This chapter reviews the history of the IPCC’s efforts to achieve and maintain policy relevance while remaining policy-neutral and staying far away from ‘policy prescriptiveness’. The chapter argues that the boundaries between policy relevance, neutrality and prescriptiveness are a practical achievement – they must be constantly negotiated as the science and politics of climate change evolve. The chapter uses historical case studies to illustrate this point, such as the controversy over the so-called ‘burning embers’ diagram. It ends by discussing recent debates about the IPCC’s new role in the post-Paris Agreement policy landscape. While IPCC actors call for greater policy relevance, observers and critics contend that the IPCC will always and inevitably be policy-prescriptive, even if on a tacit and unintentional level. Achieving even greater policy relevance may therefore mean jettisoning or modifying the aspiration to be policy-neutral.

In 2018, Lauren Alaina released her single “Ladies in the ’90s,” which takes a nostalgic look at her childhood through cleverly chosen lyrics from chart-topping songs of the 1990s. “Ladies in the ’90s” references women—and only women—from country music, as well as pop, rock, and R&B. The song establishes Lauren Alaina’s broad musical lineage and evokes nostalgia for an earlier decade. This chapter explores the performative and affective use of nostalgia and lineage in country music. A close reading of “Ladies in the ’90s” reveals how the generation of country artists coming of age in the second decade of the twenty-first century are redefining and expanding the stylistic, cultural, and even racial boundaries of the genre through the nostalgic tropes that have been used for decades in country music. In so doing, artists like Lauren Alaina are challenging the industry and carving out new musical and narrative spaces.

Wallace’s landscapes are haunted by capitalist interventions in the natural world, from the black sand of the Great Ohio Desert to the Great Convexity/Concavity that sits like a pustule between the United States and Canada. This chapter considers Wallace’s writing as an ecocritical gesture that connects human solipsism, hypercapitalism and the despoiling of the natural world. In tracing this connection, the chapter operates on the central theme of disgust, a recurrent and powerful motif throughout Wallace’s body of work. Working alongside the chapter on regional geographies, the chapter shows how Wallace troubled and complicated the regional archetypes that populate his writing by using images of the unheimlich and the grotesque, uniting the threatening, the decomposing and the simply absurd to highlight the depredations of the late capitalist system on the (American) landscape.

This chapter addresses the role of culture in the making of political mobilisations around race and migration. Taking its cue from debates about convivial culture, it focuses in particular on how music has provided a medium of connections that network across community campaigns, popular culture, and specific moments in the cultural history of the United Kingdom in the 1990s and 2000s. We argue that as the strange becomes familiar, expressive cultures open new ways of making the politics of race visible, alternative cultures that can have longer-term impacts on how racial politics may cross boundaries and explore and address modes of intolerance.

Chapter 11 outlines some positive parenting strategies designed to be of practical use for parents of children and young people. We discuss using praise in preference to criticism, setting out clear expectations of behaviour and identifying ways to develop our children’s independence. We also discuss how our own behaviour directly influences children and young people, so modelling an approach where we can be calm and engaged in problem solving has a more powerful impact than anything we tell our children to do.

Historically, mental health care was provided within a religious context. As scientific approaches to the study of mind and brain developed from the seventeenth century onwards, the spiritual and religious elements of care became separated from the biological, psychological and social elements. The rift grew under the combined influences of biological reductionism, Darwinism, behaviourism and psychoanalysis. In the later twentieth century, a new wave of scientific research on spirituality and religion began to reverse this trend. Spirituality came to offer a more subjective and individualised approach to transcendence, which did not necessarily require religious affiliation. Psychiatrists have found a more positive place for spirituality in both clinical practice and research. This has been reflected internationally, in professional organisations, policy, debate and training. A growing evidence base demonstrates the positive benefits of spirituality/religion for mental health, and patient-centred care requires that spiritual/religious issues be addressed with sensitivity and respect.

Worries about the death of democracy are as old as democracy itself. According to a common view of democracy, democracies come to an end when their institutions and laws break down and are replaced by undemocratic ones. I contrast this common picture of democracy with one that depicts democracy as a way of living together, as a form of action that is, in principle, ongoing. On this second picture, democracy need not die even if its institutions do, because the civic actions that make a society democratic are a form of activity that doesn’t end.

In this chapter, we review the literature on interdependent routines. We group previous studies on routine interdependence around key concepts – boundaries & intersections, clusters, ecologies, and bundles – and highlight the different analytical foci and results of each group. Hence, we make an argument for leveraging the analytical differences of such concepts as cluster and ecologies, rather than treating them as synonyms. In closing, we point out several avenues for future research.

This chapter introduces paradoxes from three areas. First, the famous antinomies from Frege–Cantor set theory are presented as consequences of the naive set concept; the standard solution, Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory and the idea of iterative sets, is discussed and found to be problematic. Second, the sorites paradox for vague predicates/properties is presented, and some standard solutions are discussed, putting the focus on “cutoff points.” A paraconsistent “glut” approach is recommended as the best way to accept the existence of cutoff points, as inconsistent and not unique. Third, a puzzle about boundaries in space is presented, standard solutions discussed and found wanting, and a paraconsistent response outlined. It is suggested that all three paradoxes are interrelated by the concept of “revenge” and should be met with dialetheism.

This chapter develops some topology, the abstract geometry of closeness, that manages to capture properties of nearness without any appeal to distance. The previous chapter studied the shape of the linear continuum, focusing on what happens when one tries to cut or tear it in two. This chapter offers a qualitative generalization of these ideas, about continuity and connectedness, but now without any metrics. The focus is on closed sets, boundaries, and eventually, continuous transformations and their fixed points, bringing ideas from analysis back to set theory. Concluding theorems are proven about retractions and some lemmas about absolutely disconnected space, leading to a parameterized version of Brouwer’s fixed point theorem.

The Introduction traces the main themes of the volume: boundaries and networks, religious innovation, and violence as an agent of societal change. It offers a tribute to the inspirational scholarship and intellectual influence of Brent Shaw. An analysis of the Demna mosaic from Cap Bon in North Africa is used as an example of the types of overlapping topics that inspired Brent Shaw and this volume.

We have seen thus far that the intellectual underpinning of the 1990 Act (as amended) - the embryo’s rather vague ‘special status’ - has not changed since the Act’s inception. Moreover, we have seen that any attempts change the intellectual basis of the Act, for example the 2008 Act, have been cautious at best. Thus, as a way of mapping the landscape to date, and also of clearing a path towards novel approaches to regulating the embryo, this chapter undertakes two important tasks: (1) an academic analysis of the caution mentioned above - a fade from discourse - which has only intensified the confusion surrounding the ‘special’ legal status of the embryo; and (2) an exploration of some of the ways in which the unclear nature, source, and extent of the legal status of the embryo could be clarified by exploring two key normative legal tools that are often employed to provide certainty: binding objects within a regulatory space, and drawing boundaries. Ultimately, this chapter posits that the root of the vague nature of the embryo’s ‘special status’ is a prevailing uncertainty regarding how we ought to treat embryos in vitro, because, by its very nature, it does not easily fit into normative social, moral or legal categories.

This chapter explores the gulf that existed in British India between theories of linear boundaries and unitary sovereign territory on the one hand, and precarious practices of bordering on the other. It analyses three distinct periods of bordering common to the northwest and northeast frontiers. In the mid-nineteenth century, colonial officials sought to instantiate partially porous borders that would provide security while allowing themselves freedom of action in frontier regions. The limitations of these schemes led to a widespread flurry of bordering in the 1860s and 1870s led by administrators ‘on the spot’. Much of this activity contradicted orders from superiors, and took the form of breaking existing boundaries as well as instantiating new ones. A third period, around the turn of the twentieth century, saw heightened attention to international boundaries. These borders remained fragmented and limited. They also had disruptive effects on internal boundaries, reopening questions over where the frontier began.

The Islamic empires, and specifically the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, were not antithetical to the Westphalian principles of international order. The claim of Islamic and Ottoman incompatibility had more to do with European colonial ambitions. Altering their universalist claims, Ottoman rulers engaged in significant adjustments to Western principles of international diplomacy and international relations. Studying the Islamic world provides insights into how a regional order might be based on a shared collective identity rather than on material dominance by a hegemonic power. The Ottoman Empire provides a perfect case to examine adjustment at the peak of Western imperial expansion and confrontation with the West.