Unlike previous approaches to sustainable investing, focused primarily on excluding companies from problematic sectors such as tobacco, the aim of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) integration is to incorporate the assessment of ESG characteristics within mainstream investment analysis. This aim has given rise to claims that ESG integration is not about value judgments but focuses only on neutral risk–return calculations. Against such framing, this chapter argue that various ethical concerns inevitably arise when considering the quantification process underlying the generation of data used in ESG integration approaches. Drawing on the literature related to quantification and commensuration, the chapter identifies four areas in which ethical concerns can arise: (1) the strong focus on financial materiality; (2) the aggregation of disparate and often incommensurable ESG data; (3) ESG measurement problems; and (4) the treatment of ESG data as a private good. The chapter shows how quantification processes in these four areas give cause for ethical concerns related to which aspects of sustainability are rendered visible or invisible; how power relations between different field actors are structured by quantification; and which organizations have access to the opportunities that prevailing processes of quantification afford.

Akbari describes what it means to have a human body in the digital age and argues that datafication has transformed the materiality of the body in its very flesh and bone. This transformation is especially dangerous in uncertain spaces, such as borders and refugee camps, where identity becomes crucial and only certain categories of human bodies can pass. The consequences to those experiencing datafication of their bodies at the border are harsh and severe. However, the deliberate unruliness of the border paves the way for these spaces to become technological testing grounds, as evidenced by the development of technologies to track fleeing populations for the purposes of contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Akbari’s text oscillates deliberately between academic thinking, autobiographical accounts, pictures, and poetry, thus clearly denoting the discomfort of the human being living in a Code|Body.

Dimitri van den MeersscheThis chapter traces the many entanglements between international organizations and private actors in the space of global security governance. By analysing the controversies surrounding the mandate of Europol and the contribution of private actors in countering terrorism online, it describes three modalities of entanglement: (i) private actors as sites of data collection and providers of sources of information that are increasingly relied upon by international institutions, (ii) enrolment of private platforms in the implementation of governance projects by international organizations, and (iii) alignment of such governance projects to the logic of tech companies and platforms – what Johns has described as a ‘lean start up’ mentality. Having traced these multiple points of influence, interaction and interdependence, the chapter proposes an infrastructural approach to the study of such public–private cooperation. This implies a recognition of how law and materiality are entangled in the production of social order and attentiveness to the role of digital infrastructures and socio-technical protocols in redrawing the public–private divide and constituting, mediating and materializing the exercise of international institutional authority. These observations crystalize in an urgent call to direct our thinking on rights and regulation towards these infrastructural formations and the political affordances that they entail.

This chapter explores an overlooked aspect of Bloomsbury’s contradictory relationship to embodiment, materiality, and empire: their simultaneous embrace of early twentieth-century nudity and their condemnation of undress when it is expressed by the lower classes and colonial subjects. By focusing on the Studland beach photographs archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, this chapter considers the wider cultural context regarding nude images, both in terms of historical representation and practices of nakedness asks. Ultimately, the chapter asks: how might we understand Bloomsbury’s fascination with both photography and nudity at a time when nakedness and race together influenced colonial thinking and civilizing imperatives? The chapter argues that a consideration of Bloomsbury’s relationship to nude photography cannot be severed from the history in which whiteness is the normative racial marker for early twentieth-century Britons.

This chapter provides an overview of manuscript production and reception in the OE and ME periods. It focuses on how manuscripts were produced, the cognitive copying practices of its scribes, the subsequent use of manuscript texts by their readers, and the implications these issues have for the texts and data that survive. It considers the methodological issues arising from working on manuscripts in both their physical and edited forms. The chapter argues for the importance of considering manuscript evidence – including material aspects of the text – when using such texts as data for linguistic enquiry, and the value of this overlooked material for increasing our understanding of diachronic change. Finally, the chapter highlights and demonstrates some fruitful approaches to medieval textual material from the disciplines of historical sociolinguistics, dialectology, pragmatics and philology.

What is classical relief? Can “relief” ever be spoken of as a single category? Is it a “medium” in itself? If so, what exactly does it “mediate”? And how does the notion of artistic medium (which art history tends to use in relation to materials) relate to the more theoretical concept of “media” as tools or channels for the storage and transmission of information? This chapter attempts to crack open such questions by examining the terminology that is applied to relief work in Greek and Roman texts, focusing in particular on the problematic term typos, which is applied to relief sculpture, repoussé metalwork, terra-cotta moldings, engraved gems and (perhaps) sculptors’ models. Developing J. J. Pollitt’s foundational chapter on typoi in The Ancient View of Greek Art, it explores how technologies of making, materiality, and dimensionality contribute to the particular instability of the typos as a category of object and, in turn, the peculiar ontology of relief as a category of ancient art.

A critical and empirical archaeology of pastoralism has already begun to rewrite some of the long-standing “grand narratives” of pastoralism’s role in shaping ancient urbanism, trade, polities, and landscapes.

This chapter looks at the work and critical reception of B.S. Johnson (1933-73), focusing on the influence that the development of the critical term postmodernism on his reputation by dividing it into three stages of two decades each: before postmodernism (1960-1980), during postmodernism (1980-2000) and after postmodernism (2000 to present). It argues that Johnson’s career was essentially proto-postmodernist, engaged in a struggle to undermine the realist hegemony of the 1960s, but that the theoretical concerns of postmodern writing were at odds with his own and it was never a term he used or had the opportunity to refute. As a result his work remained unassimilable while postmodernism held sway and only later- with the aid of a biography- could criticism get to grips with Johnson’s double-coded rejection of convention and commitment to his own brand of social realism.

This chapter explores material language practices and their interaction with language ideologies. It investigates how oral, literal, and digital forms co-constitute discourses of normativity and prestige. Through observations of literacy practices, teaching, media, and participants’ reflections, the chapter studies materialisations of language and their ideological implications. The dominance of English writing in formal and institutional contexts contrasts with the variable use of oral Kriol, which resists standardisation. Efforts by the National Kriol Council to create a standardised orthography reveal tensions between fostering linguistic legitimacy and maintaining the anti-standard nature of Kriol. Digital communication amplifies these dynamics, bringing to the fore non-standardised writing that reflects local linguistic realities. Kriol’s oral and multimodal characteristics, perceived as spontaneous, creative, and resistant to disciplinary norms, challenge Western-centric ideologies that prioritise fixed standards. This shows that material language practices are culturally specific. A consideration of the role of materiality in language ideologies challenges universalised epistemologies.

This chapter introduces the study of language ideologies and the relationship between language, social belonging, and social order, particularly in the context of late modernity. It approaches linguistic categories as discursively constructed rather than naturally occurring. This frames language as a key lens for understanding human social organisation, emphasising that ideas about language reflect and co-construct broader social and political ideologies. Through a discussion of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological theories, the chapter critiques essentialist views of language. It introduces concepts such as social indexicality, standard language, prestige, and centring institutions to explore how language acquires social meaning and status. The chapter also examines the material dimensions of language, including the role of writing, sound, and tangible artefacts such as grammars and dictionaries in shaping linguistic ideologies and language categories. It lays the foundations for understanding languages as dynamic, constructed phenomena embedded in specific historical, cultural, and material contexts.

This chapter theorizes payment infrastructures as crucial material sites of hegemonic power in three different regards. First, the material form of payment technologies and the uneven routes of circulation produced by them are an integral part of the ways in which modern money and finance exercise power. Payment technology is not a neutral infrastructure, but a carrier of hegemonic power and potential site of hegemonic contestation. Second, payment infrastructure is inextricably connected to state security and sovereignty. State security and sovereignty were enabled and made durable with and through the payment infrastructure. Third, infrastructures are historically durable, though they may be rerouted or reinscribed. This chapter distills three elements that typify the hegemonic power of infrastructure and that can be used when taking “infrastructure” as the starting point for analysis. These elements are (1) sedimentation, (2) reach, and (3) disposition. The arguments are illustrated empirically by reference to the so-called financial war on terror, where financial infrastructures became a major but highly depoliticized site of security power. Empirically, this chapter focuses on the way in which the payment technology SWIFT and financial transactions are being appropriated for security purposes.