Chapter Seven illustrates that social science attention to fatherhood remains under-developed in China and Japan, and when studies did emerge they tended to follow the epistemologies and methodologies of the American school of child development. However, the chapter emphasises key differences whereby Japan is understood to be an East Asian exemplar of a welfare regime that has taken a ‘Nordic turn’ while China is considered to have exacerbated gender inequalities among young people and young married couples trough the One Child Family Planning Policy (1979) and the privatisation of housing. On the other hand, both China and Japan are illustrated to have dismantled Confucian patriarchy in favour of welfare regime development and the social policy regulation of fatherhood. Yet both regimes continue to stigmatise young professional single-women as non-married ‘parasite singles’ (Japan) or ‘left-over women’ (China).

Chapter Two illustrates that the dual predominance of a) pyschological perspectives on father salience to child development and b) sociological perspectives on ‘fatherlessness’ in the USA represented distinct, prominent and paradigmatic features of the American literature. Chapter two charts the ‘invention’ of the cost recovery model of child support by the US welfare regime in 1974, as the template within the English-speaking welfare regimes. In addition, Chapter Two also explains that neo-patriarchal perspectives on fatherhood amplified and flourished under the American neo-liberal and neo-conservative paradigm of combining welfare ‘reform’ with the promotion of marriage under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA, 1996).

When Kofi Annan was elected the first African to head the United Nations in 1997, he faced an organisation that was dysfunctional, had a reputation for being anti-business, and it had little to contribute to the onward march of globalisation.To address these problems, Annan forged a strong alliance with the corporate sector, launching the Global Compact in 2000. This programme encouraged transnational corporations to adopt universal norms of behaviour that had been established through various UN treaties. This programme also allowed Annan to harness the private sector to support his Millennial Development Goals, which was launched the same year. Through it, targets were set to deal with a range of social problems, thereby providing a novel way of coordinating global action between governments, international agencies, nongovernmental organisations, and the corporate sector.By the end of his term, Annan had created a new pathway to global governance, built around norms and measureable targets. The result was greater cooperation between members of the world’s community to solve social and environmental problems. Annan was motivated to establish these alternative programmes to compensate for the entrenched dysfunction within the UN General Assembly.

Chapter Five identifies an increase in the significance of fatherhood to Irish social policy debates, particularly those surrounding prosecution through the courts for non-payment of child maintenance payments, the Constitutional recognition of fathers outside marriage and normative concerns with ‘vulnerable fathers’ in Irish family support debates. The analysis reveals that the American model of fatherhood strongly influenced the politicisation of fatherhood in Ireland, and that Irish social policy debates tended to reflect normative academic traditions of avoiding Nordic, and in particular, Swedish welfare and gender ideologies in favour of selective debates concerned with a residua of ‘vulnerable fathers’.

Governments regulate in response to crises of all kinds. Regulatory policy has emerged as a distinctive field of government in the past 25 years, with standards for cost-benefit analysis, impact assessment, consultation, and compliance. But many 21st century risks linked to innovation or cross-border risks are not easily addressed through regulation; international regulatory co-operation works best on technical issues. Political leadership will be needed to create new alliances or frameworks to address global catastrophic risks. The private sector and government face security risks but of very different kinds, affecting hard and soft infrastructures. The new security economy defined by states has led to a revival of command-and-control regulation, and to something new on a global scale, extra-territorial regulatory reach. Expanding the scope for innovation will help the commercial economy generate solutions to collective problems.

This chapter covers the recent history of plantation archaeology in the Caribbean as it intersects with the discourse of race, ethnicity, and capitalism. Analysis of the artifacts and landscapes in relation to the Caribbean plantation complex allows for renewed questions about the development of race and capital in places where the written record is insufficient. Particularly as it pertains to studies of race, ethnicity, and capital, plantation archaeology in the Caribbean has coalesced around three major themes: (1) African cultural retentions; (2) trade, consumption, and access; and (3) landscapes and social relations.

The chapter discusses the respective locations and “values” of Indigeneity and Blackness vis-à-vis whiteness and ethnoracial mixings in ideological constructions of national identity in two different Latin American historical periods: “monocultural mestizaje” and multiculturalism. After delving into the ideological foundations of monocultural mestizaje and “racial democracy,” the chapter considers the advent of what has been called “the Latin American multicultural turn,” which began emerging unevenly in the region in the late 1980s. The “turn” brought about new official narrations of the nation, in a move away from the “monocultural mestizaje” ideology of national identity that reifies the mestizo as the prototypical national identity, to instead nominally recognize and “embrace” national ethnoracial diversity in a wave of new constitutions and constitutional reforms. The chapter concludes that both racial hierarchy and the mestizaje ideology of national identity remain alive and well, as the colonial racial order has adapted to contemporary circumstances, including the ideological shift from monocultural mestizaje to multiculturalism.

In this chapter, I ask us to consider raciosemiotics – a way of examining signification, or semiosis (producing meaning through signs), that rigorously attends to bodies, feelings, histories – as means for testifying to Black life and death. I offer a raciosemiotics framework as one way to bear witness, or testify, to practices of making meaning through and about Blackness that either hinder or sustain Black life. I cast raciosemiotics to capture past and future work that centers meaning making about and through racialized signs (including the racialized body) and I imagine it as a possible tool in an abolitionist linguistic anthropology, following Savannah Shange’s offerings. The second half of the chapter applies a raciosemiotic lens to testify to multimodal practices that mete out “discursive-material” harm; and a collective practice of publicly censuring acts that threaten Black life and living (i.e., naming whiteness). In this discussion, I also briefly attend to everyday practices of Black expression that refuse or disregard anti-Black epistemes.

This chapter focuses on what race is and what race is not by looking at the interplay of race and human variation. It notes that while race is not biologically real, the invention of race as a social construct is real in cultural, social, and economic terms, often with deleterious biological consequences.

Located across a large swath of land in the north of Australia, the Gulf Country has a history encompassing lives where race has featured predominantly. In the context of European colonization from around the mid nineteenth century, relations between people who have become known colloquially as Whitefellas and Blackfellas have been central to the region’s society, cultural mix, and economy. As understood in everyday language, Whitefellas are known to have no Aboriginal ancestry, while Blackfellas are descended from forebears belonging to one or more of the Indigenous language groups connected to traditional lands.

Like Europeans all over the Global South, settlers and administrators in East Africa used the concept of race as a weapon to oppress, elevating themselves and for decades enjoying the luxury of immunity from having their “race” used against them. However, in the context of post-independence, whites came under an uncomfortable spotlight as many Kenyans of African descent questioned their entitlement to belong to the nation in light of their enduring and extreme privilege. The typification of whiteness in the Kenyan discourses traced here thus emerges as a backlash against a history of colonial theft and frames whites as outsiders, conspicuously Other. Time is folded and flattened in these formulations; even whites born long after independence, or who bought their land from Africans, become “white settlers” or “land-grabbers,” and decidedly not “Kenyan.”