This volume examines one of the defining tensions of our era: how to harness the transformative power of artificial intelligence while preserving responsibility, sovereignty, and human judgement.

Bringing together scholars and practitioners, this volume moves beyond hype and alarmism to explore AI across three interconnected levels: global systems, organisational governance, and personal ethics. It addresses digital sovereignty, cybersecurity, sustainability, inclusion, healthcare, education, and accessibility, highlighting both the environmental and social costs of AI and its potential to advance innovation within the Sustainable Development Goals.

Rather than offering easy solutions, the book advocates embracing technological possibility while insisting on transparency, accountability, and public values. At stake is not only how AI functions, but how it reshapes institutions, knowledge, and everyday life.

Balancing lightness with weight, this book invites readers to reflect critically on progress, power, and responsibility in the age of intelligent machines.

This volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones. They are deeply political arrangements that embed values, distribute power and shape whose knowledge counts.

Bringing together scholars from science and technology studies, critical data studies, media studies, organisation studies, arts-based research and political sociology, this edited volume explores openness as an ongoing socio-technical process rather than a fixed ideal. The book moves from the partial openness of early Internet standards and free and open source software, through contested practices of opening government data and public infrastructures, to struggles over inclusion and governance in scholarly and cultural knowledge infrastructures. This is followed by community-driven experiments in care, repair and alternative openness and concludes with forward-looking contributions on how to keep infrastructures open for research, how to fund infrastructures as digital commons and how to mobilise open infrastructures for democratic resilience and economic sovereignty.

The contributions trace how principles such as accessibility, transparency, participation and collective stewardship are enacted in practice—and how they are challenged by commercial capture, asymmetries of expertise, cultural governance and geopolitical inequalities. Across theoretical chapters and rich empirical case studies, the book investigates the governance of open infrastructures, the politics of alternative technological arrangements and struggles for epistemic justice within knowledge systems.

By foregrounding power relations, ethical tensions and questions of responsibility, this book rethinks openness as a site of political negotiation rather than a technical solution. The volume offers critical insights for researchers, policymakers, engineers and civil society actors concerned with digital commons, democratic governance and the future of open knowledge infrastructures in increasingly contested political and technical environments.

A companion website, www.openinfrastructures.net , extends the volume through author interviews, supplementary materials and additional resources that document the making of the book and provide further insights into the debates on governing, sustaining, and contesting open digital knowledge infrastructures.

Colour Matters provides a fresh investigation of colour in the long nineteenth century. Across fourteen richly researched essays, the book explores the materiality, politics, and sensory experience of colour—from synthetic dyes and chrome pigments to the role of colour in medicine, gender, empire, and identity. By weaving together art history, literature, anthropology, science, and conservation, the contributors reveal a dynamic world where chromatic experimentation shaped aesthetics, technology, and social life. Colour Matters offers an essential contribution to colour studies and the humanities’ material turn, showing how pigment and perception illuminate both past and present.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of art history, literature, cultural studies, and the history of science in the long eighteenth-century, as well as curators, conservators, and readers fascinated by the histories of colour and material culture.

War Machine is a speculative sounding of the myriad entanglements of technology, ecology, discourse, politics, and conflict shaping the contemporary environment. Taking the tools of geopolitical competition and control as its formal and conceptual basis—wargame simulations, artificial intelligence, weaponised drones, territorial enclosure, and extractivist economics—War Machine presents a series of digitally simulated conflicts over the most ecologically vulnerable areas of the Earth, using the data gathered to generate hybrid visual poems that stand in for the multitude of political, conceptual, and economic battles that are presently raging across the face of a profoundly endangered planet.A hybrid work of generative criticism and poetry, War Machine depicts the intensive complexities of the present moment through conducting an experimental textual performance, attempting to enfold and perform, rather than simply describe, challenging conjunctions of competing discourses and activities. The resulting stream of outputs and interpretive potentials preclude the ascendency of any “definitive” critical narrative, refusing any straightforward integration with existing canons of worldly diagnosis, but also illustrating opportunities for resistant play and critical-creative possibility within the uncertainty.The consciously unconventional gesture at the heart of War Machine is in attempt at modelling an adventurous, forward-facing approach, in both thought and practice, that refuses inaction when dealing with otherwise devastating scenarios. It is an approach that acknowledges head-on myriad worldly harms, seemingly insurmountable, while still contributing to the aesthetic, affective, and conceptual foundations from which alternative modes of knowing, being, and meaning are developed and justified.

This monograph offers a rich and insightful study of The Sentencing of Jesus, an ancient Jewish polemical narrative describing the trial and execution of Jesus, which is the earliest of all the Toledot Yeshu texts. The volume includes a substantial historical introduction, carefully edited synopses of the Aramaic, Judaeo-Arabic and Hebrew versions, detailed philological and exegetical notes on the text and its transmission history, and an English translation. In his comments, Bohak explores recurring themes in Late Antique literature—such as the apologetic and polemical uses of authentic or forged protocols of trials and executions, envisioning an enemy hanged on an unexpected tree, the humiliation of dragging a corpse through the streets for all to see, and the use of magical handbooks and of spells to heal or harm—shedding new light on the cultural and literary resonances of these motifs. Detailed linguistic analyses trace translations and mistranslations across Aramaic, Hebrew, and Judaeo-Arabic traditions.

By reconstructing an ancient polemical text that has previously been known only in a fragmentary manner, and by situating it both within its Late Antique context and in the context of previous scholarship, this book makes a significant contribution to the study of Judaism, and of Jewish-Christian relations, in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.