Modern slavery is an amalgam of legal concepts defined in international law united by a shared characteristic – they are all forms of unfree labour: one person deprives another person of their freedom for profit. The introduction explains how unfree labour involving migrant workers and supply chains is particularly troublesome for states to govern because these transnational vectors do not fit within the ‘default’ territorial format of legal jurisdiction and, thus, challenge traditional ideas of state sovereignty. It treats modern slavery laws, which combine international, national, and (sometimes) regional laws, as an example of transnational law and shows how, in this context, the nation state is but one among an assemblage of governance actors. It develops a multidimensional conception of jurisdiction to explore the transnational legal governance of unfree labour and to illustrate how modern slavery laws reconfigure traditional understandings of sovereignty.

The materialist turn in contemporary literary theory – comprising of multiple discourses such as new materialism, posthumanism, ecocriticism, speculative realism, affect theory, and others – has been deeply influential in the field of nineteenth-century American literature. However, one key tension within these materialist theories is the question of its politics: how does a turn to materialism, which privileges the actual physical matter of bodies and things over the ideological and linguistic categories of ideas, advance any political or ethical imperatives? Is a world of matter a world without human meaning? This chapter outlines both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on this question in recent nineteenth-century American literary study. It then seeks to redraw the political impasse between them as one of scale. To that end, I examine two mid-century texts – the anonymously authored “The Ultra-Moral Reformer” (1842) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Sphinx” (1846) – as depictions of the challenges (and opportunities) of scalar distortion. These texts suggest that the political and ethical impasse within materialism can be described within materialist terms itself, and that doing so offers a way of understanding the value judgments inherent in materialist methodological commitments as scale dependent.

Focusing on the role of the Australian charitable foundation Walk Free, an organisation connected to the faith-based abolitionist movement, this chapter traces the emergence of a global antislavery governance network and explores the role of philanthrocapitalists and public–private partnerships in it. It shows how Walk Free established an ethical business alliance that portrays slavery in global supply chains as resulting from market failure and depicts the control large transnational corporations have over their supply chains as an antidote to the limits of state sovereignty. Walk Free and the global antislavery governance network advocates for market-based solutions to the problem of modern slavery – such as supply chain transparency and mandatory human rights due-diligence legislation – that enlist transnational corporations located in the Global North to enforce international legal standards against contractors located primarily in the Global South. This chapter illustrates how scale and governance interact in ways that reconfigure sovereignty and shore up neoliberal capitalism.

This chapter adopts an Anthropocene framework to contextualize Gerard Manley Hopkins. Placing his work within the epoch of human geophysical agency, I argue, affords new perspective on his radical contribution as an ecological witness. It allows us to see that Hopkins’s depictions of natural entities involved an intuition about their embeddedness in larger systems, many inchoately explained by contemporary science; that his representations of non-human nature seldom avoided the ‘anthropos’ (the ‘human’ in Anthropocene), whether as destructive interloper or divinely privileged steward; and that his life and work included moments of prescience about human activity interfering with Earth-system processes. To recontextualize Hopkins thus is to furnish different ways to interpret his work (in wider conceptual networks and deeper time horizons) and to animate that work’s reception (in light of present concerns). It is also to affiliate Hopkins with ecopoets whose formal innovations might be fruitfully juxtaposed with his poetics.

The ecological thinking of the Georgics leads to intricate problems of scale, which Chapter 4 traces. The poem seeks to conceptualize humans’ place in their local environments – epitomized by the bounded space of the farm – while also imagining life at larger scales and attempting to think the world as a coherent whole. The chapter connects these issues to political, geographical, agricultural, philosophical, and poetical questions. This chapter finds in the Georgics a searching exploration of what it means to be local, and whether such a thing is even possible in the age of Jupiter and the time of Caesar. Ultimately, the poem rethinks a more nuanced concept of locality that is intertwined with the global, and is of shifting, unpredictable scale: a concept of fractal locality. At the center of the poem, Vergil places a fitting emblem for a fractally local poetry, the temple he vows in his native Mantua. This temple models Vergil’s achievement as anchored in particular place, and yet in a place that has become local, Roman, Italian, and global all at once.

This chapter offers an overview of historians’ writings about scale and their debates on micro- and macrohistory in the past half century. It is argued that the complex debates between followers of Italian microstoria, members of the Annales school, and social and cultural historians in the Anglo-American world need to be considered in the context of similar discussions and experiments with scale in literary writings, in artworks and especially in the scholarship in human geography. The chapter claims that, in an era of human-made climate crisis, we should reconsider how we conceptualise the role of particles, microbes, parasites, worms, and other animals in historical writing, going beyond the dichotomy of micro- and macrohistory. It is proposed that the geographer Neil Smith’s concept of ‘jumping scales’ is an especially productive way of discussing how hierarchical power structures are established and disrupted by agents operating at levels that range from the microscopical to the global.

Chapter 1 begins with the problem of conflicting timescales in antiquarianism. At Pompeii, the question of human significance at the scale of geological deep time inspired writers to reconsider the material past and explore alternatives to traditional timelines. This chapter shows how Charles Dickens in particular experiments with nonlinear temporal forms in his travel narrative Pictures from Italy, which I argue uses a fractal temporal form to nest infinite pasts in present sites. A fractal is a nonlinear shape that repeats its structure even when viewed at fine scales. When Dickens deploys it as a temporal form, he necessarily changes the shape of history, offering alternative possibilities for Italian politics. Chapter 1 ends by considering the ethical ramifications of linear and nonlinear temporal forms in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage. This poem, depicting the Roman Republic of 1849, dramatizes English tourists’ attempts to reassert the historicism that casts Italy as past despite the Risorgimento. Ultimately, Chapter 1 shows how both Dickens and Clough respond to political potential in Italy by reconfiguring time.

The introduction to Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a survey of recent and historical transnational approaches to Irish cultural production. In doing so, it shies away from insisting on a definitive method for the scholars in the field, choosing rather to highlight the diversity of approaches in the chapters in the volume. The introduction calls for a “weak theory” of the transnational, recognizing the myriad ways that both cultural producers and critics understand the term and the project. It also calls for a critical evaluation of the methods and scope of studying Ireland in a transnational phase, one that does not simply accept that a globalized world must necessarily be read in a globalizing frame.

The concluding chapter of this volume maps the contributions of the book as a whole, articulates possible future directions for further research, and offers a humanities lens to this conversation about youth mental health. Directions for further exploration include expanding the frame to encompass studies of affect and emotions (not just mental health), investigating the cultural politics of emotions (not just the importance of inner well-being) by situating emotions within political landscapes, enlarging the vocabulary of climate emotions (beyond the language of mental health), and queering climate emotions research.

This chapter examines the boundary-breaking spatial and social dynamism of animalian entities embodied within LB I–LB II polychrome murals of Crete and Thera. In these innovative paintings, animalian entities engaged with both painted and lived contexts, taking on novel manners of involvement in Aegean sociocultural spaces; some established new aspects of creaturely identity and relation. We begin with three animalian entities considered – boar’s tusk helmets, ox-hide shields and ikria – examining how their presence in murals further challenged long-standing parameters of two-dimensional representation. Here discussion broadens to consider how renderings of various animals in Minoan frescoes charged and unsettled the fabric of powerful built spaces. Innovations in color, scale and the creation of spatial depth approached the ways animalian bodies were experienced in the round. Simultaneously, details of the frescoes kept the painted creatures, and the spaces they occupied, tautly embroiled in the structured order of the wall. We close by considering how polychrome frescoes could foster radical newness in animals’ identities, focusing on renderings of blue simians. This blueness, regardless of whether originally intended to approximate biological hues, engendered distinct status for simians in the Aegean, with fascinating connections to renderings of young peoples.

This chapter investigates scaling in the work of hope. We foreground how hope is not merely an abstract aspiration but a principled, time-oriented praxis by showcasing how hope can be meaningfully pursued when scaled through pedagogical work. Our cases include the central NGOS/activist groups in our ethnography, namely Instituto Raízes em Movimento, Instituto Marielle Franco, and Coletivo Papo Reto. We examine, for instance, the case of how Raízes em Movimento appropriates and rescales the trope of “circulando,” a policing practice premised on the criminalization of faveladas/os. We afterwards examine the case of artistic and organizational responses to the historical and contemporary silencing of Blacks in Brazil, examining the case of Favela Não Se Cala alongside the activist work of the Instituto Marielle Franco. We then look to the work of Coletivo Papo Reto who perform pedagogical work representing the transformative ethos of papo reto activist register. This collective work highlights the teachable–scalable–dimensions of hope through sociolinguistic action, by which hope comes to be rescaled from mere abstraction toward a form of social change.

While the desire for “One Nation, One Language” has played a key role in language policies around the world, I argue that it is not really what drives the English-only movement in the United States. Some previous work on language and power oversimplifies how power works, since a policy seeming quaint and innocuous (and therefore impervious to criticism) can be just as powerful as a policy framed in terms of nationalism or globalization. Instead, drawing on Jan Blommaert’s theory of “upscaling,” I argue that downscaling plays just as pivotal a role in the English-only movement, and I examine examples that cut across my interviews, archival research, observations, and policy documents. I begin by analyzing examples of downscaling on its own, then turn toward situations where people engage in both upscaling and downscaling in a single text or interaction. Ultimately, scaling in either direction can be a way to claim linguistic authority. At the same time, sometimes policymakers do not walk this tightrope successfully, and there can be discursive dissonance. I argue that this sort of dissonance played a role in the eventual downfall of Frederick County’s Official English ordinance.

The treatments with the strongest evidence base for EDs use collaborative weighing at the beginning of each session, but this may be challenging for patients with comorbid OCD due to their increased tendency for rigidity, reassurance seeking, perfectionism, and a decreased tolerance for uncertainty. Personalized interventions should be devised to target the specific factors that maintain the patient’s disorder, such as addressing the core fears and how this impacts weight exposures (e.g., blind or viewed). Collaborative weighing is appropriate and needed for most patients. It is important to be mindful that certain aspects of providing weight information can become obsessive with this comorbidity, and engaging in hidden weighing can be useful in increasing tolerance of uncertainty related to changes in weight. Identifying and addressing compulsions and escape behaviors and encouraging the patient to abandon these behaviors and face the possibility of relapse can be beneficial for treatment in the long term.

The increasing penetration of information and communication technologies in the economy enabled the emergence of digital business practices in a wide range of industries. The digitization of information products, service processes, product information, and pricing altered the functioning of the markets. Once products and processes are digital, communication technologies facilitate the instantaneous exchange of the information. This immediate availability of product and service information and pricing enhances competition: digital networks can accelerate and even automate product and price comparison, making consumers more powerful in the marketplace. This chapter focuses on the economics of digital information products and implications for strategy.