This chapter examines the newly expanded and transformed theatre ecology enabled by the post-war rise of central government subsidy to the arts. It explores subsidy’s ambitions, achievements, and benefits, but also its turbulence and the ideological risks embedded in its deeply ambivalent objectives to foster elite arts but also democratise the arts. The chapter begins by giving a history of British theatre subsidy and considers its contribution to the development of theatre as one of Britain’s great cultural assets through its visionary promotion of such things as artists’ independence, the expansion of theatre infrastructure, and a conception of theatre as a civic right. The chapter then considers some of the hazards arising from how theatre subsidy has been practised by the Arts Council of Great Britain (and successor organisations), especially its tendency to reinforce elite privileges of metropolitanism, class, and whiteness. The chapter critiques the elitism of British arts subsidy’s legacy and proposes transformation of its practices to become more accountable, more democratic, and more dispersed, helping to make British theatre and culture more diverse and better informed by a greater variety of imaginations.

Peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb, Turo, TaskRabbit, Eatwith, and Uber are transnational market actors, generating millions of transactions, in multiple jurisdictions across the globe. These companies connect individuals and small businesses via online platforms and mediate transactions in the real, offline world between owners and renters, service providers and service recipients. Despite their clear importance and their market influence, the legal role of peer-to-peer platforms remains elusive. The emerging transnational legal order is a mixture of self-regulation and sporadic, concrete state or local regulation in several jurisdictions. I suggest thinking of platforms as transnational actors and offer a conceptualization of their legal role. Access platforms create and maintain a market with its own rules, conventions, and entry and exit points. To capture the role of platform as constituting a market, I rely on fiduciary law, an area of private law area concerned with power and vulnerability. This role creates duties toward the participants in this market. This duty explains why, for example, the platform should be responsible for the discriminatory actions of its participants. Other obligations include the duty to give prior notice before pulling out from an area of activity, and duty to create and maintain fair entry and exit rules.

This chapter focuses on the everyday. It considers how responsibility for the everyday, quotidian care of cultural heritage is assumed or allocated and the form that this takes. It analyses how care is translated into access, preservation and care of collections and places and how risk is managed when access has the potential to harm the long-term future of cultural heritage. This chapter analyses the ways in which access and preservation are supported, through financial support as well as in statutory provisions; it analyses the duties of care placed on custodians of cultural heritage and the role played by standard-setting.

Access to healthcare profoundly impacts the health and quality of life of Deaf people. Automatic translation tools are crucial in improving communication between Deaf patients and their healthcare providers. The aim of this chapter is to present the pipeline used to create the Swiss-French Sign Language (LSF-CH) version of BabelDr, a speech-enabled fixed phrase translator that was initially conceived to improve communication in emergency settings between doctors and allophone patients (Bouillon et al., 2021). In order to do so, we start off by explaining how we ported BabelDr in LSF-CH using both human and avatar videos. We first describe the creation of a reference corpus consisting of video translations done by human translators, then we present a second corpus of videos generated with a virtual human. Finally, we relate the findings of a questionnaire on Deaf users’ perspective on the use of signing avatars in the medical context. We showed that, although respondents prefer human videos, the use of automatic technologies associated with virtual characters is not without interest to the target audience and can be useful to them in the medical context.

This chapter guides the researcher through key elements of developing a research methodology for conducting research on and at global environmental negotiations and agreement-making sites. It addresses four important components: 1) Methodological: how to develop a research project; 2) Ethical: how to reflect on and comply with ethical standards; 3) Legal: how to protect, manage and store data and 4) Organizational: how to prepare research on-site. We address key cross-cutting issues relevant to all chapters of the book and the central question of how to decide whether you need to be on-site to answer your research question and advance the state of the art on global environmental agreement-making. The chapter includes three main takeaways: First, the ethical, legal, and organizational aspects of this kind of research are as important as the conceptual and methodological work that prepares scholars for data collection and participant observation on-site. Second, access, funding, and data protection need to be addressed early in the research process and should be reflected at different stages of the research process. Third, regardless of the research puzzle and methodology, conducting research on and at negotiations will always imply a high degree of reflexivity and preparedness.

The chapter explores translation between images and language through the practice of audio description for blind and partially sighted theatre audiences. This practice exceeds analytical models such as ekphrasis or intersemiotic translation because of the particular circumstances in which the texts are received: they are performed live alongside their sources (set, costume, lighting, gestures), and in dialogue with other performance modalities (such as live and recorded sound). The embodied nature of the practice affects how the describer constructs a spectatorial ‘gaze’, particularly in relation to performers’ bodies. Examples are drawn from two performances that foreground bodies and the gaze: Beauty and the Beast (Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser, 2013), and a short cabaret act, Scarf Dance by Amelia Cavallo. The latter performance suggests ways in which attention to the gaze in burlesque might help to develop a ‘critical audio description’.

This chapter will argue that the federal court data paywall—PACER fees—unduly hinders the production of research on America’s federal courts. This effective limitation on public access to data leaves us with less access to better justice. Worse, there is little to no offsetting benefit. Although PACER fee revenue is often described as high, it is actually tiny as an economic matter. Congress can and should enact legislation that both mandates free public access to PACER’s vast array of information and replaces the associated fee revenue. That would allow the judiciary to continue its current operations and also allow appropriate research on federal courts.

Sex offered intimate access to the emperor; imperial sex partners therefore were potentially amongst the most influential members of court, even if they lacked official positions or were of low social status. This chapter begins by discussing and explaining an historical anomaly: the absence at Rome of a ‘harem’ – an institutionalized reserve of women attached to the court as exclusive sexual partners for the emperor. It then examines the access to the emperor that sexual partners like concubines had, and the influence of these partners on court dynamics. Finally, it considers the role of sex, sexuality, and gender expression in the performance of imperial power at court. Underlying the analysis are the often outrageous tales told by the sources about emperors’ sex lives; the chapter argues that these cannot be simply taken at face value but are useful in reconstructing patterns of thinking about how sex intersected with imperial power.