an earlier model for dance education, culturally responsive pedagogy is an inclusive approach to dance learning from birth to age eight. Key influences are introduced with attention given to aesthetic experiences, early dance relationships, ‘dance-play’, young children’s engagement with technology and the explosion of dance on screen. Consideration is given to established truths about dance and the emerging presence of Indigenous dance within dance education. Examples of dance artists in education settings, along with visual and transcribed examples, are provided, demonstrating how early years educators may support young children’s agency as critically responsive co-creative participants in dance.

The anthropology of ethics and morality has become a key area of research and theorization. The “ethical turn” has involved several approaches ranging from Foucauldian studies of ethical self-cultivation and virtue ethics to ordinary ethics and moral experience. Among these approaches, psychological anthropologists have figured centrally, contributing to the development of neo-Aristotelian and phenomenological frameworks. Prior to the current surge of interest, psychological anthropologists were at the forefront of earlier debates on morality. These studies concerned questions of moral relativism, moral emotions, and the socialization of morality in early childhood. This chapter examines psychological anthropology’s engagement with ethics and morality from early work in search of the universal qualities of moral values to contemporary developments in the study of moral experience and relational ethics. The review concludes with a consideration of future directions for engagement with ethics and morality in relation to decolonization, activist anthropology, and the role of nonhuman forces – from cascading disasters to algorithms – in shaping ethical life.

Katharine Bradley is responsible for the now well-known sonnets admired as the work of Michael Field. Many are collected in Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908), a volume in preparation since at least 1893, though Bradley had been writing sonnets since 1869. This chapter details some of her earlier work, noting especially her use of the art sonnet and the memorial (or elegiac) sonnet. It examines her radical experiments with the sonnet form and her remarkable ability to translate ideas, impressions, and prose sources swiftly and deftly into fluent verse. A supreme later example of poetic translation is ‘Fifty Quatrains’ in Wild Honey, written for Charles Ricketts, her male muse, and the recipient, like Edith Cooper, of many fine later sonnets. Ivor Treby’s invaluable selections include noteworthy sonnets by Bradley unpublished in their day, though other examples very likely remain in the archives.

Peat extraction profoundly transformed central Russia’s physical, economic, and social geography. This chapter traces how canals, railways, cables, as well as housing and social welfare helped make central Russia’s peatlands more habitable. From the 1920s onwards, and particularly following Stalin’s death in 1953, the government invested considerable funds allowing workers to live permanently near important peat extraction sites. Over time, workers’ settlements turned into regular parts of the landscape and homes for workers and their families. The everyday in these places blended features of urban and rural life. Enjoying access to running fresh water and basic health care, most people combined employment in peat extraction with private gardening to produce food. This chapter foregrounds the often overlooked role of workers’ settlements as spaces of reproduction in the history of Russia’s fossil economy. Peat was not just a fuel but also a source for place-based feelings of belonging that allowed workers to embrace the margins of Russia’s fossil economy as their home.

How did peat become part of Russia’s industrial metabolism? This chapter traces the physical mobilization of peat in the late imperial period and during the early Soviet electrification campaign, highlighting the importance of regional perspectives for efforts to write an environmental history of Russia’s industrializing economy. From the late nineteenth century, peat played an increasingly important role as an industrial fuel, inspiring technical elites to consider it a source of electric power. This idea was subsequently incorporated into the GOĖLRO-plan for the Electrification of Russia, which firmly anchored peat in the power industry. The early Soviet energy system, with its emphasis on regionally available energy sources, was not solely a product of Bolshevik power. Instead, it must be situated within longer trajectories of regionalized fuel use and the experience of a war-related fuel crisis that predated the 1917 Revolution.

This chapter addresses the legal challenges of the virtual world, with a particular emphasis on the role of identity in its new configurations in the contemporary virtual environment. Specifically, we consider the changing nature of regulation, law and crime in an online context that has seen the emergence of the metaverse, which has made connecting the physical with the virtual persona more complex. Avatars and other personae have made it challenging to align identity with prior understandings and perceptions. Digital personae and virtual representations of selves require theoretical reconsiderations of identity and a set of norms that regulate interaction, and human relations in general within this world. Indeed, a discussion on identity rationalizes the need for new laws. The chapter considers these emerging challenges and explores the role that democratic governments and other gatekeepers can play in regulating digital communication and discourse, balancing the protection of freedom of speech with the persecution of hate speech. The perceived state of lawlessness that inhabits the online space suggests the need for clear criteria and terms of use, in addition to establishing a mechanism of accountability for those involved in virtual crimes, due to the lack of governmental guidelines for crimes in virtual universes.

This chapter discusses the role of phenomenology in psychological anthropology, with an emphasis on its ongoing productive potential for the field. The chapter explores how a phenomenological framework has been mobilized in psychological anthropology to illuminate central concepts like subjects and lifeworlds, intersubjectivity, and the aspectual nature of consciousness and experience. The chapter also emphasizes the valuable methodological implications of bringing a phenomenological framework to the practice of anthropology. Throughout, recent ethnographic examples are engaged to illustrate how psychological anthropologists have generated innovative insights through the use of phenomenological approaches.

This chapter presents a discussion about the interconnection between the proliferation of sources of information in a “post-truth” era. In particular, it considers the question of what the concept of “post-truth” actually means in the context of prevailing understandings of veracity and sincerity in discourse and communication. It also places this notion against the broader discursive practice of (de)legitimization and how the digital environment has added layers of complexity to how users – citizens – negotiate information and the idea of truth. In particular, attention is given to how mis- and disinformation in a post-truth context can be proliferated and disseminated in the online context and the specific features of communication the users might utilize to do so. Overall, this chapter explores current understandings of the notion of post-truth in public discourse before focusing more explicitly on how it is used in public discourse by influential actors such as Donald Trump. It will also consider the role that post-truth discourse plays in populist discourse as well the issues posed in broader online communication in the virtual context.

Chapter 2 is concerned with research questions. We discuss the different processes through which research questions can be identified and developed in corpus-based research on health communication. Three case studies are considered. The first study involved the analysis of press representations of obesity. In this study, the researchers developed their own research questions in a variety of ways, including by drawing from the non-linguistic literature on obesity. The second study focused on the McGill Pain Questionnaire – a well-known language-based diagnostic tool for pain. A pain consultant asked the researchers if they could help understand why some patients find it difficult to respond to some sections of the questionnaire. In response, the researchers formulated a series of questions that could be answered using corpus linguistic tools, and identified some issues with the questionnaire that address the pain consultant’s concerns. The third study involved the analysis of patient feedback on the UK’s National Health Service. The researchers were approached by the NHS Feedback Team and given 12 questions that they were commissioned to answer by means of corpus linguistic methods.

Chapter 12 discusses the potential opportunities and challenges associated with disseminating the findings of corpus-based approaches to health communication, which also apply more generally to interdisciplinary research and collaborations between researchers and non-academic stakeholders. We include two case studies. The first case study involves work on patient feedback with members of the NHS who had provided a list of questions for us to work on. We discuss the importance of and challenges around building and maintaining relationships with members of this large, changing organisation, as well as outlining how we approached dissemination of findings, both in academic and non-academic senses, and the extent that we were able to carry out impact. The second case study considers our experiences of disseminating findings from a project on metaphors and cancer, focussing particularly on writing for a healthcare journal, dealing with the media, and going beyond corpus data to create a metaphor-based resource for communication about cancer.

The chapter discusses the critical role of predictive uncertainty and diversity in enhancing the robustness and generalizability of embodied AI and robot learning. It explores the need for robots to efficiently learn and act in the unpredictable physical world by considering diverse scenarios and their consequences. The chapter highlights the importance of distinguishing between evaluative and generative paradigms of uncertainty, emphasizing the need to balance accuracy, uncertainty, and computational complexity in robot models. It examines various sources of uncertainty, including physical and model limitations, partial observability, environment dynamics, and domain shifts. Additionally, it outlines techniques for quantifying uncertainty, such as variance, entropy, and Bayesian methods, and underscores the significance of leveraging uncertainty in decision-making, exploration, and learning robust models. By addressing uncertainty in perception, representation, planning, and control, the chapter aims to improve the reliability and safety of robotic systems in diverse and dynamic environments.

This chapter proposes new readings of the poems of Whym Chow: Flame of Love based on ideas of unconventional domesticity, alternative divinity, and queer, chosen families. The chapter explores the ways in which animal characteristics disrupt and subvert conventional poetic form and religious teachings in the volume, specifically elegy and Catholicism. It also focuses on connections between Michael Field’s writing and animal poetry found in the work of other fin-de-siècle and modernist writers. The chapter proposes that these poems can and should be celebrated for their eccentricity, oddity, and queerness rather than overlooked and marginalised within Michael Field’s oeuvre.

The importance of effective communication between the adults in the lives of children and young people has gained prominence in theory, policy and practice, and throughout the different contexts in which students participate. In educational contexts throughout the world, it has been well established that the best outcomes occur for children and youth when the adults in their lives come together to support them. Communication is at the core of interaction and provides the building blocks for positive relationships to emerge and develop. Such relationships enhance learning and support students, their families and teachers to recognise and reach their full potential. The field of communication offers some sound insight into effective communication between adults, including different models that aid in developing a better understanding about the complex nature of communication in education-based settings.