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The issue of recognising and possibly rewarding accomplished practice is discussed. Then the concept of incentivisation is considered followed by examples of schemes to incentivise sustained programmes of professional learning including schemes for chartered teacher status. The use of rewards and sanctions to improve practice is examined and the question whether such approaches should be on the basis of the performance of an individual teacher or on a collective basis is considered. Focusing largely on the individual teacher can reinforce the individualism and isolation of professional practice and development. Schemes for collective development are spotlighted.

The first case study examines how a school director, the general public and legal professionals in the Netherlands move away from non-discrimination law. The chapter focuses on a ruling by the Equal Treatment Commission, which stated that a public school was wrong to suspend a female Muslim teacher who refused to shake hands with men. The chapter argues that the public controversy following this decision illustrates the way in which non-discrimination law matters in the Netherlands. The empirical research shows that the school director and many other ordinary people feel disconnected from non-discrimination law. Most people in this case study are ‘cynics’ and ‘outsiders’, with some signs of ‘legal meaninglessness’ and ‘legal powerlessness’ but with a strong sense of ‘legal cynicism’ and ‘legal value isolation’.

The chapter is dedicated to the study of a specific type of football community that emerged during the 1980s in Spain: women’s penas. Llopis-Goig and Flores discuss how women’s link to these penas provides them with networks of support and sociability, bonds of friendship and integration in a community as well as a door to the public space that helps them avoid the isolation of a nuclear family for some women. Thus, the female fans generate empowerment strategies that allow them to gradually combat the discrimination experienced in football and in society. However, Llopis-Goig and Flores argue that women’s penas cannot be regarded as initiatives that question the patriarchal structure of football; instead, the study shows female fans’ desire to belong to this male-dominated system.

The aim of this chapter is to develop an analytical framework based on the concept of ‘legal alienation’. This is done in three steps. First, it examines the general alienation literature and it discusses those few studies in which the concept of alienation has been applied to the field of law. Next, the concept of legal alienation is broken down into several dimensions: ‘legal meaninglessness’, ‘legal powerlessness’, ‘legal cynicism’ and ‘legal value isolation’. Finally, the chapter focuses on two basic questions: ‘Are people aware of the law?’ and: ‘Do people identify with law?’ Based on these questions, the chapter introduces four normative profiles to describe people’s attitudes towards law: ‘legalists’, ‘loyalists’, ‘cynics’ and ‘outsiders’.

The second case study examines the way in which contractors in the Dutch construction industry move away from competition law and EU antitrust regulations. Most data from this case are drawn from public hearings with contractors in a parliamentary enquiry which showed a widespread use of cartels, aimed at price-fixing and market-allocation. The chapter shows that members of the Dutch construction industry feel disconnected from competition law, which leads to a process of legal alienation. Most contractors are ‘cynics’ (with some signs of ‘legal meaninglessness’ and ‘legal powerlessness’, but with a strong sense of ‘legal cynicism’), while some qualify as ‘outsiders’ (with strong feelings of ‘legal value isolation’).

Soto introduces a curriculum change context in which national planners appeared to acknowledge the importance of stakeholder involvement, through organising formal consultations at local level, only to ignore the suggestions made. Consequently, curriculum goals did not fit contextual realities. Although the teacher was positive about the rationale for change, her implementation experiences were of working in isolation in an unsupportive school context, to try to achieve curriculum goals which were of little interest to her learners or their parents. Soto concludes by questioning the value of curriculum change initiatives that promote teaching approaches inconsistent with prevailing educational norms, without planning for the local awareness raising, and ongoing teacher development opportunities that could provide teachers with necessary ‘moral’ and practical support.

The essay considers how poetry communicates persistent pain to an audience of non-sufferers. It proposes poetry builds empathy by identifying universal aspects of pain that are shared, overcoming resistance to recognising commonality with chronic pain sufferers in popular memory and public policy. It explores how the act of writing externalises pain, diminishing its hold over the sufferer, breaking their isolation. Scarry’s characterisation of pain as an intentional state without an intentional object is challenged, refuting that chronic pain has intention, and that symbolic objects like poetry are driven by conscious intention, rather than language and desire.

The first chapter discusses the political issues resulting from a dependence on coal using the term “coal consciousness” to describe the increasing awareness of the importance of coal to British imperial and commercial security. Rather than discussing the coal issue in isolation, however, chapter 2 argues that it is imperative to consider how bodies created to investigate the coal question were both affected by, and crucial to, shifts in political thought about imperial defence. In particular, it considers how the Carnarvon Commission, in contrast to the earlier Colonial Defence Committee, created an enduring coaling knowledge. This was achieved through the sheer weight of evidence and data collected, thus reflecting a wider belief in the power and practical utility of information and knowledge.

This chapter provides an ethnographic account of what privilege looks like in Irish schools. From the castle life offered by the first, to the monastic isolation of the second and the resolutely English flavor of the third, each of the three schools explored constitutes a world apart, far removed from what most children will ever experience. The uniqueness of each setting and the centrality of ‘ethos’ contribute to the geographic and symbolic isolation of these islands of privilege. The chapter shows how these environments may impact on children’s identities, helping them to understand that they are special and superior to others.

This chapter investigates the use of electricity in chemical experimentation in the early nineteenth century after Volta’s invention of the galvanic pile. Humphry Davy uses electricity as a tool in his electrochemical isolation of elements, but he does not attempt to explain how it works, and his experimentation on inorganic materials has important elements in common with accounts of electrical vitality. Davy’s sense of the mysterious operation of electricity is taken up in writings by John Abernethy, William Lawrence and Mary Shelley, which debate the connections between electricity and life, and by Richard Carlile, who uses Davy’s work to advocate materialism and atheism, but who finds that electricity resists attempts to appropriate it in a narrative of enlightenment and progress.

In this chapter, Dickerson and Robins outline the way in which examining body movement, gaze, and gesture and their sequential placement can facilitate a better understanding of interactions where a child with an ASD has limited productive language ability. Specifically, the chapter demonstrates the way in which drawing on the principles of conversation analysis in the careful analysis of video recordings can reveal intricacies and competencies that might otherwise be easily missed. The chapter starts by outlining the practical and ethical considerations that should inform data collection and then illustrates the sorts of discoveries that can emerge when careful attention is paid, not simply to spoken communication in isolation but to embodied communication in context.

Why did the end of the Cold War provide the conditions for world opinion to be a force in world affairs, particularly in Northern Ireland? What international relations theories can help explain this change? Rusciano answers these questions by linking two schools of thought: the English School of international relations and global opinion theory. Both theories deal with the influence of “international society” on global relations; the latter is used to provide specific details of how world opinion came to be a force defining the society’s boundaries. After the Cold War, world opinion ceases to be a mere East/West propaganda tool and becomes a moral and pragmatic force backed up by its ability to isolate nations and individuals from an international community. In an increasingly globalized world system, isolation can have dramatic economic and political effects. These effects helped alter the opportunities for peace in Northern Ireland.

In The Female Malady published in 1985, Elaine Showalter notes that representations of madness in literary texts are not simply reflections of medical and scientific knowledge, but are part of the fundamental cultural framework in which ideas about insanity are constructed. Writing from a feminist perspective on women, madness and English culture, Showalter draws extensively upon women’s diaries, memoirs, and novels in order to include women’s voices as well as the male views set out in medical literature. One of her first examples is Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s well-known novel, Jane Eyre. While Showalter describes Bertha’s violence, sequestration, and regression to an inhuman condition as a powerful model of female insanity for Victorian readers, she never mentions Bertha’s Jamaican immigrant background. Yet ethnic identity, or the immigrant experience, is a vital aspect of the cultural framework that literary texts both reflect and help to shape and is thus significant in an understanding of ideas about insanity.

The chapter gives an overview of Stone’s career leading to his isolation in the McCarthyist period of the 1950s and the launching of his independent newsletter I.F. Stone’s Weekly. It discusses in detail the relevant content of two books: The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950–1951 (1952) and The Trial of Socrates (1988). The arguments in both books are very precisely related to documented facts and events from highly reputable sources, the processes that are generating those facts on the ground, and the relationships that are driving the processes. In Korea, it identifies Stone’s analysis that the USA in 1951 had demonstrably lost its secure capacity to deliver an atomic weapon using bomber aircraft as the argument and revelation that were profoundly threatening to US political and military elites, and which led to twenty-eight publishers rejecting the book before it was finally accepted by one small publisher. Stone continued a successful journalistic career as an independent publisher and public intellectual through the social unrest and anti-war agitation of the 1960s and 1970s. Socrates is presented as a valedictorian exploration by Stone of the philosophical arguments for freedom of speech, and it deploys the same journalistic method of document analysis that he used in Korea. It is a very detailed account of the philosophical issues in the trial and verdict, placed in their socio-political context. Stone is not sympathetic to Socrates’ philosophy or actions in the trial, but condemns the verdict and death sentence. The chapter considers the evaluations by scholars of Stone’s arguments in both books and notes that these books were condemned by political opponents of his views at the time they were published but endorsed by subsequent scholarship.

What role do the material and non-corporeal elements of venues play in mediating young people’s sense of safety and in shaping or facilitating the occurrence of unwanted sexual attention? This chapter explores the role of spatial design, environment, and geographies as a final component of assemblages of unwanted sexual attention and safety. However, it argues that the physical design and environment cannot be viewed in isolation from other factors such as venue culture and participants’ sense of belonging in a venue: these are intimately intertwined with whether or not young people feel a need to exert control and autonomy over self and space. It is likely to be a complex assemblage of these factors that facilitate unwanted sexual attention and that mediate how young adults understand or perceive their experiences.

Research on suicidality has often engaged with themes of connection and isolation, and these themes were taken up in our earlier work too (Roen et al., 2008). It was Durkheim (1952 [1897]) who first theorised suicide in relation to social context and social bonds, with the understanding that many instances of suicide can be attributed to people feeling lost or alone (anomic suicide) or to a weakening of social bonds (egoistic suicide). In more recent decades, Pritchard has suggested that a person who is experiencing suicidal distress may feel rejected. The person then rejects the unresolved pain and rejects the immediate world with its troubles. The family shares this ultimate rejection, because the person did not apparently value them sufficiently to want to live (Pritchard, 1995). Here, Pritchard presents social connectedness as key to understanding and preventing suicide. Fullagar also indicates that social connectedness seems to be crucial, suggesting that suicide may be understood as something that happens ‘where connectedness is severed’ (Fullagar, 2003: 300). The idea that a suicide attempt is a cry for connection has also been developed by some researchers (Bettridge and Favreau, 1995; Canetto, 1997). Based on our own previous research concerning young people’s understandings of youth suicide, we have come to understand that it is not primarily psychological states (or mental illness) that are the key to understanding suicide. Rather, suicidal acts may be understood as ways of responding to a psychosocial dilemma. This dilemma concerns ‘the desperate need for connection with others in tension with the inevitable difficulties inherent in that connection’ (Roen et al, 2008: 2096).

Reason’s transformation into an achievement concept which is open only to white males may have been largely invisible to those working in the Enlightenment, but philosophical biases are not what they once were. Much easier to see now is that the something which allows for the creation of racial concepts and which appears almost to demand judging others’ rational capacities on the basis of similarity and difference is closely linked to epistemic isolation and representation. Once the mind is disconnected from the ontological security of an independent reality, it becomes solely responsible for guaranteeing the reliability of its procedures. Modernism may be built on the faith that the proper use of reason will guide us to accurate representations of the world and, hence, to objective truth and knowledge, yet this is not quite how things worked out. As the modern project progresses, the promissory note first offered by Descartes, the one where he claims he will establish stable and unshakeable foundations for scientific truth, gets harder and harder to cash. As it turns out, rather than putting science on a firm foundation, he undermines epistemic foundations that, by all appearances, are irreplaceable, at least not within a modern framework. For the moderns to make any good faith effort at cashing Descartes’ promissory note, they simply have to cut off the diversity of reason, and, when that happens, humans who are unable or unwilling to live up to the pre-ordained standard must be denied epistemic and moral agency. To do otherwise would threaten to undermine the very objectivity of knowledge, of metaphysics, of science. The result is that the Copernican turn plunges us into a world that threatens to epistemically dissolve into cultural relativism, if not a solipsistic subjectivism—and all because, contrary to modern approaches, there really are a variety of ways to conceive of the limits, principles, rules of cognition.

People don’t become addicts in isolation. This is not news. In addition to the well-cited research showing that social connection is essential for the very survival, much less for the flourishing, of children, much work on addiction over the past two decades has focused on the importance of childhood influences on later substance use and abuse, and of social influences on transitioning into and out of addiction. For our purposes, this raises a problem: how can the results of this huge body of research showing the power of social relationships with respect to addiction be squared with either of the classes of theory that we have discussed? The role that other people play in increasing or decreasing an individual’s risk of addiction and hope for living free of it seems to deny both sides of the dichotomy.

Instead of following the customary cultural approach of their time, there have been authors who have brought widely accepted contemporary cultural values into question: this is what Leonardo Sciascia did by making Sicily a privileged observatory for looking at the world from a mafia perspective. His analyses, investigations and stories do not just give us an insight into Sicily, they are a metaphor of the world. This is the role of the intellectual according to Sciascia. Writers cannot live in a turris eburnea, alone in their own intellectual isolation; they must play a public role of testimony or a role of ‘public awareness’, as defined by Gesualdo Bufalino.

Since the late 1990s, forced labour, slavery, and human trafficking have become problems of major media, policy, and public concern. Research on these topics has proliferated and a sizable literature has emerged over the last decade to understand the distinctive forms that forced labour and trafficking take today. While this wave of scholarship has lent valuable insight into the nature and dynamics of these problems, the tendency to study forced labour and overlapping practices in isolation from wider processes of international development has led to some serious empirical and conceptual blind spots in the literature. Theoretical and empirical questions around how broader dynamics of international development—like the organisation of global production, trade and investment policy, and soaring inequality—influence severe exploitation have been all but entirely overlooked, obscuring root causes and narrowing possible solutions.

Through large-scale empirical fieldwork, Burdsey addresses the cultural politics underpinning minority ethnic identities and communities in a particular seaside resort. The chapter explores the diverse material, affective and emotional connections that exist for minority ethnic residents in the town, together with their myriad journeys and rationales for moving there. Through Burdsey’s notion of coastal liquidity, the chapter reveals the uneven, contextual, and multidirectional nature of migration processes and settlement at the seaside. The ontological linkages between racialised bodies and the English seaside, and the (re)production of, and challenges to, these dis/connections in minority ethnic as well as dominant popular imaginations are addressed. The chapter also uncovers the complexities and nuances characterising practices and perceptions of integration, isolation, social networks, and community formation.

Man has always lived in groups. The smallest kind of human group, the family, has clearly been necessary for the maintenance of the species. But so far as is known, men have always from the most primitive times formed semi-permanent groups larger than the single family; and one of the functions of such a group has been to regulate relations between its members. Politics deals with the behaviour of men in such organized permanent or semi-permanent groups. All attempts to deduce the nature of society from the supposed behaviour of man in isolation are purely theoretical, since there is no reason to assume that such a man ever existed. Aristotle laid the foundation of all sound thinking about politics when he declared that man was by nature a political animal.

There is little doubt that information technology has permanently altered the manner in which we work. We are now living in a digital age, where working practices are no longer constrained by space and time. Co-workers are not necessarily required to be in the same physical environment to work together and this has led to an evolution in business practices, with organisations increasingly managing larger workforces spread over different time-zones (Bennett et al., 2010b; McGregor, 2000). One of the many challenges faced by organisations who adopt distributed ways of working comes with building and maintaining an organisational culture and ensuring that employees feel part of the team and work cooperatively, despite the geographical distance from their co-workers. Distributed ways of working may sometimes engender feelings of isolation, reduce productivity, and lower staff morale (Bell et al., 2008; Bennett et al., 2010b). However, although technology may in this case be contributing to the problem, it could also provide the solution. Increasingly, organisations are introducing social media tools into the workplace which have the potential to improve communications between co-workers, boost morale and motivation, increase efficiency, and foster an organisational culture (Akkirman & Harris, 2005; Bennett et al., 2010b).

We are all products of our environment. It shapes our perceptions and influences our behaviour (see, for example, Isen and Levin 1972; Darley and Batson 1973; Mathews and Cannon 1975; Haney et al. 1973; Overmier and Seligman 1967). Since the law is fundamentally a tool for the regulation of human behaviour, it is important that the law takes into account the individual’s environment. Yet, the legal standard set for soldiers that obey the illegal orders of their commanders is often implemented in isolation from or with a limited understanding of the soldier’s environment. Under the Rome Statute, soldiers are liable for obeying illegal orders if they knew the order was unlawful or the order was manifestly unlawful. In determining whether an order is manifestly unlawful, the courts can use the standard of whether a ‘reasonable person’ would have known that the order was manifestly unlawful. The ‘reasonable person’ is often ascertained without sufficient in-depth understanding of the social, behavioural, psychological, biological and cultural effects generated by the unique military and combat environment.

Albania is widely regarded as the most isolated of all Eastern European countries. However, Williams argues that despite its isolation, there was an underground penetration of international pop culture, particularly from Italy. Moreover, during the 1980s, private groups also met at Tirana’s artificial lake and performed forbidden western music. These performances by the so-called ‘Lake Bands’ provided an opportunity for Albanians to familiarise themselves with western rock music. Nonetheless, it was not until 1988 that singer/guitarist Aleksander Gjoka staged Albania’s first rock concert. Williams points to the fact that even in a country epitomising isolation there was room for western and indigenous pop-rock.

Are middle-aged gay men ‘past it’ — socially and sexually — if not prematurely old? It has been said in gay male cultures individuals can begin to feel old after the age of 30 (Duncan and Barrett 2013). If this is so, can middle-aged gay men expect little more than rejection and isolation as they slide towards the ultimate misery represented by the epithet, ‘lonely old queen’? The stakes are high and, with such concerns in mind, this book examines midlife gay men’s experiences of growing older in Manchester, the third largest city in the United Kingdom (UK) and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGB&T) capital of the North of England. The city has a highly developed, differentiated gay scene. Its ‘gay village’ in the heart of the city is seen as the most visible aspect of a gay culture second in size to London, and provides all manner of social, political, cultural, sexual, economic and other opportunities. The village has grown exponentially since the mid-1990s, and (perhaps uniquely) since that time has proven highly popular with heterosexuals (Binnie and Skeggs 2004) seeking identification with its trendiness and tolerance of sexual difference.

Hardly any scholarly attention has been paid to the first-time prison researcher. What little commentary does exist (e.g. Smith and Wincup, 2000, 2002) is primarily focused on providing practical tips for novice researchers within criminal justice institutions which, whilst helpful, do little to prepare the inexperienced, ‘greenhead’ researcher for the lived emotions and experiences of the task of conducting prisons research. Even the most seasoned researchers are in no way immune to the ‘pains’ and ‘turbulence’ of prison-based fieldwork (cf. Liebling, 1999); however, for the neophyte prisons researcher, these pains can be magnified, particularly given the exhaustion, isolation and ‘shock’ of working in the field for the first time (Smith and Wincup, 2000). This ‘shock’ undoubtedly results from the lack of studies which exist to adequately equip and prepare novitiates to prisons research, an issue which is arguably part of the broader dearth of scholarly attention previously paid to the emotive aspects of work undertaken in this environment (see Liebling, 1999; Jewkes, 2012).

For the last few decades, protected areas have formed part of the arsenal of tools promoted by conservationists to close frontiers. Protected areas epitomize the notion of the post-frontier through the nominal isolation of a zone within a larger span of “non-protected” areas. They involve distinct ways of seeing, understanding and producing the world (West et al. 2006). Much literature has emphasized the imposition of systems based on a Western worldview, managerial logics and top-down-driven solutions. Relying on Cartesian divisions between nature and culture, state incorporation and dispossession, the dramatic consequences of their establishment have repeatedly been noted (Colchester 2003). This has led to massive calls for change, from both conservationists and social movements.

For many years the problem of meaning in life has been a central part of several scientific disciplines, especially philosophy or theology. Several decades ago, psychology also started to study this phenomenon. It was particularly stimulated by practicing psychologists and psychiatrists who recognized the importance of meaning in the lives of their clients and patients, as they were often dealing with this problem. Several prominent psychotherapists, especially in the area of existential psychology, brought the problem of meaning into the heart of their theories. Frankl (1996, 1997) in his logotherapy and existential analysis approach, emphasized that the need for meaning is a central human motivation, and the inability to fulfil this need could lead to a state he named the “existential vacuum”. If a person remains in this state, it can cause psychological problems such as depression or neurosis. Yalom (1980), known for his original approach to existential psychotherapy, considers meaninglessness as one of the four existential givens (together with death, freedom and isolation) producing existential anxiety. To overcome meaninglessness and related existential anxiety, a person should create his or her own personal meaning in life and fully engage in its realization. Yalom presents two ways of showing how people create and fulfil their meaning: cosmic meaning is related to the meaning scheme beyond the person’s self, such as religion or spirituality; terrestrial meaning represents secular values such as commitments, creativity, generativity, and so on.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, boys at many English public schools lived apart from their teachers. This was typical in such institutions at the time, with most schools adopting the ‘house system’. While notionally under the control of housemasters, within these places pupils usually inhabited house rooms and open dormitories, which teachers seldom entered. This was a deliberate policy. Discussions of the open dormitory reveal that its spatial set-up — where boys were kept isolated from their masters but in very close proximity to their peers — was intended to have a distinct emotional effect. It was hoped that the judicious guidance of senior boys would set a good example to their juniors, contributing to their emotional education. Isolation, meanwhile, was supposed to encourage independence, creating self-governing individuals who were able to exercise self-control rather than being disciplined by the institution. The aim was the production of a moral system, in which the discipline of the self, body and emotions played an important part. This meant learning to control emotional expression, but also forming the right kind of attachments to others. The prefect system, in which a chosen group of senior boys were given the right to use physical discipline, and especially fagging, is notorious. However, it is important to remember that this had set cultural limits.

Brian Nelson speaks fast, and his Chicago ‘’dees’ and ‘dats’ promise to spare his audience some of the usual fluff; he evokes sympathy in his audience while handling his own outrage or recalling tough memories. In the spring of 2010, Brian was released from Tamms Closed Maximum Security prison (CMAX), the Illinois supermax, after spending 12 years in solitary confinement. Opened in 1998 and closed in 2013, Tamms was originally meant to function as temporary added punishment for prisoners already serving time in other state prisons. Yet many prisoners, including Brian, wound up being held in isolation at Tamms for many years—some for the duration of its operation. During Brian’s incarceration at Tamms, he suffered severe depression, became a central figure in litigation over the treatment of Tamms prisoners with mental illness, and organized a prisoner-written newsletter and hunger strike for improved conditions. Since his release, he has been a vocal activist, attempting to persuade members of the public that the conditions of extreme punishment in US supermax prisons inflict invisible but lasting psychological harm. Like the other former supermax prisoners who provide the impetus for this chapter Brian possesses considerable personal and political agency. Yet when he speaks about Tamms, he becomes visibly upset, often choking back tears and shrugging as though he has momentarily given up trying to explain his experience.

Iris Murdoch’s most memorable novel is a work of intense poetics and creative imagination. It tells of theatre director Charles Arrowby, who retires to a lonely cottage beside the sea. The beautiful but desolate setting and the isolation he incurs are punctuated by a series of appearances of people from his past; women he’d romanced in the bohemian milieu of London’s Theatreland flit back into his life like ghosts when eventually he encounters his long-lost childhood sweetheart Hartley living in a village a short distance away. The memory of their adolescent love affair has haunted Arrowby over the years—Hartley’s reappearance reigniting an obsession which has smouldered in the background of his life and never died out.

In this chapter the key concepts of technology, institution and change are discussed and defined. The intimate relations between technology and institution are also described with the conclusion that technological and institutional change cannot be discussed in isolation from each other. Instead, they are different sides of the same coin, a coin with a value for an understanding of civilizations, global growth and cultural exchange as well as environmental sustainability, health and wealth distribution. Some concepts to be reviewed have been developed to frame the convergence of technology and institution in the sense that material expressions and social order are co-constructed or co-produced.

An early attempt to analyse processes emanating from combinations and integration of knowledge together with its carriers stemmed from the observation that industrial branches and sectors seemed to agglomerate geographically, creating local or regional clusters. Other concepts mirror sectorial complexes or the importance of systems. In common, they all have the assumption that technology and institutions are systemic in the sense that their parts cannot be understood or analysed in isolation, but need to be understood as connected entities. Conclusions in this chapter include the developing uniformity of systems and organizations despite the original institutional differences of distinctive geographical locations and regions. Another insight is that change in one part of the complex is very likely to have repercussions throughout the whole system.

As the auditorium darkens a man at a computer appears, spotlit before us. Frustrated by the isolation of contemporary communica- tion he jumps up and summons us out of our theatre seats and on a journey. An ethereal voice sings from above as we tentatively cross the stage. We are led along a passage where we are confronted by a woman washing cloths, wringing them with anguish as she speaks of her pain. Further along, at another Station of the Cross, a teenage girl tries to rid herself of the horror of rape through cleansing gesture and language. Young men gather for initiation as we are led into a court- yard illuminated by braziers with a mound of earth centrally placed. As we experience the initiation of the protagonist we are drawn into the singing and dancing, into the warmth of the flames, the rough- ness of the earth that covers him and the tingling freshness of the cleansing water. (Isivuno Sama Phupha [Harvest of Dreams], 2007)

Among the many goods thought to be at stake in the free will debate is friendship. Robert Kane lists it, together with love, as one of ten items that hang in the balance in figuring out if we are free in the sense of being undetermined originators of our actions.1 Susan Wolf, in describing the worries of many, writes that ‘the most gruesome difference between [a world in which we give up our practices that depend on the assumption that we are free agents] and our world would be reflected in our closest human relationships’ (1981: 291). Although we could form ‘some sorts of associations that could be described as relationships of friendship and love’, the words ‘friendship’ and ‘love’ would take on ‘a hollow ring’. We would inhabit ‘a world of human isolation so cold and dreary that any but the most cynical must shudder at the idea of it’ (1981: 291).

In Sherry Turkle’s (2006, p. 220) words: ‘We are witnessing a new form of sociality in which the isolation of our physical bodies does not indicate our state of connectedness but may be its precondition.’ In this sense, the human rights site ‘Crisis in Darfur’, brought to you by Google Earth (GE) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) documents an earth haunted by real people, both viewers and the viewed. States of embodiment involved in our actual cognitive and physical manipulations of personal computer technologies usually, in Turkle’s sense, also involve our physical isolation from those we connect with via these technologies. This chapter investigates ways in which we nevertheless make connections with the people represented on our Human Computer Interfaces (HCIs) despite this physical isolation via our connections with the websites in which these representations are found together with our subsequent connections to those who create these websites and the potential links between them. In the broader context of documentary discourse, I am investigating and speculating here on some of the ways in which web documentaries might be situated within the web itself.

The material conditions that influenced early modern women’s writing are crucial to understanding what women wrote and how their work can be read. Like all material artefacts, early modern women’s texts do not reach readers in isolation, but emerge through complex systems of production, transmission and reception. Criticism of early modern women’s writing in the last decade has increasingly emphasised their engagement with different generic forms and modes of circulation, expanding the parameters of the field beyond literary interpretation of the texts themselves to an engagement with their intricate textual histories. The current volume builds upon this work to produce a wide- ranging account of the rich and diverse material cultures through which early modern women’s writing was produced, transmitted and received. It focuses on the ways in which this writing was culturally mediated: how it was originally packaged and promoted, how it circulated in its contemporary contexts, and how it was read and received in later revisions and redactions. In doing so, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing aims to illuminate not only the ways in which we read, analyse and value early modern women’s writing, but also to expand our understanding of the production, transmission and reception of early modern literature more broadly.

The debate on eugenics occasioned by the lectures Madzsar, Diene s and Fulop offered to the Society of Social Sciences between February and May 1911 highlighted diverse theories of social and biological improvement. A crucial realization in itself, it also substantiated the claim that Hungarian eugenics could not be viewed in isolation, but in terms of a set of ideas and practices which travelled from one individual to another, and from one country to another. This debate marked a major landmark in the history of eugenics in Hungary, but is it possible to shift the scholarly focus from a single cultural moment to a network of connections between this society and other societies at that time, and no less between eugenicists in Hungary and abroad?

“Madness is a solitary malady — and so is writing”, offers Joann Deiudicibus in this study of the stark isolation at the heart of depression and the unimaginable pain of various psychic states. At mid-century, Anne Sexton’s highs and her suffering, transformed into art, deepened our understanding of madness, poetics, gender, writing-as-therapy, and even conceptions of psychopharmacology and the artist. Contemporary writers describe depression’s flipside — the intense heightening and sharpening of the senses often characteristic of mania, and how states of hypomania and mania can escalate creative productivity. Separated from romanticized and gender stereotypes, depression — with its inexorable pull toward death — can be viewed not only in terms of loss, but as creation, composition, and close contemplation of “the gift close to the wound”.

Joyce’s works seem stubbornly to refuse inclusion in any cohesive developmental narrative which we might try to create. In part, this is simply a function of the works themselves, since they do seem to frustrate any effort to categorize them, generically, aesthetically, or thematically, alongside his peers. However one must also suspect that the machinery of Joyce scholarship, with so many journals and essay collections and professional gatherings devoted solely to the examination of his work, serves not only to elevate but to isolate it. There is an expectation intrinsic to this scholarly apparatus, that it should reinforce the necessity for that isolation. Eliot and Pound and Woolf can be regarded as elitist high modernists, but Joyce is different. Yeats and Synge and O’Casey can be regarded as cultural revivalists, but Joyce is different. It is not that such readings are not correct, but rather that Joyce’s exceptionalism becomes, in effect, the point. To say that Joyce is different is one thing, but the assertion easily shades off into the implied assumption that Joyce’s writing emerges from a set of cultural coordinates that are also utterly different. In such circumstances, Joyce’s works can quickly seem to float free of any set of historical, cultural, or literary circumstances through which the nature of his achievement might be more fully understood.

The number of one-parent households has increased significantly in most European countries as a consequence of changes in social and family structures, as well as in gender roles and individual expectations and behaviors. Families with young children and only one adult, very often the mother, are particularly exposed to new social risks, and particularly to the trade-off between paid work and care responsibility (see Chapter 1). The fact that the other parent of one’s children is not living under the same roof (anymore), or is even totally absent, makes the everyday care arrangements less flexible and compatible with other tasks, especially with working or studying hours. Lone-parent households are also more at risk of poverty, because of the imbalance between dependent and working members in the family, and because divorce and separation often entail a reduction in disposable income. As a consequence, this family type can be defined as socially vulnerable (Ranci 2010), as both the family ties and the connection to the labor market risk being strained.

Only a few days after the Egyptian revolution had achieved its climax with the fall of Hosni Mubarak, Libyans started a battle to topple their own dictator. However, contrary to the cases of Egypt and Tunisia, in Libya the battle was destined to last much longer as Ghadhafi refused to release power. Eventually the revolutionaries managed to achieve their aims only thanks to the intervention of NATO, which helped them take control of Tripoli six months after the beginning of the struggle, in late August 2011 (Boyle 2013).

Christianity is Samuel Beckett’s fundamental antagonist: his thought, his aesthetics and his writing cannot be fully understood in isolation from his lifelong struggle with it.116 That may seem a large claim, until one realizes how persistently Beckett returns to this agon with Christianity when defining his whole artistic project vis-a-vis those of his contemporaries and chosen precursors. A telling emblem of this is the above letter to Duthuit (part of an important series from 1949 which culminated in the publication of Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit in December). Inserted into the discussion of Bram Van Velde’s painting is a reference to the ‘great refusal’ made by one in Dante’s zone of unnamed neutrals in Inferno III, those rejected by both Heaven and Hell and driven to chase one banner after another for eternity. In Three Dialogues, Van Velde’s art is tellingly associated with Beckett’s own obsessive concern with a ‘fidelity to failure’ (SBDi, 145); similarly, in another letter, Van Velde exemplifies ‘fidelity to the prison-house, this refusal of any probationary freedom’ (to Duthuit, 2 March 1949; SBL2, 130). The artistic task of the gran rifiuto therefore is to remain within a probationless zone of rejection and expulsion, tracing the ever-onward but futile movement inside the prison-house of existence, while eschewing both heroism and any kind of redemption.

The quote above is taken from the novel The Vanishing (later adapted into a successful Dutch film and less successful American film). The main character, Saskia, describes her recurring dream of loneliness. Academia can tend toward such isolation, with different disciplines and topics staying within their own” golden eggs” of discourse. One of the goals of a volume such as this one is to force two” golden eggs” to collide by asking scholars from the fields of both creativity and ethics to consider how these topics might be related.

Alfred Hitchcock’s diptych of films, Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958), share many things in addition to the use of James Stewart as the male lead. In both films Stewart spends time with a woman whose characterization is a complication of both the maternal and the roman- tic. Both films contain themes of voyeurism and isolation within society and introduce the concept of voyeurism in the opening credit sequence. Particularly striking is that James Stewart’s character begins each film in a state of disability. The form of disability in each film, physical or mental, is closely related to the form of voyeurism practised. Thus, a compari- son of the relationship between physical disability and what I will term “public voyeurism” in Rear Window, and between mental disability and what I refer to as “personal voyeurism” in Vertigo, provides a lens through which we can compare the two films’ resolutions as a result of this dis- tinction between public and private. Specifically, Hitchcock seems to use the public voyeurism in Rear Window to emancipate voyeurism by nor- malizing it; whereas the isolation in Vertigo and the subsequent murders condemn voyeurism.

To understand terrorism in an age of interconnectedness and globalisation we need to engage with the question of the role of communication and the media in the phenomenon of political extremism. Communication and the media cannot, however, be approached in isolation. To comprehend the difference media can possibly make in the exchange of information, its processing, and its effects, they need to be “fitted” into the broader picture of how social interactions occur, identities are constructed, and groups mobilise for political purposes. The aim of this chapter is to show that this framework, within the broadly conceived field of terrorism studies, does not currently exist.

On 19 March 1826, John Clare wrote to Alaric Watts, a literary editor, responding delicately to what had evidently been an offer to choose a gift of books: I can hardly have the face to state as you desire me what books I like as I do not wish to intrude on the kindness of any one or else I have long desired to see the Poems of ‘Miss Landon’ which I have not been able to do as yet Montgomerys too are strangers to me excepting some things in periodicals which only made me desire to become acquainted with the rest the reading of no poem ever left such an impression on my fondness for poetry as his ‘Common Lot’ did which I met with about 10 years ago in a little volume called the ‘Beautys of Poetry’ (Clare, 1985, p. 368)

No major historical event occurs in isolation. Even though this chapter seeks to focus closely and directly on the prison riot that broke out in Dartmoor Convict Prison on Sunday 24 January 1932, to restrict examination to the events of the riot itself would be so limiting as to distort and possibly mislead. Large-scale prison disturbances, such as a riot, have contexts, precursors or triggers as well as repercussions which help to illuminate the individual, institutional and social tensions which compose the backdrop to the main event. In the days immediately before the Dartmoor riot, one harrowing assault best illustrates some of the elements within the prison’s internal interpersonal relationships and cultures which served to increase tension and insecurity. Indeed, a prison doctor at Dartmoor was later to suggest that the assault intensified the existing strained atmosphere in the prison.1

The English language coursebook is a pedagogical tool but also a cultural artefact and, in evaluating any cultural artefact, there must be a consideration of the culture within which this artefact is produced and the prevailing discourses that have shaped it, as well as its own role in influencing current and future discourses. Lave and Wenger (1991: 52-3), in discussing the situated nature of learning, write that: Activities, tasks, functions and understandings do not exist in isolation; they are part of broader systems of relations in which they have meaning.