This chapter explores the relationship between John Clare’s writing and the evolving discipline of ecocriticism which, in its broadest terms, treats literature as a representation of the physical world and the reader as a mediator between these complex environments. Clare’s work was central to the early ecocritical canon of the 1990s and continues, in more recent years, to shape our understanding of how and why environmental writing matters, particularly in a context of ecological despoliation, species extinction, and global warming. That Clare’s resolutely local voice and perspective should be at all relevant to an understanding of our broader world speaks to the challenge that he poses to modern readers by the example of his own relation to natural otherness. That relation, exemplified in poems such as ‘The Nightingales Nest’, is predicated on habits of attention and self-circumscription, a sequence by which the poet as ecological actor evokes the experience of coexistence.

This chapter explains how international society emerged and was globalised. Its main purpose is to explore how the European sovereign states-system expanded across the globe to become the truly international order of sovereign states that we see today. The first part of the chapter examines how the expansion of the states-system came about and how it has been analysed. The second part provides a critical discussion of how the spread of the states-system has been understood in IR. It aims provoke thinking about the enduring Eurocentrism that continues to bedevil our theorising of international politics.

This chapter considers the relevance of postcolonialism to the discipline of ‘international relations’ (IR). It argues that postcolonialism advances a powerful critique of traditional approaches to IR (see chapters on realism and liberalism) since it calls into question the discipline’s foundational ontological and epistemological assumptions. In particular, it challenges the dominant assumption that states are the basic units of IR and that we should examine the relations between these units in the context of an anarchical system. Postcolonialism refocuses our attention on the constitutive role played by colonialism in the creation of the modern world and sees international relations as hierarchical rather than anarchical. It sees academic disciplines such as IR – and Western rationalist, humanist and universalist modes of thinking in general – as complicit in reproducing colonial power relations and seeks normatively to resist practices of colonialism in its material and ideational forms, whether political, economic or cultural.

In this chapter we give a brief overview of corporate governance in the United States (‘US’), the United Kingdom (‘UK’), New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India and Singapore, some of the major Anglo-American corporate governance jurisdictions that are based on the unitary (one-tier) board model. In Chapter 12 we deal with corporate governance developments in the European Union (‘EU’), the G20/OECD Principles of Corporate Governance, and corporate governance in Germany, Japan and China. The Principles include traditional Anglo-American corporate governance principles but go wider – as well as principles applying to a traditional unitary board structure, they include principles applying to a typical two-tier board structure.

In this chapter the focus is on corporate governance developments in countries where the two-tier board system is used. The number of EU member states with different corporate law systems makes corporate governance harmonisation quite difficult, but also leads to very interesting and dynamic discussion within the EU. The G20/OECD Principles of Corporate Governance cover board structures. Germany has a two-tier board structure with employee representatives forming part of the supervisory board. Elements of the German corporate governance model influenced the original Japanese corporate governance model, but Anglo-American influence emerged after World War II. China has a unique corporate governance model because Chinese corporations were traditionally state-owned and many major corporations are still either state-owned or state-controlled. Nevertheless, elements of both the German model and the Anglo-American model, especially as far as independent, non-executive directors for listed companies are concerned, have influenced the Chinese corporate governance model.

Sexuality is one of the few curricular areas so constrained by policy that it often fails to resemble the topic students are interested in learning about or address the pressing concerns to which it was supposedly oriented. Focused on prevention of various sorts – and this often means prevention of all sexual activity, especially for youth – the more positive lessons about what sexuality can be for self-identity, relationality, community-building, and political life remain unaddressed. Though sexuality education has attempted to address the public goods of population health and individual development, too often it has done so without making clear concepts of gender, sex, ethical relationships, pleasure, and community. This chapter traces tensions in sexuality education from the start of its status as part of the official public school curriculum in the late nineteenth century to current debates that continue to shape how sexuality is defined and taught. We highlight continuities and ruptures that have characterized the global spread of sex education, showing how much of what happens in the Global South is shaped by legacies of colonialism and American political priorities. The chapter concludes by considering emerging challenges and opportunities for progress in sex education.

This book is the result of a collective effort by a group of scholars from Latin America, Europe, and the USA, who together wished to write a legal history that would center on the common experiences of Latin American societies over a long period, which began before Europeans invaded the continent and continue to date. The aim was to identify a narrative that would observe common trends, manifest the dramatic shifts that had occurred throughout this period, and insert these findings into a wider perspective. This in turn would reveal that debates taking place in Latin America were often linked to discussions transpiring elsewhere, to which they both contributed and from which they received input and inspiration. Our first aim, therefore, is to craft a pan-Latin American narrative and insert it into a global perspective. Our second aim is to propose a new methodology that places at the center questions rather than answers, processes rather than results, and contexts rather than descriptions of solutions. We also want to demonstrate the multiple levels on which law operates and how deeply it is embedded in social, political, cultural, and economic processes.

This section situates the study within the current debates surrounding the issues of commemoration, cultural memory, and identity. It applies the insights offered by memory studies to investigate the political implications of Shakespearean appropriation and legacy. It introduces the key focus of the book: the ways in which memorialising Shakespeare was used to formulate and contest imperial, national, and social identities during the global crisis of the First World War. As diverse groups evoked him to underpin their collective past and common values, Shakespeare provided a starting point for dialogue and a shared ‘language’ in which it could be conducted. This dialogue was not always friendly, as people used Shakespeare not only to highlight their commonalities, but also to insist on their differences. Although imperialist and nationalist agendas often dominated, Shakespeare also provided an outlet for other, usually silenced and forgotten voices, as marginalised racial, ethnic, and social groups adopted him to respond to the prevalent totalising narratives. Examining these exchanges within the framework of memory studies offers a unique view of the intertwining of culture and politics at the time that saw the emergence of the world order which is still with us over a hundred years later.

This chapter extends the consideration of the changing global burden of diseases and discusses what is required to mount an effective response to public health challenges, particularly in countries where people are living in extreme poverty. It considers the role of international development assistance and the responsibilities of the international community in improving the health of poor people.

This chapter deals with global literacy development in relation to writing systems. A global perspective on literacy compels attention to global variation in languages and writing systems. The history of writing involves processes of discovery, borrowing, and modification, which language communities go through when they move toward a literate society. These processes require choices to be made regarding the graphic forms and how they connect to the spoken language and to broader cultural and educational considerations, including how new generations can learn this writing to understand their language. Across the globe, writing systems have developed varying solutions as to how to represent their spoken language, that is, its phonological, morphological, and semantic properties. In this chapter, some of the solutions to this mapping problem through invention and variation will be examined , and cognitive principles aiding the process of learning to read across languages and writing systems are proposed. The chapter concludes that writing systems follow the same set of operating principles in learning to read but that the they differences between them do matter for in terms of understanding the weighting of reading procedures and different educational challenges. It is also emphasized that all writing systems are learnable, and instruction effectively geared toward their specific properties may be successful for most children.

In this introductory chapter, we examine the worldwide distribution of literacy, its development with schooling, and the sources of individual variation in literacy outcomes. Various perspectives on global variation are discussed while also aiming for a common framework to describe literacy development that recognizes demographic boundaries in the world, on the one hand, and its global variation as a function of bio-ecological markers on the other hand. In this introduction, we draw attention to the wealth of recent research on variations in literacy development that arise across regions and that reflect the multiple interrelated influences of individual, home, school, and societal factors. Furthermore, observations on the neurobiological and ecological markers related to global literacy are discussed. These include the role of writing systems, genetics, brain foundations, self-regulation, and sociocultural, contextual, teacher, and parental factors in global literacy development. An explanatory framework is also provided showing that literacy development involves gaining reading fluency and spelling to facilitate reading comprehension and writing, that it builds on language, and that child characteristics and home- and school-support factors combine to influence individual variation, within an indirectly influential sociopolitical context.

In this final chapter, a wide-angle perspective is provided on the major issues that arise when one thinks globally about literacy. Despite many important differences across the globe, literacy development suggests some general patterns that reflect nearly universal phases and shared operating principles. Although the “development” of literacy begins early through natural processes of language development and conceptual development, it is school experiences, explicitly designed to teach reading, that we expect to ensure the achievement of literacy. Each classroom within a school is its own literacy ecosystem, with one or more teachers, students, literacy curriculum materials, assesments, and regulated interactions. The classroom itself is embedded within other systems – the school, the community, the larger school administrative units, and local, regional, and national government control agents. A Global Literacy Framework is presented, showing that literacy development is embedded in language development and can be predicted by (a) system factors, referring to variations in the linguistic and writing systems, (b) child factors, associated with the neurobiological foundation of children’s learning capacity, and (c) support factors, associated with processes in the home and at school. All these influences exist within a sociopolitical context that exerts influence broadly across the system.

Chapter 6 provides a second empirical example of the Benford agreement procedure: here we analyze new daily COVID-19 cases at the US state level and at the global level across nations. Both the state-level and the global analyses consider time as a variable. Specifically we examine, (1) for the United States, new reports of COVID-19 between January 22, 2020 and November 16, 2021 at the state level, and (2) for the cross-national data, new reports of COVID-19 between February 24, 2020 and January 13, 2022. At the state level, we report Benford agreement analyses for (1) the full dataset, (2) cases grouped alphabetically, (3) cases grouped regionally, (4) cases grouped by days of the week, and (5) cases grouped by their governor’s party (Republican or Democratic). We then turn our Benford agreement analysis to global cross-national COVID-19 data to assess whether Benford agreement of COVID-19 varies across countries.

This chapter puts forward new guidelines for designing and implementing distributed machine learning algorithms for big data. First, we present two different alternatives, which we call local and global approaches. To show how these two strategies work, we focus on the classical decision tree algorithm, revising its functioning and some details that need modification to deal with large datasets. We implement a local-based solution for decision trees, comparing its behavior and efficiency against a sequential model and the MLlib version. We also discuss the nitty-gritty of the implementation of decision trees in MLlib as a great example of a global solution. That allows us to formally define these two concepts, discussing the key (expected) advantages and disadvantages. The second part is all about measuring the scalability of a big data solution. We talk about three classical metrics, speed-up, size-up, and scale-up, to help understand if a distributed solution is scalable. Using these, we test our local-based approach and compare it against its global counterpart. This experiment allows us to give some tips for calculating these metrics correctly using a Spark cluster.

“Decolonizing the Medieval Literary Curriculum” shows why the critical teaching of the literatures of the deep past – in the form of a critical canon, and a countercanon – is essential today, at a moment when White supremacist and alt-right groups in the West are weaponizing the symbols, cultures, and histories of the European Middle Ages to assemble a spurious, fantasied past of White racial purity and superiority, prelapsarian Christian homogeneity, and religiopolitical supremacy so as to make this fantasied past the basis of authority for transforming today’s world. At the same time, changing population demographics in the West are creating cohorts of students in higher learning who have diversified substantially in terms of their race, class, countries of origin, sexualities, genders, and physical, cultural, and psychosocial composition. Students, even more than faculty, have called for curricular transformations that are responsive to the urgencies of our time. The pedagogical strategies and curricular offerings in this essay are thus an example of the efforts undertaken today by a community of largely premodernists of color who are working to teach a decolonizing curriculum, and who are profoundly engaged in transforming how the deep past is taught and studied in the twenty-first century academy.