This chapter undertakes two transnational reception studies to show how comic style was valued. The first demonstrates how the overanimated, racialized effects of minstrelsy mediated the American genesis and British reception of Artemus Ward’s underplayed deadpan. The second reception study shows how lectures on American humor in colonial Australia mediated the national humor discourse that developed late in the century. By tracing national humor discourse through two genres of public speech, lectures and the reporting on them, the chapter builds on Daniel Wickberg’s framing of humor as “a value within a culture” to show that value in formation within and across cultures. It argues that not only how humor was talked about but also how it was not talked about shows its cultural value. The chapter concludes by considering how colonial discourse on Aboriginal humor, which was not discussed in Australian humor lectures, positioned it in relation to settler institutions and knowledge systems.

This chapter distils the lessons of Camp David, arguing that the summit was premature and structurally flawed. Neither Israel nor the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) arrived with a clear, shared vision or the political will to make the painful concessions peace required. The gaps between their positions were vast, and shifting Israeli red lines further eroded trust. Internal miscommunication within the Israeli delegation – where some negotiators privately downplayed official positions – undermined Ehud Barak’s credibility and destabilised the process. Human relations among the negotiators were strained, and the Americans proved ineffective mediators: there was no binding agenda, guiding framework or systematic follow-up. The summit suffered from poor coordination, mutual suspicion and inadequate diplomacy. Ultimately, Camp David collapsed due to poor timing, lack of trust, conflicting expectations and insufficient leadership. Without mutual respect, clear communication and willingness to compromise, peace remained elusive.

This chapter explores further the mixed blessings of security assistance from the standpoint of conflict management in civil wars. In some cases, the constellation of pressures from external supporters nudges states toward negotiation, especially mediation; in other cases, the external pressure nudges states away from negotiation. The results reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between the congruence within a state's support group and the propensity for mediation. Moreover, strong states appear less responsive to the characteristics of their support groups and also generally less interested in mediation. States facing more security threats also appear less responsive but also more interested in negotiation across the board. The key cases at the end of the Cold War, especially the Southern Africa case, further reveal the importance for peacemakers to account for the embedded nature of a given conflict in wider webs of enmity and amity.

This chapter analyzes how the party-state sought to depoliticize the judiciary by diverting socially sensitive disputes away from courts. Focusing on the Litigation Source Management Campaign, it shows how the regime mobilized grassroots mediation systems, including neighborhood committees and administrative agencies, to intercept disputes at the prefiling stage. By encouraging citizens to resolve grievances outside the formal legal system, the campaign significantly reduced the volume of potentially destabilizing cases reaching the judiciary. This strategy prioritized dispute containment over adjudication, aligning with the Party’s broader aim to prevent legal forums from becoming flashpoints of contention. In tandem with the suppression of court-centered activism, these diversion efforts further dejudicialized politically risky matters, shielding the courts from the pressure to deliver politically sensitive rulings. The chapter concludes that these tactics helped sustain judicial autonomy in routine cases by structurally removing threats to stability, thus reinforcing the dual state’s separation between normative legality and prerogative oversight.

My prologue introduces the main arguments and arc of the book. As I explain, Revolutionary Ink traces two interrelated but ultimately opposing currents. Beginning in 1693, it shows how New York’s printing presses initially inspired fealty to the British Commonwealth. It then registers a seismic shift at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 when loyalty to the “ancient” liberties of all Freeborn Englishmen became paramount, a process of “Americanization” spurred by colonial presses up and down the Atlantic seaboard. I also point out that the work is neither a triumphant Whig narrative nor a teleologically inevitable one. More accurately, sheets printed in ink are transformative agents of change, with largely unforeseen consequences across changing historical and interpretive contexts. Drawing on a large body of scholarship across disciplines, Revolutionary Ink seeks to identify some of these changes in a distinct and crucial setting, unveiling a history of a city of divergent ideas, people, and institutions evolving over time, both influenced by print media and influencing it.

Generative AI systems offer unprecedented capabilities for addressing access to justice challenges through their ability to understand and generate human-like text. This chapter examines how large language models (“LLMs”) can bridge the language gap between laypeople’s factual descriptions and legal concepts, providing personalized legal information and assistance with legal tasks.

The analysis explores several applications, including the automated provision of legal information using retrieval-augmented generation (“RAG”), streamlined legal intake processes, intelligent form completion assistance, and AI-enhanced mediation. These systems show promise for identifying legal issues from plain language descriptions, assisting with the drafting of legal documents, and supporting dispute resolution processes.

However, significant challenges remain, particularly regarding hallucinations where models generate convincing but incorrect information, algorithmic bias that may perpetuate existing inequalities, and transparency concerns inherent in black-box AI systems. While generative AI holds promise for democratizing legal assistance, implementation with robust safeguards, continuous evaluation, and human oversight is essential to ensure these tools enhance rather than undermine access to justice.

This chapter presents twenty translanguaging activities to exemplify some of the many ways that we can use translanguaging in our classrooms. We have included activities across the educational spectrum, from primary to secondary, tertiary and adult stages, and at low, medium and high levels of English language proficiency. Activities are loosely categorised in four groups: thinking activities (including translanguaging think-pair-share, shared language buddies, translingual task planning and home language spaces), visual and spatial activities (including bilingual posters, linguistic landscapes, translanguaging picture description and conversations around us), people activities (including languages we know, our stories, multilingual peer mediation and reading to family and caregivers) and texts activities (including translingual jigsaws, translingual shared reading, translingual text summary, group story reading, translingual PQRST, translingual text annotation, song subtitling and translingual story writing). Each activity is justified, introduced and the procedure is explained with notes regarding adaptation, alternatives and materials and resources required (if any).

Online Dispute Resolution (“ODR”) emerged from the convergence of Alternative Dispute Resolution practices and digital platforms, addressing the need for more accessible dispute resolution mechanisms. ODR platforms reduce logistical burdens by eliminating travel requirements and enabling asynchronous communication, while helping to level the playing field between represented and unrepresented parties.

This chapter examines how AI enhances ODR through automated settlement calculations using game theory, negotiation analysis through discourse monitoring, and sentiment analysis to detect contentious exchanges. AI systems can also assist facilitators by analyzing negotiation patterns and suggesting when interventions may be needed.

Despite significant potential benefits, ODR faces challenges, including the digital divide, algorithmic bias, and jurisdictional enforceability. Well-implemented ODR platforms, supported by transparent standards and ethical AI principles, may significantly contribute to making dispute resolution more equitable and responsive to modern societal needs, while requiring careful attention to user-centered design and robust data protection measures.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, this chapter explores how informal norms interact with formal justice. It recounts the challenges faced by complainants and female staff while working inside police stations.

This chapter explores the attitudes and perceptions of fifty-five practitioners engaged in infrastructure-related dispute prevention and resolution in the Asia Pacific region. The aim of the survey and follow-up interview conversations is to provide insights into the dynamics, challenges and lessons learned in engaging with communities to prevent and resolve disputes in the context of infrastructure projects. The principal finding of this chapter, based on survey data and follow-up questions, is that from the perspective of regional practitioners, prior community consultation is considered the most effective approach to preventing infrastructure disputes. This finding is consistent with the results of the data analysis in the prior chapter correlating heightened consultation standards with a reduction in the proportion of project disputes. A number of challenges continue to exist in mitigation efforts with the most challenging being the ‘lack of agreement on shared economic benefits’ and ‘limited communication’. Overall, practitioners advised that most disputes arise because ‘there was no consultation or inadequate consultation with a marginalised part of the community’. The chapter also includes practitioner suggestions on areas for improvement. The findings of this chapter demonstrate the significance of effective prior community consultation and grievance mechanisms for preventing disputes.

This chapter examines shifts in funeral rituals during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on Zoom-mediated funerals as sites of negotiation between traditionalization and mediatization. Drawing on anthropological theories of ritual and discourse, the authors use a semiotic lens to analyze how mourners navigated the intersection of cultural expectations, technological affordances, and new media ecologies in the context of death. Drawing on the experiences of participants in US-based funerals conducted on Zoom in 2020, the chapter explores how participants used language and metacommunication to contextualize and reframe rituals in response to the absence of tactile, in-person mourning. Examples presented here illustrate how officiants and family members juxtaposed traditional religious and cultural expectations with the mediated nature of online ceremonies, transforming Zoom into a “sacred space,” even as they debated the technical difficulties of online rituals. Transcripts of recordings of Zoom-mediated funerals and interviews with participants show the process by which mourners forged a relationship between expectations for traditional funerals and an imagined imperative for mediatized responses to contemporary crises. The authors argue that rituals, far from being static or solely symbolic, are dynamic processes that respond to changing social and technological conditions and combine mediatization and traditionalization to co-construct meanings.

This chapter discusses Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, which focuses on domesticity and labor aboard a space station during a twenty-four-hour period of circling the earth. It argues that Harvey builds the novel through a focus on four intertwined forms of labor: natural science experiments, space station maintenance, interpersonal talismanic-memorial labor, and the aesthetic-affective-emotional labor of metabolizing human-planet relationality. To focus on this last form of labor, the chapter examines Harvey’s use of myriad formal strategies that call attention to themselves as mediating technologies for encountering the earth’s surface. Furthermore, it highlights the novel’s primary socioecological affects: awe, anxiety, disgust, love, nostalgia, and precarity. To situate the assessment of how Harvey produces planet-scale affect, the chapter considers the overlap and divergence of the concepts planet, planetary, and planetarity. Ultimately, it argues that Harvey productively pressures the more conventional and anthropocentric concerns in the novel with her forceful centering of the earth as an object worthy of non-anthropocentric attention.

This chapter focuses on responses to member state crises for one organization, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Whereas the previous chapter identified whether African RIO members behaved as expected on average, in this chapter, I look for evidence of theorized causal mechanisms linking leaders’ prior behavior to co-members’ willingness to provide support. I examine eighteen political and security crises which occurred in members of the Economic Community of West African States between 1990 and 2017. For each crisis, I assess whether the leader in crisis was in good standing with co-members based on prior contributions to regional security operations, or whether they had a record of destabilizing co-members. I then assess whether their standing informed co-members’ responses to the crisis in the manner anticipated by the theory. After establishing the prevalence of pro-government responses to members in good standing and anti-government responses to members not in good standing, I turn to three cases.