This chapter examines how essayistic personae enabled writers and readers to understand personhood as a means of making a unity out of multiplicity. It draws on Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the person to track how essayistic personae both depicted corporate personhood and themselves served as corporate persons, allowing many writers, real or imagined, to write as one. It also uses Locke’s theory of personhood to show how essayistic personae present conscious persons as contingent unities imposed upon multitudinous thoughts and experiences. Essayistic personae not only extended personhood to non-human beings, such as corporations and animals, they also drew attention to the limited nature of personhood for many human beings, including married women and enslaved people.

This chapter meditates on how Black erotic bodies manifest in a white supremacist world. It contends that said bodies congeal through an amalgamation of fungible gender and material/discursive dispossession. These inheritances afford Black people the opportunity to conjure fugitive freedom practices, such as multiplicity, which enable Black people to harness erotic power in the pursuit of self-determined notions of pleasure and intimacy with themselves and within Black communities. To buttress my argument, I draw on the work of Akwaeke Emezi – namely, their debut novel Freshwater and an essay about their gender transition surgeries – and Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” to illustrate how multiplicity is a freedom practiced undergirded by erotic power such that practitioners need not minimize or eliminate contradictory or complex aspects of themselves in order to access pleasure and intimacy along personal and interpersonal registers.

This book explores the coevolution of firms, sectors, regions, and national economies in the Global South and explains their economic performance as a dynamic outcome of interactions between the multiple levels of innovation systems. This book counters prevailing views on economic development and offers a unique contribution to the literature on economic catch-up. Whereas the traditional linear view of development has taken a “more is better” approach, this book advocates that latecomers should pursue detours or leapfrogging, which conforms with a “less is better” approach. Instead of the conventional prioritization of manufacturing, this book proposes prioritizing domestic ownership and knowledge in specific sectors and regions and asserts that no country has successfully developed a high-income economy without generating a certain number of globally recognized big businesses. Instead of placing priority on free markets as the Washington Consensus does, this book argues that economic catch-up is only possible with active and planned government interventions, which are needed to overcome latecomers’ disadvantages regarding barriers to entry at the middle-income stage.

Democracy, sovereignty, citizenship, and the rule of law are foundational yet contested concepts. Their foundational role has been extensively discussed with reference to modern nation-states and global order, and their contested quality has come to the fore through norm contestation. This chapter suggests that contestation’s move into the limelight represents an opportunity to address the future of democracies. It argues that first, norm contestedness is expected due to its value- and practice-based roots. Second, contestedness has implications for everyday norm-use and academic norm-conceptualization. This chapter conceives norms and their multiple contestations as the constitutive ‘glue’ of global ordering rather than as a ‘means’ towards implementing governance rules. This chapter identifies a conceptual gap between state-negotiated norms of global governance and societal contestation of norms. It recalls Tully’s ‘Unfreedom of the Moderns’ claim and the central role of agonism in including the multitude of affected stakeholders in establishing norms of governance. Using the cycle-grid model, this chapter frames democracy from below.

This chapter considers how the Routine Dynamics debate around technology, artifacts and materiality has evolved over the course of the past two decades. In reviewing the progress achieved so far, I show how the field is gearing up to address the important challenges posed, among other things, by new forms of artifacts and technology, and new ways of organizing. In so doing, I discuss how the latest advances in routines and materiality (artifacts at the centre, performativity and multiplicity/fluid ontology) can help us address the theoretical, methodological and empirical challenges raised by contemporary material phenomena. I conclude by laying out an agenda for future studies of routines, technology, artifacts and materiality.

Actor-network theory has always been an inspiring theoretical and methodological source for Routine Dynamics research. Seeing routines as networks of actants and as a consequence rather than a cause of collective action enabled scholars to move away from a priori assumptions about the world and shift their attention to situated performances, multiplicity, and connections-in action. In this chapter, I provide a brief historical account of actor-network theory highlighting some of its central authors and their work before unravelling how Routine Dynamics scholars have appropriated it—ironically, often as an undercover actor that remains invisible at first sight—and conclude by reflecting on how actor-network theory can continue to be of use for and shape Routine Dynamics research.

Huang and Mendoza’s introduction to the fourth volume of Asian American Literatures in Transition offers a refresher on Lisa Lowe’s formative critical work, Immigrant Acts (1996), published at the beginning of the time period covered in this volume. The authors reframe Lowe’s terms “heterogeneity,” “hybridity,” and “multiplicity” within several watershed moments affecting Asian Americans and other groups in the USA: including the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), the September 11 attacks, the decriminalization of sodomy (2003), the COVID pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement. While many of these events exacerbated the vulnerability and precarity of some Asian American groups, the turbulence of the time fueled the Asian American literary imagination as writers in this period drew on more representational strategies for their literary experimentations than in previous periods. This volume covers precisely these tensions: artistic proliferations in the face of injustice, recognition in the face of social erasures, innovation in the face of neoliberal white supremacy’s monopoly on wealth and violence.

This chapter concludes by emphasizing the multiple character of the law. Summarizing the multiple beings of the law as they have appeared in this book – the law as a distribution machine, the law as a narrative practice, the law as a matter of shuffling documents, the law as a matter of temporal ordering and folding – this chapter raises the question how we may make sense of this multiplicity. Here, I argue we must refuse to reduce these multiplicities to one preferred abstraction. Instead of such hyper-explanations, I argue we must retain multiplicities in order to justice to law’s multi-scalar, multi-temporal, and non-local character. In order to do so, I suggest we think of the law as a hyper-object. The notion of the hyper-object forces us to situate and account for our collaborations with this strange being, so that we will never be able to claim we have apprehended the law in its totality, yet we need not sacrifice description entirely. Such a conception calls for situated accounts, and remains sensitive to the fact that social and legal life is always ongoing, never not concrete, irreducibly multiple.

Chapter 5 is devoted to studying the non-existence of concentration solutions for other singularly perturbed elliptic problems. Results in this direction are obtained by using a local Pohozaev identity. As an application of these results, the existence of infinitely many sign-changing solutions for the Brezis-Nirenberg problem is proved.

The Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction method and its variants are usually used to construct solutions for elliptic problems without small parameters. In Chapter 4, these methods are adapted to study the Schrodinger equations with subcritical growth. The results in Chapter 4 show that the non-compactness of some elliptic problems may give rise to the existence of infinitely many positive solutions whose energy can be arbitrarily large. Such results cannot be obtained by using the abstract critical points theories.

This paper explores Platonic and Aristotelian thought on multiplicity, forms, and matter, and considers the relationship between Abrahamic and pagan understandings of the order of divine creation.