This chapter discusses the importance of collaborative relationships in civic life, and how the relationships that people would value do not always arise on their own. Instead, there can be an unmet desire to collaborate. It underscores why it’s important to distinguish between two types of goals for collaborative relationships: informal collaboration oriented toward knowledge exchange, and formal collaboration oriented toward projects with shared ownership, decision-making authority, and accountability. It also introduces the book’s main argument, which is that in addition to commonly cited factors such as resource constraints and a lack of organizational incentives, unmet desire arises because potential collaborators (who often begin as strangers) can be uncertain how to relate to each other. Uncertainty about relationality is a key barrier to new collaborative relationships. Last, the chapter also connects a rich understanding of the science of collaboration to several other topics: the nature of democratic agency, how to strengthen the link between science and society, the nature of discursive participation as a form of civic engagement, and how we conceptualize civic competence.

In the spring of 1593, a spate of viciously xenophobic libels appeared throughout London. The most notorious of these, the so-called Dutch Church libel, landed Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe in some trouble, possibly due to its prominent allusions to Marlowe’s plays. This chapter argues that the collaborative, censored playscript Sir Thomas More reprises the incendiary confluence of libel, xenophobia, and drama that took place in 1593. The play’s opening scenes dramatize the anti-immigrant Evil May Day riot of 1517 with an eye to the 1590s, showing the strangers’ crimes and the violent resistance of London’s citizens. The citizens take their grievances public once all legal avenues for redress have failed. Yet libel and riot are not the only extralegal recourses in the play. The latter two-thirds of Sir Thomas More track the rise and fall of its titular character, who himself repeatedly confronts the limits of the law. Thomas More’s career extends the initial dramatization of libel into an extended meditation on the remedies available to any subject afflicted by unjust law, from bills and libels to riot to the vexed administration of equity and the vagaries of conscience.

In this chapter, the author compares female serial killers (FSKs) and male serial killers (MSKs) and describes crime location differences as well as victim differences. Most MSKs targeted at least one stranger, whereas only a small percentage of FSKs did. In contrast, most FSKs killed someone they knew or were related to, whereas less than half of MSKs killed someone they knew, and only a few killed someone to whom they were related by blood or marriage. MSKs were 18 times more likely to stalk victims. FSKs most frequently killed males and females, but MSKs most frequently killed females. Serial killers did not commonly target only their same gender. FSKs’ most frequent method of killing was poisoning, whereas MSKs’ most frequent method was asphyxiation. There were some murder method commonalities. The author discusses her general observations of FSKs vs. MSKs and provides preliminary new data comparing serial killer taking of crime trophies. The cases of MSKs Robert Yates and Jerome Brudos illustrate stark differences in MSK crimes compared to FSK crimes and illustrate psychological concepts.

This chapter explores the crises of the Roman and American republics. Understanding these crises requires that we view politics as an arena of identity contestation rather than simply interest articulation. What changes in both Rome and the United States is that participants came to see each other as Strangers, no longer sharing the same background assumptions, the same sense of the past, nor the same anticipation of the future. Borne of distrust, norms of getting things down turned into norms of obstruction. This had implications for how politics was experienced. The changes in these norms not only disabled these institutions, making them unable to actualize a future, but also made possible alterations in the political framework that might have been inconceivable before. In particular, one sees the elevation of individuals who offered solutions by promising to bypass those ineffective and unresponsive institutions. That is, as institutions and processes become distant abstractions that no longer answer to fundamental questions of the future of the community, the individual becomes the tangible personification of politics, answering these questions in a singular voice.

Focusing on the ways in which Shakespeare’s Othello defies the expectations of its early audiences, this essay argues that the play should be considered as an experiment that can offer new perspectives on race, religion, and the stage in early modern England. In almost every respect, the figure of Othello and his Venetian and Cypriot contexts are the result of Shakespearean innovation. He is the first Christian Moor on the stage; he is racialized differently; his trajectory intentionally defies the model established by the popular "Turk play." He even speaks differently from those "strangers" that had gone before. Reflecting in detail on the nature of those innovations reveals the extent to which the play was a sustained challenge to assumptions regarding race, religion, and the theatricality of difference that had hitherto dominated onstage and beyond. It was an experiment that proved enduringly influential.

Chapter 2 depicts the current situation of Muslims in Asante. I briefly summarise the historical developments since the early 2000s and discuss the demographics of the Muslim minority in Asante. I describe zongos as wards of strangers and Muslim communities and narrate the history of one of these wards in detail, thereby introducing Kokote Zongo, the main site of my fieldwork and ethnography, and I offer a bird’s-eye view of its social structure. I conclude the chapter with two accounts of how people in this ward cope and live with poverty. As I argue, the history and social dynamics of these wards matter to the ways in which the people there live their religion.

This chapter examines the circumstances when a stranger to a trust becomes liable as if he is a trustee because he has become involved in some way with a trust. The stranger will be liable to compensate the trust fund for any losses suffered. This is relevant where the trustees canot be found or where a trustee is bankrupt and therefore has no funds with which to compensate the trust fund. There are three instances where a stranger will become liable as if he were trustee: either acting as a trustee de so tort, or knowingly receiving trust property or knowingly assisting in a breach of trust. The test for liability where a third party receives trust property has varied over the years . The test today is based on unconscionability. The test for dishonest assistance is based on an objective test for dishonesty. This is more in line with the criminal test of dishonesty and replaces a combined test which involves a subjective element on behalf of the wrongdoer. Where a third party holds himself as if he were a trustee but intermeddles with the trust property then he may be liable.