The ecological thinking of the Georgics leads to intricate problems of scale, which Chapter 4 traces. The poem seeks to conceptualize humans’ place in their local environments – epitomized by the bounded space of the farm – while also imagining life at larger scales and attempting to think the world as a coherent whole. The chapter connects these issues to political, geographical, agricultural, philosophical, and poetical questions. This chapter finds in the Georgics a searching exploration of what it means to be local, and whether such a thing is even possible in the age of Jupiter and the time of Caesar. Ultimately, the poem rethinks a more nuanced concept of locality that is intertwined with the global, and is of shifting, unpredictable scale: a concept of fractal locality. At the center of the poem, Vergil places a fitting emblem for a fractally local poetry, the temple he vows in his native Mantua. This temple models Vergil’s achievement as anchored in particular place, and yet in a place that has become local, Roman, Italian, and global all at once.

This chapter offers an overview of historians’ writings about scale and their debates on micro- and macrohistory in the past half century. It is argued that the complex debates between followers of Italian microstoria, members of the Annales school, and social and cultural historians in the Anglo-American world need to be considered in the context of similar discussions and experiments with scale in literary writings, in artworks and especially in the scholarship in human geography. The chapter claims that, in an era of human-made climate crisis, we should reconsider how we conceptualise the role of particles, microbes, parasites, worms, and other animals in historical writing, going beyond the dichotomy of micro- and macrohistory. It is proposed that the geographer Neil Smith’s concept of ‘jumping scales’ is an especially productive way of discussing how hierarchical power structures are established and disrupted by agents operating at levels that range from the microscopical to the global.

Chapter 1 begins with the problem of conflicting timescales in antiquarianism. At Pompeii, the question of human significance at the scale of geological deep time inspired writers to reconsider the material past and explore alternatives to traditional timelines. This chapter shows how Charles Dickens in particular experiments with nonlinear temporal forms in his travel narrative Pictures from Italy, which I argue uses a fractal temporal form to nest infinite pasts in present sites. A fractal is a nonlinear shape that repeats its structure even when viewed at fine scales. When Dickens deploys it as a temporal form, he necessarily changes the shape of history, offering alternative possibilities for Italian politics. Chapter 1 ends by considering the ethical ramifications of linear and nonlinear temporal forms in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage. This poem, depicting the Roman Republic of 1849, dramatizes English tourists’ attempts to reassert the historicism that casts Italy as past despite the Risorgimento. Ultimately, Chapter 1 shows how both Dickens and Clough respond to political potential in Italy by reconfiguring time.

The introduction to Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a survey of recent and historical transnational approaches to Irish cultural production. In doing so, it shies away from insisting on a definitive method for the scholars in the field, choosing rather to highlight the diversity of approaches in the chapters in the volume. The introduction calls for a “weak theory” of the transnational, recognizing the myriad ways that both cultural producers and critics understand the term and the project. It also calls for a critical evaluation of the methods and scope of studying Ireland in a transnational phase, one that does not simply accept that a globalized world must necessarily be read in a globalizing frame.

The concluding chapter of this volume maps the contributions of the book as a whole, articulates possible future directions for further research, and offers a humanities lens to this conversation about youth mental health. Directions for further exploration include expanding the frame to encompass studies of affect and emotions (not just mental health), investigating the cultural politics of emotions (not just the importance of inner well-being) by situating emotions within political landscapes, enlarging the vocabulary of climate emotions (beyond the language of mental health), and queering climate emotions research.

This chapter examines the boundary-breaking spatial and social dynamism of animalian entities embodied within LB I–LB II polychrome murals of Crete and Thera. In these innovative paintings, animalian entities engaged with both painted and lived contexts, taking on novel manners of involvement in Aegean sociocultural spaces; some established new aspects of creaturely identity and relation. We begin with three animalian entities considered – boar’s tusk helmets, ox-hide shields and ikria – examining how their presence in murals further challenged long-standing parameters of two-dimensional representation. Here discussion broadens to consider how renderings of various animals in Minoan frescoes charged and unsettled the fabric of powerful built spaces. Innovations in color, scale and the creation of spatial depth approached the ways animalian bodies were experienced in the round. Simultaneously, details of the frescoes kept the painted creatures, and the spaces they occupied, tautly embroiled in the structured order of the wall. We close by considering how polychrome frescoes could foster radical newness in animals’ identities, focusing on renderings of blue simians. This blueness, regardless of whether originally intended to approximate biological hues, engendered distinct status for simians in the Aegean, with fascinating connections to renderings of young peoples.

This chapter investigates scaling in the work of hope. We foreground how hope is not merely an abstract aspiration but a principled, time-oriented praxis by showcasing how hope can be meaningfully pursued when scaled through pedagogical work. Our cases include the central NGOS/activist groups in our ethnography, namely Instituto Raízes em Movimento, Instituto Marielle Franco, and Coletivo Papo Reto. We examine, for instance, the case of how Raízes em Movimento appropriates and rescales the trope of “circulando,” a policing practice premised on the criminalization of faveladas/os. We afterwards examine the case of artistic and organizational responses to the historical and contemporary silencing of Blacks in Brazil, examining the case of Favela Não Se Cala alongside the activist work of the Instituto Marielle Franco. We then look to the work of Coletivo Papo Reto who perform pedagogical work representing the transformative ethos of papo reto activist register. This collective work highlights the teachable–scalable–dimensions of hope through sociolinguistic action, by which hope comes to be rescaled from mere abstraction toward a form of social change.

While the desire for “One Nation, One Language” has played a key role in language policies around the world, I argue that it is not really what drives the English-only movement in the United States. Some previous work on language and power oversimplifies how power works, since a policy seeming quaint and innocuous (and therefore impervious to criticism) can be just as powerful as a policy framed in terms of nationalism or globalization. Instead, drawing on Jan Blommaert’s theory of “upscaling,” I argue that downscaling plays just as pivotal a role in the English-only movement, and I examine examples that cut across my interviews, archival research, observations, and policy documents. I begin by analyzing examples of downscaling on its own, then turn toward situations where people engage in both upscaling and downscaling in a single text or interaction. Ultimately, scaling in either direction can be a way to claim linguistic authority. At the same time, sometimes policymakers do not walk this tightrope successfully, and there can be discursive dissonance. I argue that this sort of dissonance played a role in the eventual downfall of Frederick County’s Official English ordinance.

The treatments with the strongest evidence base for EDs use collaborative weighing at the beginning of each session, but this may be challenging for patients with comorbid OCD due to their increased tendency for rigidity, reassurance seeking, perfectionism, and a decreased tolerance for uncertainty. Personalized interventions should be devised to target the specific factors that maintain the patient’s disorder, such as addressing the core fears and how this impacts weight exposures (e.g., blind or viewed). Collaborative weighing is appropriate and needed for most patients. It is important to be mindful that certain aspects of providing weight information can become obsessive with this comorbidity, and engaging in hidden weighing can be useful in increasing tolerance of uncertainty related to changes in weight. Identifying and addressing compulsions and escape behaviors and encouraging the patient to abandon these behaviors and face the possibility of relapse can be beneficial for treatment in the long term.

The increasing penetration of information and communication technologies in the economy enabled the emergence of digital business practices in a wide range of industries. The digitization of information products, service processes, product information, and pricing altered the functioning of the markets. Once products and processes are digital, communication technologies facilitate the instantaneous exchange of the information. This immediate availability of product and service information and pricing enhances competition: digital networks can accelerate and even automate product and price comparison, making consumers more powerful in the marketplace. This chapter focuses on the economics of digital information products and implications for strategy.

The Introduction argues that Faulkner discovered an epistemology for networked systems in the creation of his own imagined landscape. I present two major stages in which Faulkner’s discovery took place: (1) an earlier vision portraying how networks scale, circulate information, centralize, and produce potentially tyrannical paradigms of top-down vertical power; and (2) another view of dynamical networks that are constantly adapting to produce novel forms of movement and behavior. The Faulkner that this study evokes is at once the modernist developing a spatial narrative practice describing the emergence of complex social networks and the Romantic for whom the immanent life was paramount and even sacrosanct. That these two trajectories of inquiry and spiritual belief are not easily reconcilable gives philosophical and moral weight to the landscape and characters that Faulkner invented. They also provide a striking meditation on what it means for human beings to find themselves in systems so vast and ubiquitous that they can no longer remember what it was like to live outside them and, thus, to think outside of their ideological dicta.

This chapter answers the question: what is an internet platform, anyway? Why is it special? The definition focuses on the network characteristics of internet services that leverage positive network externalities to grow to an immense scale, permit a high degree of behavioral novelty and diversity, and operate under an economic model that profits primarily by taxing the activity thus promoted (including by taxing user attention). This is analogized to the basic operating model of political states.