As we have seen in Chapter 1, the discovery of Kepler’s laws is a long and troubled story. Kepler was fully aware of the importance of his discovery, as we can guess while reading the few quotations of his books in these pages. Only later were his laws synthesized into the short and elegant statements that we may find in every book on Mechanics or Celestial Mechanics.

Can works of art teach us something, perhaps about ourselves, about the world, or about what matters? This chapter addresses whether and how the arts contribute to learning by drawing on insights from epistemology – the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge. It considers how the arts contribute to the various ways of knowing that philosophers distinguish: propositional knowledge (also called “know-that”), experiential knowledge, understanding, and skill-based knowledge (also called “know-how”). With respect to each, there are promising ways of working out how art may contribute to our epistemic growth. At the same time, each candidate type of knowledge faces challenges and complications that limit its ability to be the singular answer regarding learning from and through the arts. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that “know-how” – or skill-based knowledge – is an especially fruitful concept for understanding how we become epistemically better off through engagement with the arts. This chapter thus suggests that becoming epistemically better off through engagement with the arts is not about acquiring knowledge of facts, but rather about developing ways of seeing, perceiving, interpreting, and responding to the world more skillfully.

Over time, United Nations human rights treaty bodies (UNTBs) have developed an admissibility requirement that individuals’ allegations be ‘sufficiently substantiated’ or ‘not manifestly unfounded’. Explanations of these terms have varied, but States, treaty body members and scholars have equated them with a prima facie threshold. Among international tribunals, prima facie is commonly understood to require the complainant to make a plausible claim. However, review of UNTB decisions indicates that application of this requirement clashes with the accepted meaning of prima facie by: (1) often requiring the complainant to present convincing allegations; (2) taking into account – or giving greater weight to – the state’s arguments and evidence at the admissibility stage; and 3) sometimes requiring the complainant to pre-emptively overcome the state’s possible defences. This chapter seeks to identify relevant trends in order to both better understand current UNTB practice and illuminate paths to greater consistency and clarity in admissibility determinations.

Before accessing the UN treaty bodies’ individual communications procedure, a complainant must have exhausted domestic remedies. This admissibility rule exists for good reasons, but it has limits. In particular, exemptions must be recognised in respect to domestic remedies which lack effectiveness, including accessibility. Regrettably, UNTBs are currently reverting to a formalistic and mechanical application of this admissibility rule. What justice requires, however, is the opposite: an expansive consideration of the plethora of barriers that prevent access to domestic justice, as well as a reflection about how each barrier can realistically be evidenced by a complainant. This can be achieved, this chapter argues, through an individual-centred, contextual approach, which achieves the aim of preventing the state from escaping international scrutiny, while highlighting the crucial role domestic justice should play in remedying human rights wrongs.

The chapter introduces the concept of Earth’s amphibious transformation—the technological and socio-political extension of the human habitat onto sea surfaces since the mid-20th century. It frames this transformation as a key driver of the oceanic Anthropocene, characterized by intensified vertical interactions with spatial layers above and below the sea surface, reaching from fossil fuels beneath the seabed to outer space. Through oil platforms, wind turbines, mariculture cages, offshore rocket launches, and many other types of artificial islands, marine regions have become central to developmentalist agendas and environmental degradation concerns. The chapter establishes two interrelated analytical perspectives: an oceanic-vertical one that reveals new artificial islands’ upward and downward-oriented access to spatial layers, and a terraqueous-horizontal one connecting these artificial islands to coastlines. Ultimately, reorienting our gaze toward the ocean, the chapter proposes a paradigm shift in recognizing the central role of many marine regions in the Anthropocene, emphasizing artificial islands as both symptom and agent of anthropogenic transformations of planetary scale.

Grounded in developmental, social psychological, and education perspectives, this chapter describes how an ethnic–racial identity (ERI) focused intervention can provide an entry point for educators to engage in culturally sustaining pedagogical practices that support the positive academic and psychological adjustment of students and contribute to reducing ethnoracial inequities in the education system. The chapter reviews the theoretical foundation of the Identity Project intervention and the accompanying teacher professional development program that prepares educators to intervene with students on ERI. The Identity Project was initially developed and tested in the United States but has now been tested in multiple European countries. A summary of empirical evidence to date is presented, followed by a more in-depth discussion of challenges related to implementation, evaluation, and scale-up – both logistical challenges and challenges brought about by the sociopolitical context.

The chapter continues to focus on multispecies interactions. Dual-habitat built environments remain central to the analysis, but with an emphasis on species translocations and their impacts on biosphere integrity. The chapter addresses the questions of how and why hard surface structures made from steel or concrete, particularly offshore oil and gas platforms, became new and important vectors for marine bioinvasions in the oceanic Anthropocene. In such bioinvasion cases, a species multiplies exponentially in a new ecosystem, dominating it in terms of biomass or density. Slowly moving or stationary structures opened entirely new marine regions to marine bioinvasions and created novel material conditions for them. The use of new hard surface floating structures along coastlines or further offshore supplanted wooden structures and their previous habitat conditions. New bioinvasion pathways emerged through convergence with coastal urbanization and industrialization during the second half of the twentieth century, adding more hard surfaces such as water intake tunnels, piping systems, and seawalls—and now also interacting with offshore wind turbines, floating buildings, and others.

This chapter reviews the influence of discriminatory experiences on youth outcomes of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) with an emphasis on the family context. Studies in the review include 271 articles spanning the past twenty years. Studies include parent experiences of discrimination and youth outcomes through mediating family and other processes. Studies also include youth discriminatory experiences and youth outcomes through moderating family and other processes. The most common experiences across family context, discrimination, and BIPOC youth outcomes are presented through description and frequencies in theoretical perspectives, participant characteristics, discrimination measures assessed, and study design, across studies. The chapter closes with implications for interventions and policy suggested by the studies

Interest groups, non-profit organizations, and state-level bureaucrats are all known to be important actors in state-level legislative politics. This chapter introduces the interaction by highlighting state legislation provided by various types of outsiders. I begin to address long-standing questions about who holds power in political institutions. This chapter motivates the state-level focus of the research. Variation across the states in levels of legislative staff and resources, institutions (e.g., term limits), and partisan configurations allows me to test theories about the relationship between resources, institutions, and the reliance on group products. Beyond this methodological reason, understanding the decisions made by state legislators and the set of statutory law which governs state citizens is essential to understanding democracy in the United States. The resulting state laws constrain the actions of state bureaucrats and cities, alter the incentives to businesses, and shape the carceral and educational outcomes for millions. My examinations into legislative drafting and the relative success of group bills have far-reaching implications for democratic representation: Whose preferences are reflected at the agenda setting stage and ultimately passed? The quality of democracy varies across the states, and my work studies the institutions that may improve democratic decision making.

Over decades of reviewing individual communications, the Human Rights Committee (HRC) has developed greater consistency when shifting the evidentiary burden between the author and the state in its decisions on individual communications. The grounds on which this shift is made, including the nature of the allegations, the evidence used to corroborate the allegations, and the extent to which the state engages with the process, seem to impact the articulation of the shifted burden in certain cases. To effect this burden shift, the chapter explains that the HRC appears to follow three steps when assessing claims of a breach of the prohibition against torture: (1) the allegations must be corroborated by some level of evidence; (2) the HRC applies a rebuttable presumption that the author’s alleged facts are true; unless (3) the state offers evidence in direct response to the specific allegations of torture.