This chapter identifies factors that are extrinsic to norms and affect the stability of the alternate endings. Three classical elements of rhetoric guide the analysis: speakers, audiences, and arguments. The chapter first discusses my focus on critical states with decision-making authority. Speakers need the support of important audiences to avoid or reduce social and material costs of proposing "inappropriate" norm interpretations. Some audiences are more important than others: Speakers are likely to prioritize gaining approval for their norm interpretations from their in-groups and domestic audiences. The chapter gives guidance on identifying in-groups. Speakers try to gain support for their norm interpretations through their argumentation: We would expect the use of legal language and output legitimation when norm interpretations are openly proposed, and identity-based legitimation when actors try to hide exceptionalist norm interpretations. Lastly, I draw attention to a particular kind of speaker – agents to whom norm interpretation was delegated. When agents are involved, perceptions of agent competence also affect what interpretations can be upheld. The chapter concludes that audience reactions, argumentation, and delegation to agents affect the extent of collective expectations surrounding norm application, and thus norm strength.

The chapter outlines key principles in Cognitive CDA, which inherits its social theory from CDA and from cognitive linguistics inherits a particular view of language and a framework for analysing language (as well as other semiotic modes). In connection with CDA, the chapter describes the dialectical relationship conceived between discourse and society. Key concepts relating to the dialogicality of discourse are also introduced, namely intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The central role of discourse in maintaining power and inequality is described with a focus on the ideological and legitimating functions of language and conceptualisation. In connection with cognitive linguistics, the chapter describes the non-autonomous nature of language, the continuity between grammar and the lexicon and the experiential grounding of language. The key concept of construal and its implications for ideology in language and conceptualisation are discussed. A framework in which construal operations are related to discursive strategies and domain-general cognitive systems and processes is set out. The chapter closes by briefly introducing the main models and methods of Cognitive CDA.

AI has the potential to support many of the proposed solutions to solve sustainability concerns. However, AI itself is also unsustainable in many ways, as its development and use are for example linked with high carbon emissions, discrimination based on biased training data, surveillance practices, and the influence on elections through microtargeting. Addressing the long-term sustainability of AI is crucial, as it impacts social, personal, and natural environments for future generations. The “sustainable” approach is one that is inclusive in both time and space; where the past, present, and future of human societies, the planet, and environment are considered equally important to protect and secure, including the integration of all countries in economic and social change. Furthermore, our use of the concept “sustainable” demands we ask what practices in the current development and use of AI we want to maintain and alternatively what practices we want to repair and/or change. This chapter explores the ethical dilemma of AI for sustainability, balancing its potential to address many sustainable development challenges while at the same time causing harm to the environment and society.

The concluding chapter discusses the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious politics within the global context of democratic backsliding and spontaneous mass mobilizations. We highlight the contributions of our theoretical framework and the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious pathways for hybrid regimes and beyond.

The Introduction situates the book within the context of urban sociology, highlights the importance of the study, and outlines the arguments and contributions. I discuss my approach to the study of public spaces as multilayered sociological entities, rather than mere physical containers of events, people, and the built environment of cities. Studying how public spaces function at the city level, I argue that the meanings and values assigned to places are closely tied to where they are located and how they are used. Approaching public spaces as places where economic, political, gender, and social hierarchies are both reinforced and undermined, I show the complexity of social relations and coexistence in a rapidly changing urban environment. Key themes from urban sociology, sociology of culture, and inequality will be used to lay out the book’s arguments and contributions. I will also discuss my methods and provide an overview of the rest of the chapters.

In the conclusion, I bring the components of the book together, arguing that the findings in each chapter relate to a broad framework that explains the social functions and meanings of public spaces. I discuss how perceptions of self and others, in both the economic and cultural senses, act as essential components of urban experience. Through these discussions, this concluding chapter lays out the opportunities and limits of studying public spaces as a means of understanding social relations in changing urban contexts, and it suggests potential paths for future research.

This chapter is grounded in the storied realities of an EMI programme in a Japanese university where one entire campus was transformed into an English-speaking operation. The accompanying rhetoric reified campus ‘internationalization’ as part of the quest for institutional ‘renewal’. Given the ambitiousness and contentiousness of this undertaking, the EMI programme would eventually become implicated in controversies over the workings of underlying ideologies linked to campus Englishization. In so forcibly compounding Englishization, internationalization, and institutional renewal with EMI, the administration introduced a set of ancillary activities and practices involving advertising and faculty recruitment that bore only peripheral relevance to EMI. While principally irrelevant to EMI, these undertakings were not arbitrary but a part of using EMI to fulfil agendas that went beyond concerns over medium of instruction per se, or for that matter education. In this critique the authors consider these peripheral undertakings to be para-EMI activities and argue that these activities were influenced by prevailing cultural political and socio-economic relations within Japanese society.

This chapter explores the critiques of modern liberal democracy presented by Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault. Both thinkers challenge the foundational premises of liberal democracy, questioning the role of the individual citizen as a political agent. Foucault, through his concept of power, challenged the view of the modern individual as a free political agent. For Schmitt, the rivalry between friend and foe is so deep that it politicizes all other areas. In his view, antagonism between communities is the driving force of political life. The analysis extends to Bruno Latour, who challenges the dualistic cosmology inherent in modern democracy. Latour proposes a secular monistic cosmology, blurring distinctions between Nature/Culture, individuals and objects. He criticizes the reliance on external facts and on the separation between subject and object. Latour proposes the mother tongue as a basis for commonsense, but unlike the perception of liberal democracy, it does not rely on a scientific epistemology of cause and effect or objectivity. The chapter contends that the decay of democratic practices and the widening gap between democratic ideals and realities may necessitate novel imaginaries.

Chapter 5 argues that the increasing number of female servants and resulting visibility of women at court had political ramifications. By exploring the more active roles played by ladies and damsels in political events of the realm, I demonstrate how female courtiers found ways to access privilege for themselves, their families, and other associates through intercession. For example, they dramatically assisted Isabella’s coup against her husband Edward II and courageously stood by Catherine of Aragon during her divorce crisis. On the other hand, when national sentiment turned xenophobic, a queen’s foreign attendants faced scorn, retribution, and even banishment during periods of conflict. Some female attendants faced misogynistic attitudes that attacked their perceived propensity toward immodest sexuality, greed, and darker forces like witchcraft and poisoning. This role of women at court – apart from queens and particularly notorious examples like Edward III’s mistress Alice Perrers – has been neglected in many discussions of medieval court politics and patronage. I contend that the hostility experienced by some female courters highlights how medieval contemporaries themselves recognized women’s potential access to insider information about monarchs and the favors that could be bestowed to their kin, friends, and associates.

An introductory chapter briefly outlines relevant historiography of courtier studies in general and analyses of elite female servants more narrowly. This introduction establishes important classifications of household servants and demonstrates how roles and terminology shifted over time as the royal court and household grew in both size and complexity over the course of the later Middle Ages. In addition to illuminating categories of female service, the introduction details the sources and methodology employed to produce this analysis of medieval English ladies-in-waiting, highlighting the goals, successes, and limits of this kind of prosopographical methodology. The introduction argues that an analysis of ladies-in-waiting offers insight into female social networks, gender dynamics at court, and issues of power, authority, and wealth, along with how women accessed these features, in late medieval society.

This chapter demonstrates that a researcher is attached to the analytic process in ways that make it difficult to be completely independent and objective when doing research. Issues of objectivity and subjectivity are discussed, which offer a frame to understand the ways in which a researcher’s cultural familiarity with an object of study, as well as their professional vision and institutional positionality, inform the analytic process. After reading this chapter, readers will understand that discourse analysis research is inherently subjective; know that a researcher’s cultural familiarity with an object of study is crucial to doing discourse analysis; be able to identify and adopt multiple analytic perspectives; be capable of applying reflexive practices to the analytic process; and understand, and know how to deal with, the power dynamics that exist in discourse analysis research.

The many years of service evident in the careers of some ladies-in-waiting who received annuities for decades while continuing to complete responsibilities in the royal household demonstrates that the opportunities of court service were valued by many. Such service offered one of the only salaried professional positions available to women in later medieval England, and for many was a true career. Families sought to promote their daughters at court because female servants could seek to gain not only remuneration but also intangible patronage opportunities for themselves, their families, and their associates. Employment in elite households enhanced servants’ loyalty, built and deepened relationships, and also heightened the status of the royals and nobles who bestowed rewards. Including gender in the analysis helps us to recognize the porous boundary between domestic life and political life at the royal court, and, in an era when politics was all about access to the decision-making monarch, female courtiers enjoyed and benefitted from such informal routes to access. Although in service, and always answerable to the needs and commands of their queens and aristocratic employers, understanding the history of ladies-in-waiting underscores how they nevertheless found ways to exercise agency and access political power in medieval England.