This chapter explores how public policy shapes healthy neighbourhoods and communities by addressing place as a fundamental determinant of health and wellbeing. It outlines a causation framework emphasising the interplay of biological, social, economic, historical, and environmental determinants, highlighting how places significantly influence health through material, psychosocial, biological, and behavioural pathways. Central to this discussion is the role of intersectoral public policies and multisectoral collaboration, particularly through the ‘Health in All Policies’ (HiAP) approach, to address complex societal issues across multiple domains, including housing, transport, employment, social infrastructure, and public spaces. The chapter introduces the ‘Place in All Policies’ (PiAP) model, adapting HiAP by emphasising community-driven, ecological, and culturally responsive governance frameworks. It concludes that effective policy must recognise and incorporate local and Indigenous knowledge, fostering community engagement and integrated policy frameworks to enhance the health, resilience, and sustainability of communities.

This chapter reviews the latest methods and datasets on cognitive networks as models of human cognition and behaviour. Despite some limitations, cognitive networks have significant potential for various case studies. This chapter identifies three primary applications for cognitive networks: (i) interpretation of cognitive processing across visual, auditory and semantic tasks and among different populations; (ii) predicting cognitive development, decline and performance in both healthy and clinical populations; and (iii) reconstructing semantic framing in texts and media. The chapter emphasises that cognitive networks can provide relevant tools for modelling human behaviour and the field can advance through careful statistical modelling, collaboration with other interpretable frameworks and the availability of rich datasets across tasks and contexts. The review highlights that cognitive networks offer new insights into complex human cognitive processes that were previously difficult to model, making them promising for further research and development. The chapter provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners interested in cognitive networks, emphasising their potential for a wide range of applications in cognitive and behavioural sciences. The findings suggest that cognitive networks can be an essential tool for advancing our understanding of human cognition and behaviour.

The military history of the Song Dynasty is a tale of contradictions: the first three emperors sought to replace the militocracy that had dominated society through the first half of the 10th century with a rising class of exam-recruited civil officials. This goal was institutionalized by the so-called Chanyuan treat in 1005, which exchanged wealth, territory, and pride in return for peace along the northern frontier. The Chanyuan settlement inaugurated a national strategy based on accommodation over confrontation, the disparagement of military men, and the subordination of the military apparatus to strict civilian control. But the Chanyuan model was insufficient to contain the challenges posed by an unstable East Asian political order roiled by new states constantly jockeying to assert claims over status, wealth, and territory. Thus over the course of the 11th through 13th centuries, the Song court was constantly forced to amend or abort the centralized, defense-oriented, civilian-run Chanyuan model, only to reimpose variations once crisis was averted. It is this oscillation that shaped the evolution of Song China’s military institutions.

This chapter investigates the life, poetry and philosophy of the Northern Song thinker Shao Yong. Shao lived in a time of dramatic political and intellectual change, when Confucian intellectuals began to reassess their philosophical tradition and develop new theories about the universe, the human condition, self-cultivation and political order. Shao took part in this larger trend and proposed a new way of understanding the relationship between the self and the cosmos, which involved a unique method of perceiving the world and acting within it. Shao termed this method “observing things”, which while unique in many ways, nonetheless revealed the influence of the newly emerging Daoxue school of Confucian thought as well as numerology based in the Book of Change. Shao asserted that “observing things” required that one eliminate distinctions between the self and the world and realize unity with the myriad things. The chapter discusses the significance of this concept in the context of Song Confucian philosophy and how Shao laid out his conception of it in his poetry as well as in his most important philosophical work, the Book on the Supreme Principles for Ordering the World.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in the Caribbean Region, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, we reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

We offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

The passing of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807 represented a hard-won victory, but its monumentalizing can obscure the complex time of abolition. Temporal complexity defines British literary and material–cultural representations of abolition, from the testimonies of formerly enslaved people (Cugoano and Prince), to the writings of prominent white abolitionists (Clarkson and Wilberforce), to work by ‘canonical’ Romantic-era writers (Wordsworth, Austen, and Coleridge). Through readings of key texts and artefacts around 1807, this chapter considers how the literature and material cultures of the era configure the spaces and temporalities of abolition. It argues that abolitionist arguments and sentiment depended on shifting notions of time and space in the age of interconnected global revolutions, producing abolitionist materials that worked upon the spatial and temporal gaps between the metropole and the colonies, and in many cases deliberately obscured the connections between the two.

It was during the Northern Song era that the Yellow River, the dominant landscape feature of North China, began to flood frequently and catastrophically. Yellow River floods confounded the regime, immiserated and uprooted residents of the North China Plain, and marked a turning point in relations between Chinese people and the natural world that they inhabited. This chapter locates the origins of the flooding crisis in rapidly increasing erosion on the Loess Plateau, hundreds of miles upstream from the floodplain on the Song northwestern frontier, where the edge of the Yellow River watershed was also an ecologically fragile and highly militarized borderland. It also explains responses to flooding by engineers, officials, artists, and the people of the floodplain.

Critical thinking on the relationship between fashion and ideas of personhood tends to fall into two approaches: (1) the violation or diminishing of persons by fashion as an oppressive expression of gender expectations and base commercialism; (2) the celebration of fashion as an agential mode of performance and resignification. Both leave uncontested a set of mutually imbricated oppositions between persons versus nonpersons, interiority versus exteriority, essence versus surface, organic body versus synthetic dress. What happens to how we think about fashion and beauty when they take place on the denigrated, racialized, and gendered body? The woman of color presents a provocation about the toggle between personhood and objecthood. What if race is fashion (that is, stylized, transferable, synthetic), and what are the political implications of posing such a question?

This chapter studies the 2020 photo-essay “A Primordial Culture” by Sri Lankan Canadian multidisciplinary artist Rajni Perera. It centers Perera’s work as the basis of a theory of divine adornment as a creative response to climate catastrophe. Such a theory is derived from an investment in thinking alongside Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ornamentalism and demonstrates how forms of ornament might be complicated and utilized differently in response to Perera’s lone figure roaming unknown terrain following planetary collapse. The chapter weaves in discussions of both the photographs of Perera’s adorned traveler figure and her writing as a mode of describing a future world deeply rooted in, and indebted to, Indigenous, ancient, and anti-colonial feminist cosmologies.

I present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Iran, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, I reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

I offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

The rise of social media as big social data offers opportunities for behavioural science and Behavioural Data Science researchers. The availability of large volumes of data generated by users of social media opens up the possibility of being able to study human behaviour in detail, at scale and in real-time. Stimulated in part by such opportunities, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) techniques have advanced rapidly. Applications of social media analytics now range from attitude extraction, sentiment analysis and behavioural monitoring, to rumour verification, event prediction, detection and tracking. However, the challenges have also grown and opinions on the value of social media analytics remain divided, with some seeing great potential while others express concerns about, for example, the absence of transparency in machine learning and NLP models and problems of bias in – and ethics of – harvesting social media data. Some are also concerned about the lack of methodological rigour and even question whether social media analytics is capable of delivering meaningful and robust insights into human behaviour. If they are to address these issues, then behavioural science researchers will need to master the skills and knowledge that will be needed to choose and apply machine learning and NLP techniques in ways that can guarantee robust and scientifically valid findings.