This chapter invites readers to engage in a daily morning dance practice, highlighting the numerous physical, mental, and emotional benefits of dancing. It suggests a curated playlist of diverse music genres, spanning the last hundred years, to accompany this practice. The author encourages readers to personalize their dance experience, emphasizing the importance of enjoyment and positive emotions. By promoting a shared experience of dancing, the chapter aims to foster a sense of community and well-being, ultimately demonstrating how music can invigorate and uplift our daily lives.

This chapter begins with a reflection of the Find My iPhone app, employing it as an example of how physical and digital place can exist simultaneously and in interconnected ways. Afterwards, it turns to explaining the notion of physical-digital place as parallel universes, subsequently unravelling this idea through strands taken from across crescent voice interviews. The emphasis of this chapter is on place, or more specifically the intermingling of physical and digital places, whereby the commitments, practices, and imaginaries of screens can shape one’s understandings of place and allow one to form a consciousness that is a kind of home. By employing notions of the ‘digital home’, social imaginaries, digital twins, and a postdigital concept of community, this chapter unsettles the binary between digital and physical spaces, employing Dezuanni’s definition of community to help get at the ways that online spaces feel like home. It explores these ideas primarily through crescent voices and their experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic, an event which lent more prominence to practices such as digital twins.

This chapter engages the work of two prominent theorists of agonistic democracy, William Connolly and Chantal Mouffe. It analyzes their critiques of liberal theory and Western political thought, both of which, they argue, divest politics of its essential vitality by prizing consensus, unity, and agreement. Commending agonism for its recovery of the ineliminable place of contestation in democratic politics, as well as its appreciation of the generative and emancipatory possibilities of conflict, the chapter then raises the question of political community. Must agonism’s safeguarding of difference and its preservation of perpetual contestation entail the abandonment of the concept of community? I argue agonists are right to worry about the ways appeals to community threaten difference, but contend nevertheless that a vision of collectivity is necessary for agonistic politics to survive the pressures of neoliberalism. The chapter concludes by considering a movement of radical theology that has adopted some of agonism’s central insights but which, I argue, remains captive to a form of analogical thinking that insufficiently attends to the nature of creaturehood.

This chapter explores the relationship between primary health care (PHC), health literacy and health education with empowering individuals, groups and communities to improve and maintain optimum health. PHC philosophy encompasses principles of accessibility, affordability, sustainability, social justice and equity, self-determination, community participation and intersectoral collaboration, which drive health care service delivery and health care reform. Empowerment is a fundamental component of social justice, which seeks to redistribute power so those who are disadvantaged can have more control of the factors that influence their lives. Lack of empowerment is linked to poorer health outcomes due to limited control or agency, associated with poorer social determinants of health. This influences personal resources, agency and participation, as well as limited capacity to access services and opportunities. Health care professionals and systems need to work in ways to promote the empowerment of individuals, groups and communities to achieve better health outcomes.

Sex and gender have a significant relationship to health and health outcomes for women, men, and sexually and gender-diverse people. Sex relates to biological attributes, whether born female or male, while gender identity relates to how someone feels and experiences their gender, which may or may not be different to their physiology or sex at birth. Biological characteristics expose women and men to different health risks and health conditions. Gender also exposes people to different health risks, and gender inequity impacts on their potential to achieve health and well-being.

In this chapter participants reflect on the steps that senior academics and academic institutions could do to better support early career autistic academics. They also reflect candidly on the things that non-autistic colleagues and friends could do to make them feel more comfortable in both work and social settings.

In American culture, there is a mix and mismatch of core discourses: religious, Enlightenment, and market economy. Each claims, contributes, and competes for kinds of belonging and national definition, by abstract principles of equality, particular community of religion and nation, and possessive individualism of each one’s own self-interest. Poetry, far from being private reflection or self-referring aesthetic object, is an arena in which each of these discourses encounter each other. Widely circulated in newspapers, magazines, publicly recited, poetry took part in and also refracted, in especially intense and focal ways, the drama, questions, and terms of belonging crucial to, and conflictual in, the unfolding of America. In this chapter, I explore the intercrossing and contention between American discourses of religion, Enlightenment, and individualism in the Abolitionist poetry of Whittier, the poetry of war in Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, and the poetry of participation in Walt Whitman. In the texts of each, vocabularies, terms, allusion, and critique of American cultural, religious, and political life form complex interchanges, at times through alignment, at times in tense and critical relationship. The poem becomes a field of confrontation, appeal, and address within the context of their writing as voices of culture take on poetic force.

Among Americans in the nineteenth century, literary interest in the image, idea, and practice of “community” extended beyond any conventional historical understanding of national togetherness. The abiding conception of community that obtained in the United States between the American Revolution and World War I was also informed by an emergent theory and practice of communitarianism. This was especially the case for those contemporaries who regarded the changes to an increasingly modern society and economy from a collectivist, and typically socialist, perspective. Across a range of early national, antebellum, and postbellum phases of the communitarian experiment in the United States, American writers gave expression to communitarianism’s unique reformist program through a variety of genres and political positions. Among the former were works of fiction, nonfiction, and polemic. Among the latter (in both book and short-form formats) were writings by several generations of authors and journalists that reveal a complex array of interpretive positions and ideologies, ranging from advocacy at one end of the political spectrum to skepticism at the other. The differences in their politics notwithstanding, many of the era’s communitarian-minded writers shared a desire to shape the course of events in American life with their work.

Covenant, community and communion are ways in which God’s means and God’s ends are identical. Covenant is not the ‘Plan B’ after the failure of creation in the fall; it is the fulfilment of the reason for creation, and the anticipation of the true covenant, the incarnation itself. God’s love for Israel goes far beyond any instrumental goodwill: Israel is God’s child, God’s spouse, God’s companion forever. Communion is the centre of the Christian faith: being with but also being together. Communion and community name the two aspirations of church. The one is about being in, and bringing others into, relationship with God; the other is about relating civilly, cordially and sacrificially with one another, and attending to the things that need doing to function humanly. When Jesus talks of the realm of God, he is talking about this communion and community becoming a reality for all people.

This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s complex discussion of human sociability. Schopenhauer thought that agents in the domains of politics and morality cannot conceive of human togetherness. For him, the areas of politics and morality correspond to the exercise of egoism and the spontaneous feeling of compassion, respectively. But he added that egoism is rooted in a form of practical solipsism, and compassion is rooted in a metaphysical insight into the inessential nature of individuals. It follows that neither egoistic nor compassionate individuals ultimately care about others as others. Yet Schopenhauer supplemented these treatments of others as reducible with his discussion of sociability. His analysis of social interaction exemplified by conversations, games, and other diversions includes accounts of interpersonal harmony and friction among individuals who remain distinct from one another. Even though Schopenhauer rejected sociable interaction as superficial and embraced misanthropy, his reflections on sociability contain a conception of human community.

This chapter is a largely non-technical overview of economic and political aspects of wind energy policy. The cost of wind energy is assessed in terms of Levelised Cost of Energy (LCoE) with equations given in full and simplified form. Using a large database historic installed costs for UK wind both on- and offshore are given, from the earliest projects to the present day. The observed trends are discussed. Operational and balancing costs are outlined, the latter reflecting the intermittency of wind power. LCoE estimates are made for a range of installed costs and output capacity factors at typical discount rates, and compared with current generation prices. The chapter considers the economics of onsite generation with the example of a private business using wind energy to offset demand; the energy displacement and export statistics are extrapolated to compare with a national scenario for 100% renewable electricity generation. The topic of ownership is introduced and examined in the context of the UK’s first community-owned windfarm. The chapter concludes with a brief review of UK renewable energy policy, which originated with legislation to protect the nuclear power industry.