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The first chapter lays out the ancient basis for the claims for exceptionality of the Ethiopian highlanders who call themselves the Habesha, from their ancient empires through their early modern ones. The historical record indicates not only that the Habesha have been central to world history, but also that they have been engaged for millennia in convincing powerful outsiders to recognize and respect them.

Detailed discussion of Nietzsche’s later thought continues in a further chapter. His often-expressed hostility towards Darwinism is consistent with a preoccupation with themes that are central to the Darwinian tradition, such as the struggle for existence, adaptation, selection and ‘fitness’. Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘will to power’ signals a dramatic shift away from the hedonistic psychology he had championed throughout his partnership with Rée, and is also intended to provide the basis for a kind of natural selection, but one which is for individual exceptionality rather than for survival or reproduction.

This chapter highlights another habit of thought that compromises one's ability to think clearly about strategies for governing in the United States: the doctrine of exceptionalism—the idea that there is something unique about governance in the American context. This mistaken belief makes it harder to learn from the experience of other states. There is a temptation to suggest that the United States is exceptional only because of the emphasis that Americans put on their own exceptionality. But even this is not true. People in most countries see something special about their own circumstances. Indeed, the feeling of exceptionality is shared almost universally, and rightly so. Conditions facing leaders in any one state are different from those facing any other state. Governance strategies must fit those conditions, and consequently one should expect policies and institutions to vary as well. This is why one should be wary about “one size fits all” prescriptions for governmental reform. Still, one should not get too carried away with this emphasis on variation. Even if circumstances change, there is one important commonality: leaders in all states, at all points in time, deal with the realities of building and maintaining a state.

This chapter examines the counterfactual thoughts and causal explanations that people create for exceptional and unexpected antecedents and outcomes. Four questions have puzzled psychologists and philosophers interested in causation and counterfactuality: (1) How do counterfactual ‘if only’ thoughts affect causal thoughts? (2) How do causal thoughts affect counterfactual thoughts? (3) How do causal and counterfactual thoughts differ? And (4) How do semi-factual ‘even if’ thoughts affect causal thoughts? I sketch answers to these four questions based on two central claims. First, counterfactual thoughts require people to construct a mental representation of two possibilities, the counterfactual conjecture and the presupposed factual reality. Second, there are different sorts of causes: ‘strong’ causes are necessary and sufficient for their outcome; and ‘enabling’ causes are necessary but not sufficient for their outcome.

This chapter places the Chinese classroom within a social context. Using Bronfenbrenner's bioecological systems theory of human development as the theoretical framework, the chapter describes some of the important social and cultural influences on the academic achievement of Chinese children.

The chapter opens with historical examples that drive home the point that most groups make up stories to proclaim their own exceptionality. The earliest attempts to measure beauty, especially with faces, were contaminated with such biases, despite claiming to be “objective.” Setting aside parochial prejudices, facial attractiveness can be measured reliably.

This chapter focuses on the second nodal point in the policy-making discourse on migration and climate change, which is the people who are at the centre of the phenomenon analysed in the previous chapter. People are also central to this discourse, for without people whose mobilities are in some way being affected, the abstract phenomenon of the migration and climate change nexus would remain as such, an abstract phenomenon. However, this is not to say that an easily identifiable community of affected people exists or that the lives of those people who are perceived as being affected by the nexus can be slotted into existing systems for understanding and classifying people on the move. One commonality shared by the people at the centre of the migration and climate change nexus is the exceptionality that is created around them. The basis of this exceptionality being identified as movement reveals a sedentary bias underlying the conceptualisation of the migration and climate change nexus.

Solutions to free riding, whether stability or growth free riding, are thought to be found in the provision of incentives. Yet the empirical findings of this chapter suggest that domestic fiscal rules, such as debt brakes, did not impact on the fiscal policy responses to the Great Recession. Similarly, EU-level agreements (the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and the newly created European Economic Recovery Plan (EERP)) did not impact on fiscal policy choices. First, the majority of domestic fiscal rules were equipped with exceptionality clauses. As a result, they did not impose stern constraints on fiscal policy in hard times. Second, the EERP and SGP were meaningless for fiscal policy outcomes; member states adopted stimulus programs as they saw fit with little concern for EU-level agreements or EU-wide aims for stability and growth.

Many children with exceptionalities can participate successfully in group-composition activities as well as create works of their own when they are provided with proper tools and support. Accommodations and suggestions for including special learners in composition classes and programs are offered. Specific attention is given to a selection of more prevalent physical disabilities and learning disorders. The chapter also features suggestions for modeling and role-playing this type of teaching with pre-service teachers before they interact with PreK-12 students. The final chapter of this section uses the five domains of teaching and learning to discuss modifying instruction for children with special learning needs. In addition to the five domains, that chapter employs four teaching approaches to examine the suggestions found in the others chapters in this section in order to provide guidance for teachers working with children with special needs within the framework of composition lessons and activities. Finally the final chapter in this section provides a model for constructing case studies of children that pre-service teachers could use to further their understanding of the learning processes experienced the wide range of students likely to be found in school music programs.

This Afterword summarizes the arguments made throughout the book, underscoring the variety of ways in which women filmmakers draw on generic conventions. It focuses on the benefits of considering the mode of generic production not as an obstacle, but as a resource for creative imagining. It highlights that the constructed opposition between women’s culture and men’s culture has a profound impact on critical reception and discursive circulation of films, and details several critical strategies employed to make sense of particular examples of women’s cinema. The central argument is that the discourses around “exceptionality” (and in some cases “masculinity”) that surround women filmmakers tend to marginalize their genre film production as a rare anomaly and obscure other possible dimensions of their films: the popularity among a wide range of audiences, engagement with feminism filtered through the generic, intertextual connections with other women’s work, to give only some examples. Rather than being rare examples of a subversive ‘counter-cinema’, all of the films under discussion show the potential advantages of conceptualising women’s cinema as genre cinema – understood as a ‘constellation’ of cultural, aesthetic and ideological materials – which facilitates a more inclusive range of possibilities than those allowed by the traditional auteurist readings.

As it embraces around 25 percent of the human population, post-socialist transformation is by all means a process of historical significance. It is hardly possible to imagine complex and extensive systemic changes that equal those taking place in parts of Europe and Asia. The process is twofold in nature; from the political perspective, authoritarian regimes are being replaced by democracies and, from the socio-economic perspective, the systems are being transformed from centrally-planned economies to market economies. This chapter examines the process of post-socialist transformation. It begins with the analysis of the general theory and discusses the main threads of the debate on the modes of transformation in reference to the so-called Washington Consensus. This is followed by a detailed analysis of post-socialist transformation in China. It is argued that China is indeed a post-socialist state in the process of systemic reformulation. The examination concerns China's transformation's political and economic features, its chronology and various perspectives. It is compared with the processes in other post-socialist countries. Finally, the developmental exceptionality of China's transformation is illustrated using quantitative examination.

The introduction to the book explains the theoretical and historical arguments that articulate the book. Thus, the introduction is composed of four parts that seek to establish lines of reading the different contributions received. We argue that it is necessary to adopt a new perspective to read the Amazon region, in which local, minimal stories / histories are the focus of the analysis. This is one of the connotations that intimacy adopts in our book. The introduction, in fact, explains at length how these different meanings of the intimate (the local, the popular, the homely, the quotidian, and forms of friendship and of sexual intimacies) are presented in the articles reunited in the volume.

This chapter argues that sovereignty is distinct, but not separate, from democracy. It also argues that the defining feature of sovereignty is not the exception but rather the justification of violence. Finally, it outlines three ways in which sovereignty justifies violence with reference to how refugees are perceived by sovereign states.

Over the past twenty years or so, Latin America has experienced a “new” pattern of violence shaped by persistent social inequality and exclusion in the region. Compared to the old violence, however, this new pattern of violence is less openly political and more “economic” and “social.” Paradoxically, it coexists with citizenship and formally democratic regimes and is employed by armed actors and “violence brokers” (for example, gangs, criminal organizations, vigilantes) as a flexible resource to attain goals such as economic gains or social status and control, rather than to secure formal political or state power. This chapter examines the nature of contemporary violence in Latin America and how new violence has ended Mexico's so-called “exceptionality.” It first considers the concept of new violence and the main perpetrators of violence in present-day Latin America. It then discusses three scenarios of new violence: democratic counterinsurgency, violence in illiberal democracies, and urban criminal violence in nearly consolidated democracies. Using this typology, the chapter analyzes contemporary violence in Mexico.

This chapter explores the role of intention in debates on animals creating art, the autonomy and mastery of the art-producing animal, and assumptions of exceptionality and intention rather than instinct in artistic creation.

The notion of default and override can serve linguistic analysis in different ways. In the lexicon defaults are used for the resolution of rule competition, to capture lexical blocking, to select the right stem where there are choices, and when used in inheritance systems to provide for instances that do not meet every characteristic of their class allowing exceptionality to be expressed as semi-regularity. Defaults in syntax and semantics play a more organizational, ontological role, expressing markedness in lists of features and their possible values and resolving conflicts that may arise when two sub-systems intersect. The chapters discuss how defaults and overrides can address specific linguistic phenomena, suggest an architecture of the grammar, and assess the role of morphology in language and cognition.

Mushunguli (Somali Chizigula, Kizigua; ISO [xma]) is an endangered, under-described Bantu language spoken in the Lower Jubba River area of Somalia and in U.S. diaspora communities. This chapter presents a set of exceptions to hiatus resolution in Mushunguli. Hiatus is usually resolved in one of three ways: glide formation, whereby prevocalic high vowels i,u become glides j,w; fusion, whereby the low central vowel a fuses with the following vowel; and deletion, whereby sequences of identical vowels are reduced to a single short vowel. A set of high vowel-initial stems resolve hiatus normally in contexts where glide formation and deletion are expected, but fail to do so in contexts where fusion is expected. A clear, concise derivational analysis of these data is presented, with the aim of offering a useful benchmark for future research into hiatus resolution and phonological exceptionality.