The authors have used video diaries extensively in corporate ethnography and have found them to be an essential tool in the collection of observational data in health care and consumer research. Drawing on their experience, the chapter explores video diaries’ practical uses in ethnographic research, detailing their strengths and weaknesses in the types of research questions they can help answer and the kinds of data they produce. The chapter also serves as a guide to incorporating video diaries into ethnographic and qualitative research, offering practical advice on topics including video diary guides, communication strategies with participants, and the advantages and disadvantages of mobile phone diaries versus free-standing camcorder diaries.

In this chapter, we look at, with a focus on two sisters, both courtesans – Zuhra and Mushtari – the meaning of and constraints on the participation of women entertainers in the literary sphere. We hear them ‘speak’ and from their speech-acts explore their construction of selfhood, articulation of subjectivities, and resistance to dominant social and literary norms. At the same time, we make an effort to unravel the anxieties that their literary talents evoked in the sociocultural spaces, and the reasons for their immense popularity in social memory. We also ask how their agency in the cultural domain was represented in the literary sphere, in particular the biographical compendia of the time.

The Courtesans as Models of Literary Emulation: The Pre-eminence of the Sisters in Cultural Spaces

Why these sisters? My reason for choosing them is because their literary acumen was widely accepted, and critics often measured the compositions of other women poets against the depth and range of their poems. The sisters had, it seems, set the standards that other poets were expected to aspire to and emulate. Nazakat, ‘an endearing public performer’ (mahbūba-i bāzārī) based in Bombay, wrote a couplet and a ghazal as an accompaniment to (and in the same meter as) one of the poems of Mushtari; comparing her effort with the literary skills of the two sisters, Nadir found her endeavour no more than ‘meaningless verbosity’ (tūl-i fazūl), and decided not to include the ghazal in his tazkira. Ranj was blunt, and saw her attempt to imitate Mushtari as ridiculous. He says:

In the case of another courtesan by the same name, Nazakat, Ranj expressed his appreciation of her poetry by comparing her with Mushtari (and Sardar). This courtesan, based in Jaipur, could, says Ranj, get the likes of Mushtari envious. Clearly then, in matters of literary expression and aesthetics, Mushtari, and her sister, Zuhra, were held out as models against whom other poets were assessed, and their compositions evaluated.

Much of the internet of today is dominated by the big tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon that use it to amass profits. The chapter looks at three ways in which their pursuit of profit arbitrarily interferes with people’s access to and use of the internet. (1) Big Tech corporations operate a version of the internet that forces users to yield personal data in exchange for ‘free’ services. The chapter explains why this routine harvesting of personal data is morally problematic as it forces internet users to choose between two elements of minimally decent lives: their privacy and accessing the internet. (2) Social media platforms are among the dominant online services today. They have enhanced opportunities for exercising human rights, but their business practices also limit people in the enjoyment of these rights. The chapter suggests several ways for improving the situation. (3) Some businesses lobby for ending net neutrality. The chapter explains why net neutrality is crucial for keeping internet access free from arbitrary interferences, and argues for a version of net neutrality that allows some unequal treatment of data that does not diminish human rights.

In this chapter, we discuss the relationship of individual personal thriving to fairness and worthiness by exploring the concept of epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice refers to the rejection of people’s capacity as knowers, such that these individuals are treated as being less knowledgeable and less believable than other people, frequently on the basis of their social identities. In the first half of the chapter, we will explain how epistemic injustices take place and how they interrupt human thriving. In the second half of the chapter, we will profile the ways that psychologists and others can work to prevent epistemic injustice.

I offer an overview and analysis of charitable giving in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia, and explore its linkages to politics. I study giving at home and abroad, by governments, non-governmental organizations, ruling elites, and private actors, and doctrinally connected giving. I examine how these entities give, to whom they give and why they give as they do. I highlight several key findings: First, in three of the four countries, the most active and best endowed foundations have been created by (members of) ruling families or prominent politico-religious associations; second, private giving tends to concentrate on family, tribe, ethnic community; third, religious precepts are routinely modified to appease a particular social category; fourth, with few exceptions, migrant workers are excluded from access to charity. These findings suggest that charitable giving, while intrinsic to the practice of Islam, may be instrumentalized to advance secular interests: 1) gather information about society, 2) assert relationships of authority and control, 3) shore up allegiance (to a ruler and/or an ideology), 4) consolidate a definition of community.

The investigation of Aeolian foundation myths continues in this chapter, with examination of traditions of the founding of Boeotian Thebes. Ancestral Indo-European tradition is again evident, as is an Anatolian stratum, one which foregrounds technological expertise of Asian origin.

Reading the biographical compendia of women poets written in the nineteenth century, we cannot but appreciate the impressive presence of women in the literary field. However, this impression fades away when we look at the more popular literary biographies, anthologies, critical literature, and instruction manuals; in the dominant literary strands, indeed women poets are scarce, if not totally absent. The nineteenth century was the period in which the figure of a woman poet evoked moral anxieties, resulting from the reformist zeal to keep women away from eros and love, and other emotions associated with Persianate poetry. Elite women should, for sure, be educated but only in the subjects that helped them efficiently manage their domestic spaces; there were, as we see in several reformist texts, detailed discussions on what women should and should not read, and among the books that they were instructed to shun were romantic tales and works of poetry. Commendably, the women's tazkiras contest these assumptions, and make available to the interested readers an archive of women's voices, and draw our attention to the ever-present but barely recognized contribution of women poets to the shaping of the literary culture in early modern Hindustan.

It is not without basis to argue that women's lyrical compositions represented a marginalized and incongruent literary culture, but doing so would be banal and simplistic and, above all, quite ahistorical. Women poets were present in poetic assemblies (mushā‘ira) organized by aristocrats and rich patrons; and in the salons of the courtesans, young men learnt the niceties of language, and men of letters experimented with new forms of thought and expression. In our study of women littérateurs here, we have seen that their lyrics, despite their creative depths and fresh signifying practices, were firmly obedient to the literary adāb, or the norms of aesthetics and expression. Their interventions in the literary field served to enrich and deepen the field, even as they continually challenged and contested its dominant assumptions. It is for this reason that I described their compositions, in one of the earlier chapters, as situated within the realm of what Foucault terms as ‘subjugated knowledges’, reflecting a cultural practice that was ‘masked’ by the power-language ensemble of relations but still conversed with the dominant literary and aesthetic norms and values in an aporetic relationship where women's speech both reinforced and challenged them.

We break down the leadership station, including the leadership speech. We reveal how we tailored the content, structure and delivery of our leadership speech to obtain full marks. We discuss how you start writing your speech, what resources to read, and what makes a winning leadership speech. We offer a checklist for you and your practice partners to help provide feedback each stage of the speech. We provide scripts that scored full marks at interview alongside our own analysis. We discuss potential follow-up questions for candidates to prepare.

This chapter discusses an extract from the Iranian legal textbook Mukhtaṣar-i Huqūq-i Khānivādih (‘A Concise Summary of Family Law’) of the Iranian legal scholars Sayyid Ḥusayn Ṣafāyī and Asad Allāh Imāmī. The 42nd revised edition of this text, published in Tehran in 2015, gives an overview of Iranian family law and is aimed specifically at students of law. The 472 pages of the book cover marriage, divorce, parentage, and filiation. This chapter focuses on temporary marriage (commonly known as sīgheh in Persian), which is characterised by the exact determination of the duration of the marriage when contracted. This form of marriage is permitted in Twelver Shī’ī (Imāmī) law, while being strictly rejected in all schools of Sunnī law.

Trained in addictions in Edinburgh, perhaps an easier specialty given personal experience. Then obtained a consultant post in the Scottish Borders, and a year later one in Edinburgh.

This introduction to Section 3 of the volume on Fatwās explores the staples of the genre while attending to its tremendous diversity in different regional and temporal contexts, including a representative bibliography of recent scholarship on the subject.