Chapter 6 explains how and why American policymakers doubled down on housing programs in response to the 2008-2009 housing crash. Although the crash presented an opportunity to end generous housing programs that helped inflate the housing bubble, policymakers did the opposite. With remarkably little partisan conflict, they expanded housing support to fix the source of the crisis and promote economic recovery by restoring housing-based growth. By bailing out the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, politicians effectively nationalized the country's housing finance market. The Federal Reserve further supported housing by purchasing large amounts of mortgage debt through its quantitative easing programs, which artificially lowered mortgage costs for households. Although initially designed as temporary measures, decisionmakers made these interventions permanent, fearing that removing them could disrupt a complex mortgage market and housing-based growth central to the demand-led economy. This housing policy expansion was the logical culmination of a century-long process of cumulative political actions to stimulate housing and reinforce America's demand-led growth regime.

This chapter surveys a range of engagements with religion in the modernist theatre, from T. S. Eliot’s vision for a new Christian drama to Bertolt Brecht’s fascination with the Bible, and from Sylvia Wynter’s staging of Afro-diasporic ritual practices to Rabindranath Tagore’s dramatisation of Buddhist legend. Such works, this chapter shows, tend to favour syncretic and heterodox expressions of religious subjects, frequently drawing together multiple doctrinal or ritual traditions within a single performance. These modern dramas of religion are examined across four sections: ‘Modernist Iconoclasms’, on dramatists who sought to dismantle religion’s influence; ‘Temples of a Living Art’, on artists who sought to remake theatre in the image of religion; ‘Ritual and Sacrifice’, on theatre and metaphysics; and ‘Allegories and Parables of Renewal’, on the intersection of religious allegory with social change. Throughout these sections, the chapter illustrates the plural and paradoxical roles for religion assigned on the modernist stage.

Centring the lived experiences of enslaved and free people of colour, Black Catholic Worlds illustrates how geographies and mobilities – between continents, oceans, and region – were at the heart of the formation and circulation of religious cultures by people of African descent in the face of racialisation and slavery. This book examines black Catholicism in different sites – towns, mines, haciendas, rochelas, and maroon communities – across New Granada and frames African-descended religions in the region as “interstitial religions.” People of African descent engaged in religious practice and knowledge production in the interstices, in liminal places and spaces that were physical sites but also figurative openings, in a society shaped by slavery. Bringing together fleeting moments from colonial archives, Fisk traces black religious knowledge production and sacramental practice just as gold, mined by enslaved people, again began to flow from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic world.

1. How can positioning in stories tell us something about the challenges of the storyteller? 2. What are the human rights issues in this story? 3. What role does recognition in stories play, in a relationship between the service user and the social worker? 4. What issues of participation and involvement arise from the story of Sera?

This chapters reflects on the economy of expression required in memes, which encourages Meme Makers to incorporate fictive Discourse Spaces to metonymically call up experiences. It surveys cases of memetic quotation in cases that are close to recognizable existing linguistic constructions involving verbs such as say, tell and be like, but adding further constructional specifications in their memetic applications, thereby yielding very specific meanings. Forms analysed include Said No One Ever, It’ll Be Fun They Said, And Then He Said X, What If I Told You and Be Like; the latter in particular sometimes combines with very complex content being ‘quoted’ or demonstrated, as the chapter illustrates.

The history of how the federal judiciary shaped American sovereignty has long been hidden, obscured by two often-told stories about the courts and the nation. One tells us that judges historically have ceded authority to the president in foreign affairs, and therefore have had little influence on the United States’ international relations. The other asserts that the Marshall Court’s constitutional rulings laid the foundation for federal sovereignty under the Constitution. Both of these accounts have elements of truth, but only because of developments a century later. The claim that Marshall’s constitutional decisions shaped the nation projects backward into the past an importance those rulings did not have when they were made. And the notion that the courts have historically had little to do with foreign affairs ignores that early judges were central participants in a cooperative effort among the three branches of government to secure the United States’ place in the world. It is that legacy of judicial nation-building, rather than the stories we have inherited, that can help us think about the courts’ role today.

1. How do you feel about caring for someone with dementia? 2. What are the human rights issues in this story? 3. What role does empathy play when caring for someone with dementia? 4. What are the issues for you when one sibling wants their elderly mother to have homecare and the other to send her to a care home? 5. What issues of service co-ordination arise from the story? 6. What are the safeguarding issues in this story?

1. How can we work with stories in global social work? 2. How can we include ourselves as practitioners in storytelling? 3. How can we, as social workers, safeguard the integrity of those who tell us their stories in a good and trustworthy way? 4. Being a social worker is very much like being a collector of stories. How do we learn by stories, and add them to be powerful tools in our everyday practice?

In order to understand how urban disaster risk changes, it is essential to understand how cities change. This chapter argues that cities are continually evolving entities whose past and present dynamics provide insights into future trends and possibilities. The chapter first reviews global trends in disaster losses, along with well-established definitions and frameworks about disaster risk. It explains why these are inadequate for understanding how a city’s disaster risk changes over time. It then proposes a simple conceptual framework, the Urban Risk Dynamics framework, to help guide empirical study of evolving disaster risk in any city. The framework is based on several premises: that local geography, or landscape, is vital to understanding urban disaster risk; that cities must be understood as economic entities; and that technological change is a key driver of urban change. The chapter then introduces and justifies the selection of the six case studies to be analyzed using the framework in Chapters 3–5.

Between the First and Second World Wars, many thousands of working-class and avant-garde theatre-makers created and performed in agitprop – a topical, accessible, and highly physical genre that aims to inform and persuade audiences. Although agitprop has Russian revolutionary origins, it proved so flexible and transmissible that well-known troupes like Moscow’s Blue Blouse and Berlin’s Red Megaphone stimulated waves of performances, adaptations, and original work in other cities and countries, including the UK, US, Japan, and Mexico. Epic theatre, as developed by Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, and their co-workers during the interwar and early post-war years, shared agitprop’s pedagogical priorities and many of its elements, including loose, episodic structures and anti-mimetic acting styles. This essay follows Piscator and Brecht themselves by emphasising the formal and historical connections between agitprop and epic theatre, refusing to consign the former to the category of juvenilia.

This chapter consider advertising strategies based on, or inspired by, meme genres. Our most interesting examples don’t so much directly borrow a fully-formed, recognizable meme to reuse it in an ad (though this, too, is sometimes done). Instead, really successful memetically inspired ads partly borrow from existing meme codes, such as when-memes or the ‘Sections of’ meme, and adapt these creatively to suit the persuasive goals identified. This suggests that aspects of the grammar of memes are affecting other forms of communication.