In Shakespeare’s Mediterranean comedy Twelfth Night, Feste, Olivia’s jester, continually describes ambivalence in terms of imported iridescent material, describing Orsino’s mind as an opal and iridescent silk, referencing the multi-coloured Peruvian gemstone that flashes between turquoise and orange: ‘Now, the melancholy god protect thee; and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal’ (ii .vi.80). Valerie Traub has recently suggested that ambivalence may be a productive and uniquely early modern way of thinking through issues of race and gender. This chapter argues that the language of iridescence, coupled with the play’s multicultural setting, allows Shakespeare to explore not only what an ambivalent mind might look like, but also to champion and embrace ambivalence of identity, including foreignness, gender, and sexuality.

This chapter shows that the material presence of a public gathering is an embodied speech act whose performative effects are conditioned by the social meanings attached to the gathering's physical qualities. Based on the fact that public audiences paid significant attention to the physical elements of the Riots/Uprising and anti-Prop. 187 march, the chapter posits materiality as a criterion of protest. It reconstructs ordinary conventions of protest that concern the material: spatial location and physical peace and order, as well as participants’ racial embodiment. While radical democratic thought holds that popular assemblies can felicitously enact social changes such as constituting the people, this chapter shows that these ordinary conventions, as well as the social meanings that a gathering’s specific location, physical activities, and racializations carry, constrain that performative enactment. The anti-Prop. 187 march was politically legible as an orderly gathering that took place in politically significant areas of Los Angeles. Within the same terms, the Riots/Uprising appeared to be violent, chaotic, and politically senseless, especially given dominant frames of Blackness.

This chapter examines state agency vis-à-vis digital government infrastructures. By tracing the socio-legal-technical infrastructure of Canada’s digital border, it attends to the relations, institutional practices, and technicalities (legal and technological) that constitute agencies of the state. It navigates the dual meaning of ‘agency,’ a term that evokes both the power of state actors and the boundaries of administrative agencies. Using a digital border encounter and its aftermath, this chapter shows how digital infrastructures simultaneously focus and disperse state agency. Through this process, members of the public are subjected to powerful forms of state action. State agents, meanwhile, become so multiple that they are difficult to identify or hold accountable using conventional legal methods. This chapter ultimately urges readers to take digital infrastructures and algorithmic violence seriously. It advocates for robust horizontal accountability strategies that are adaptable to the diffuse and networked phenomenon of digital governance at the border and beyond.

The concept of relevance is considered the cornerstone of evidence law. The question of whether evidence is relevant forms one of the court’s first inquiries when considering its admissibility. As per Federal Rule of Evidence 401 (“Rule 401”), which has been adopted widely across states, not only must the piece of evidence have “any tendency” to make the proposition it is offered for more or less probable, but such evidence must be material to the case or the substantive legal issue at hand. As per Federal Rule of Evidence 402, irrelevant evidence is inadmissible in court.

This chapter sets the scene for the account of incarnation that appears in Chapter 11. It does so by sketching a theology of the Word. I begin with the Word as the perfect image of God’s life of inexhaustible love. I then turn to creation, arguing that the Word is the pattern of the world’s liveliness, and that the world corresponds to the Word not despite but in and through its materiality and temporality, and precisely by displaying endless variation, animated by the Spirit. And I finish with an account of the Word’s role in salvation, as the one in whom creation is restored to an economy of delight, in which bodies are recognised as gifts from God’s inexhaustible love, and so as always containing more than we have yet seen.

The theology of the incarnation set out in Chapter 12 depends upon the Spirit for its life. In this chapter, I set out something of the pneumatology that is involved. I begin with a speculative depiction of the Spirit’s role in the eternal Godhead, and then transpose that depiction into a series of new settings, moving in turn to the doctrines of creation, incarnation, salvation, and the eschaton. Under each heading I expound the Spirit’s role as the one who unfolds for us the gift of God’s inexhaustible life of love, and draws creatures into that life. I emphasise the ways in which, in doing all this, the Spirit characteristically works with bodies, in all their materiality, temporality, and diversity. Finally, I speak about the limitations upon our reception of the gift that the Spirit is laying out for us – the inherently fragmentary and provisional nature of any one form of reception, and the fallibility and corruption that characterise all forms of reception this side of the eschaton.

This chapter focuses on gender identity. I begin by exploring the gendered complexity of devotion to Jesus in the Christian tradition, from the gospels to the present day. With the help of a variety of trans theologians, I then return to the idea that in Christian devotion the Spirit gathers people in all the complexity and richness of their embodied existence around the imagined body of Jesus. I ask again what it means to negotiate such bodily life in relation to Jesus in the light of all the affordances and resistances provided by our bodies and by his. The movement for trans, non-binary, and queer liberation provides an opportunity to see how, in this ongoing and unfinishable negotiation, we are all discovering the possible ways of living in, with, and as our bodies, at every level from our chromosomes to the patterns of our feelings and our capacities for certain kinds of experience. This is a negotiation that involves each of us in the discovery and articulation of our own gender identity, and in the invention of forms of community life that will do justice to what we are discovering.

Abstract: By adopting a Mediterranean perspective in the study of Greek religion, we observe both shared nomoi and a wide diversity of practices. They imply a whole set of ‘ingredients’, such as names, objects, settings, and mainly relationships. According to places (such as Delos or Massalia) and times (Archaic colonization or Hellenistic networks), opportunistic strategies emerge on different scales from local to global. A Mediterranean approach makes us more sensitive to the dialectical relations between social forces, durable structures, and changing environments.

This chapter retraces the evolution of Arabic print culture from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, challenging Eurocentric narratives that prioritize Western technologies and ideologies. It demonstrates how local actors in the Arab world adapted and integrated printing practices with traditional scribal methods. Through a close reading of early sources, particularly the encyclopedia entry on printing in Kitab Daʼirat al-Maʻarif, the chapter emphasizes the material, visual, and technological dimensions of Arabic print culture, arguing that printing was not merely a tool for modernization or nationalism, but a complex cultural practice shaped by aesthetics, labor, and local knowledge systems. It ultimately considers the implications of new media for the preservation and interpretation of Arabic print traditions, urging a re-evaluation of how digital technologies reshape scholarly engagement with historical texts.

In Singaporean Chinese funerals, small patches of fabric, pinned to the bereaved’s sleeves, have replaced elaborate mourning gowns. Anthropologists, examining the transformation of ritual in similar contexts – supposedly secularizing, rationalizing, post-industrial, late-capitalist worlds – have read such changes as evidence of the simplification of ritual and of ritual’s declining centrality in the marking of death. In this chapter, however, I argue that the shift from gowns to patches is more complex, inextricably linked to the policies of the Singaporean state regarding identity. Gowns were linked to the complexities of Chinese folk religion, a blend of Buddhism, Taoism, and ancestor worship that linked Singaporeans to their histories in Mainland China. The patch, however, articulates a unified Singaporean Chinese identity, described as “Buddhist bland.” Broadly, I address why, when rituals change, some elements are abandoned, seemingly without regret, while others are retained, becoming orthopraxy. While we might expect that the ritual elements that are retained are those that carry the most meaning, in this example, I suggest, the opposite is the case.

This section explores the dead body – its parts, its distillations, its residues, and traces – as synecdoche and catalyst, and as a medium of exchange and thus broker of reciprocity. By drawing together scholars working on different aspects and temporal registers of material-corporeal transformation, this selection of essays considers the different regimes of value (Appadurai 1986) through which the corpse (or organ, bone, or ash) is produced, altered, acted upon, or signified, the larger social context in which the dead exist as generative material, and the relationship between processes of subjectification and objectification (Dziuban 2017). The emphasis on materiality and the “work of the dead” (Laqueur 2015), in whatever fragmentary or residual form, also illustrates how a more expansive anthropology of death includes not only canonical death studies’ considerations of the corpse as locus of social action – a thing to be overcome—(Durkheim [1912] 1995; Hertz [1907] 2009), or an agent of social transformation (Bloch and Parry 1982), but challenges to and movements beyond this expected theorizing. In tracing how anthropology has analyzed death’s materiality, we find disciplinary fissures and silos

This chapter reevaluates William Burroughs’ cut-up fictions through the lens of repetition, textual variation, and the limits of intertextual theory. Benoît Delaune argues that Burroughs’ compositional method – especially in The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express – exceeds traditional literary frameworks such as Kristeva’s intertextuality or Genette’s transtextuality. Drawing on the restored editions of Burroughs’ work and early collaborations like Minutes to Go, the chapter shows how Burroughs employed chance procedures alongside careful editorial strategy to create complex recursive networks of affective resonance. Rather than merely remixing texts, Burroughs generated a form of material autotextuality that destabilizes meaning, challenges linear reading, and undermines authorial intention. Through comparisons to avant-garde practices in music and poetry, Delaune situates Burroughs’ writing as a radical alternative to literary production – a practice that treats language as sensory and viral, foregrounding affect, repetition, and disruption over interpretation or reference.

This chapter examines “opportunistic” uses of “natural” objects and structures in data-rich science and explores what these imply for scientists’ trust in the work of other researchers. It argues that a discipline’s objects of inquiry are not only topics of research but may also function as resources for its conduct. These objects and their relations can be resources for intersubjective coordination that become available through their mediation and materialization. Drawing on two cases from astronomy, this chapter demonstrates how researchers resort to what sociologist Melvin Pollner called “mundane reasoning”: practices for resolving disjunctive experiences that assume a shared public and objective world. Recognized for their task-specific affordances, disciplinary objects become resources for data analyses. There is a trade-off between epistemic uses of stable material objects and the placement of trust. In astronomical research, the sky is not only an ordering device for assessing and using data of various origin – it is also a resource for the partial relief from trust in data makers.

This chapter posits that risk assessment necessary as a condition precedent to settlement requires evidentiary transparency as to all stakeholders, including the arbitral tribunal. Moreover, this chapter discusses and asserts that settlement and mediation techniques are futile absent a thorough understanding of the underlying evidence, and objective procedural methodologies governing admissibility, relevance, materiality, and weight of the evidence. Thus, the chapter analyzes features and possible amendments to the rules of the leading ICA institutional administrative bodies that would enhance the predictive value of determinations based on existing evidence. Consequently, the evidential framework of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce (SCC), the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC), the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR), and the German Arbitration Institute (DIS) rules are analyzed.

Chapter 2 looks in detail at some of the ways in which Keats directly addresses the question of letter-writing. It proposes that a careful analysis of key letters can bring to light a Keatsian epistolary poetics. Keats is particularly alert both to the materiality and to the practical aspects of epistolarity, and his letters are characterized by frequent moments in which his interest in what letters are and how they work is foregrounded. He is specifically interested in how letters are constructed and in the tools and materials that form them, as well as more generally in the practical circumstances or contingencies by which they are determined and circumscribed. The chapter proposes that in their inventive and often playful explorations of epistolarity, Keats’s letters display an impulse to push against the generic and formal limits of the mode.