In Australia, the educator landscape continues to be dominated by persons who are non-Indigenous, middle-class, speakers of English as their primary language and of European/Anglo cultural heritage (Daniels-Mayes 2016; Perso & Hayward 2015). When working with culturally minoritised learners, educators currently find themselves operating amid educational imperatives that are often complex and contradictory (Unsworth 2013). As foregrounded in chapters 3–5, cultural responsivity is a pedagogical approach that seeks to value, recognise and utilise the intelligence and cultural capacities that students already possess in the classroom (Morrison et al., 2019). This is a practice that requires educators to go beyond the limitations of simply being culturally aware, having cultural understanding or being culturally competent and instead seeks to tailor an educator’s practice according to learners’ unique place-based linguistic and cultural repertoires. In doing so, the eductor acknowledges through their practice that First Nations contexts are not all the same and that learners will often speak a range of differing home languages.

This chapter shows that the entire intelligible world in Plotinus has a personal nature. Every real being is a person, not an abstract concept or a dead thing. Moreover, those real beings don’t exist in separation, and they are not autonomous individuals, but form a unified, living whole, an organism or, as Plotinus calls it, a city with a soul. The Forms are sacred statues of the gods, which can be seen through their sensible images. In the end, Plotinus coins a neologism to describe this peculiar vision of reality: παμπρόσοωπόν τι, “being-all-faces”. This grand vision gives a deeper meaning to all the earlier metaphors of statues, reflected images, and faces that I have been elucidating in the book. In a deep unity of the intelligible world, to know and love one’s own face or to know and love the face of another is to contemplate all the other faces that participate in the living city that is reality.

The role of women in the religious sphere of the military world has been underserved. This chapter turns to the epigraphic record to illuminate the role of women in military households and communities in both public and private contexts. Visual and epigraphic material is a rich source of information for our understanding of women’s roles in public military settings and private military households, and especially how women expressed religiosity on behalf of themselves, their soldier-husbands, and their households broadly. The evidence is not overwhelming, but there is enough to start building an image of the religious aspects of the lives of women associated with the army. With this aim in mind, this chapter illuminates the lives of women in military communities through the lens of religion as one aspect of daily life. By investigating precisely what women were doing in the military community, this contribution addresses the increasing trend to see the families of soldiers – whether living in the fort or extramural settlement – as a direct part of the military community, rather than a “civilian” counterpart that has often been discussed in pejorative terms or as an appendage population that is located there only by chance.

The topic of women in Roman military communities (i.e., military women) did not suddenly appear in the late twentieth century. One could say its emergence is the result of the novel idea that women were present in most aspects of life in the ancient world. Women have been around the military much longer than the general or professional reader might realize. As a topic, military women have not generally been a group to which anyone paid sustained attention until the last decades of the twentieth century. The topic gained interest as social and cultural history became welcome components of historians’ toolboxes and as archaeological fieldwork has yielded new evidence and innovative methodologies have led to updated analyses of old artifacts. This chapter reviews the historiography of the debate over the long duration of Roman studies. In particular, the authors focus on how research into these military women and their families has slowly diversified and grown over the last three decades. The field is strong and growing to provide a more complete understanding of the Roman military.

While most accounts see worshippers of Saturn as indigenous Africans or rural peasants, this chapter argues that stele-dedicants used stelae to articulate positions for themselves within the frameworks of the wider empire. Unlike earlier stelae, which worked to imagine stele-dedicants as a horizontal community of equals, stelae dedicated from the first century BCE onward became billboards that asserted the prestige of dedicants in the deeply localized but also vertically structured world of the Roman Empire. This can be seen in the adoption of new anthropocentric iconographies that adapt a koine of imagery, the composition of stelae, and new titles for worshippers like sacerdos that are borrowed from a civic sphere.

Dictionaries are an ancient and ubiquitous genre, flourishing wherever and whenever humans flourish, but it’s important to remember that dictionaries aren’t products of human biology or necessity; they are products of human creativity and community: dictionaries are cultural and therefore political.  This chapter explores what it means to understand that simple fact. Dictionaries are partisan systems of ordering words and meanings.  They may aim to be universal, but they inevitably emerge from, record, and respond to social moments from particular perspectives.  Those perspectives may seek to celebrate or denigrate certain cultural groups, legitimate or suppress certain languages, facilitate social mobility or discrimination.  Dictionaries may highlight their cultural positionality as such for political or commercial profit, or they may cast their subjective styles as objective and universal for the same political or commercial profit.  In all events, dictionaries end up documenting cultural information in their definitions, usage labels and notes, illustrative examples and quotations, inserts and appendices, and beyond.  And, again in all events, dictionaries can have cultural impacts entirely unintended or unanticipated by their makers, running from the positive and life affirming to the dehumanizing and antisocial.

This essay offers a speculative account of a third wave of Beckett criticism, emerging at the turn of the current century, one which is dedicated to the articulation of a Beckettian literary politics.

The first two waves of Beckett criticism, the essay suggests, despite their manifest differences, shared a sense that Beckett was in some fundamental sense an apolitical writer. The first wave sees his work as invested in a universal condition, which is resistant to any form of political particularity. The second tended to see his writing as a deconstructive endeavour, one which reveals not an essential human condition, but the groundless of all forms of being.

Both of these waves of criticism, the essay argues, tend to overlook a central dynamic in Beckett’s writing, in which a rejection of forms of reference coincides with a longing, however residual, for forms of political community. The urge towards solitude in Beckett is countered by an equally strong urge towards company, towards shared life. To begin to articulate a Beckettian politics, as part of a third wave of Beckett criticism, it is necessary to develop a critical language that can account at once for Beckett’s negativity – his refusal of political commitments – and for his persistent attachment to the word that he seems to disavow.

To think about the limits (of a text, of a being, of a place) is to think about adulteration. It is to recognise that, at their limits, things merge with other things.

This essay proposes that such thinking has taken on a particular urgency in our own time, an urgency that is at once biopolitical and geopolitical. The spread of a virus has forced us to examine our individual biopolitical limits, as the collapse of a geopolitical ideology – one which allied US capital to progressive democratisation – has forced us to examine the boundaries, between east and west, between north and south, that have shaped the global distribution of wealth and force.

Under these conditions there is a tendency to immerse ourselves in our own person, to withdraw from the porous limits of self, of household, of nation, to some ground zero of being. We look to the imagined grounds of a minimal life that is self-directed and self-sufficient, that is proof against contamination by whatever lies beyond its pale.

We might call this contracted state a condition of mere being – the mere being that remains when our political life, our being in relation to others, is attenuated or forsaken. But this essay suggests that close attention to literary accounts of mere being, from Henry James to Wallace Stevens to Samuel Beckett, helps us to see that poetic mereness is not a denial of shared being, but a particular means of imagining it, a means of approaching that place where we are conjoined with others. In tracing a poetic tradition of mere being, the essay argues that what we find in the dramatically denuded self is not a retreat from limits, but an encounter with them – an encounter which grants us a new way of imagining what Densher calls, in The Wings of the Dove, ‘our being as we are’.

The DOHaD field provides critical evidence for investment in early life, linking environmental exposures during preconception, pregnancy, and infancy with later non-communicable disease risk. Despite the potential of this evidence to positively impact some of our most vulnerable communities, instances where communities are engaged in participatory DOHaD research and knowledge translation processes are limited. This chapter explores the benefits of community-based participatory research approaches and outlines current examples within the DOHaD field. In particular, it focuses on ongoing work within the Cook Islands where DOHaD has informed community-partnered research, scientific and health literacy programmes in schools, and the development of early-life nutrition resources for mothers and families.

This chapter examines how movable renderings of animals contributed to sociopolitical experience in Minoan Crete, with close attention to zoomorphic vessels. Beginning in the Prepalatial period, we examine a group of clay body-form vessels that could stand independently. While typically labelled “anthropomorphic,” the vessels’ identities are more complex: their forms do not neatly suggest a particular species, and their affordances as objects are integral to what they are and how they are experienced. Through analysis of their unique corporeal characters and depositional circumstances, I argue that these figures could have been experienced as distinct productive agents, who participated in cultivating community space between Prepalatial tombs and settlements. Next, looking forward, we consider how animalian vessels continued to contribute to Cretan social venues, while subtle changes to how they embodied animals could imply profound shifts in their presence and performance. From the late Protopalatial, we see rhyta rendered as bodiless animal heads, most bovine. Unlike the Prepalatial vessels, these appeared dramatically dependent on living people to become productive, placing emphasis on human action. I contextualize these rhyta with a problematization of palatial-era politico-environmental developments and changes in social performance and “cattle culture.”

Exponential growth can be a head-scratcher. Accounts and taxonomies that seem inviting near the start of a growth curve can seem like fool’s errands afterwards. And the story of queer—or gay and lesbian, or queer and trans, or LGBTQ+, or LGBTQIA+– poetics since the late 1960s is a story of exponents, of proliferation from stigmatized rarity to celebrated (but still endangered) ubiquity. Does Randall Mann share linguistic goals with Pat Parker? Chen Chen with Samuel Ace? Reginald Shepherd with Carmen Giménez Smith? A sampling offered by me (a white, prosperous, midcareer, polyamorous, Northeastern trans woman with kids) may be more likely to include poets who share my identities, as well as my tastes, and to overlook those who do not. But there is—at least in the arts—no view from nowhere: one informed view is better than none.

By 1948, President Perón’s first economic program was yielding results and enjoying broad political and social support while strengthening an expanding state infrastructure. The consolidation of this nationalist and anti-liberal model had an impact on cultural production, particularly on an expanded literary field. Between 1948 and 1949 several works that became canonical were published, offering a diversity of perspectives on the debates that crisscrossed Argentine culture: the novels Adán Buenos Ayres (Leopoldo Marechal), El túnel (Ernesto Sábato), the essay Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro (Ezequiel Martínez Estrada) and in the short-story collection El Aleph (Jorge Luis Borges). Differences arose not only out of divergent political positions but also, and perhaps more poignantly, out of the disparate conceptual frameworks around which intellectual debates took place: ideas of order and chaos, organization and entropy, community and disorder. Terms like “pueblo” and “popular” became essential and unavoidable to discuss fiction, literary language, the role of literature, and literary institutions that grouped writers.

The history of government presents six lessons. Government has been crucial to building a nation truer to our nation, but it has taken both government and markets to do this. Government is big and complex in response to changes that were occurring in the economy which sent the country in directions inconsistent with its national values. Fourth, despite its size and complexity, government undertakes the same three essential functions it has undertaken over the history of the country. Government has been necessary to create, sustain, and expand markets, to protect people from economic loss and physical injury, and to maintain a social safety net for people mired in poverty due to age, health, or market conditions not of their doing. Finally, the pathway towards achieving America’s fundamental political values has been littered with mistakes and regrets. What makes us a nation has changed to encompass those who have been excluded and marginalized.

Environmental violence focuses on the harm from both toxic and non-toxic pollution. Contemporary agricultural practices contribute significantly to such environmental violence through a heavy reliance on synthetic chemicals to raise commodities, as well as fossil fuels for tractors and shipping related to distribution. These same practices further harm persons and communities (both human and non-human) in ways not included in the environmental violence framework. Using Jacques Ellul’s theory of a technological society and technique that values efficiency in all areas of life, this chapter explores the relationship between environmental violence, contemporary agricultural practices, and wider critiques of technology. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of how we might culturally encourage an agriculture of flourishing rather than one focused solely on efficiency through the example of the Catholic Worker farms.

Imagination was an essential component in the maintenance of morale. It was a coping mechanism, which drew men away from their present, and allowed them to access memories that helped them to feel connected to home and to England - its landscapes, peoples, and places. As subject, not citizen, soldiers their perceptions of England formed around parochial and meaningful visions, rather than abstract ideas like the state. Yet, regulars had a very particular impression of ‘home’, which drew on their military service and soldierly identities. On the other hand, reservists, volunteers, and later conscripts continued to feel embedded in their home communities, albeit mainly in their minds. These specific and personal relationships with the homeland were also nurtured by regimental culture, which, at least in infantry regiments, often preserved and celebrated attachments to a particular county or counties. The distance between men and their loved ones could leave them despondent, but the letters, parcels, and postcards that they received gave them joy and were often the substance of the imaginary worlds they created and fought for. Whilst soldiers did become increasingly embittered by perceived injustices, inefficiencies, and peace talk on the Home Front, it was their more parochial (and positive) visions of home that mattered most to them. Their imaginative realms were not just a source of motivation, they were also a cocoon to which they retreated when dreaming and daydreaming in trenches or behind the lines. They aided their endurance whilst also providing the greatest justification for their continued suffering.