Among some Indigenous peoples, the Seventh Generation philosophy refers to the idea that our present actions affect future generations of the earth and its inhabitants. Accordingly, it is important to move through the world with the next seven generations in mind. As Indigenous scholars, we consider the implications that Seventh Generation “thinking” has for the future of developmental science. Specifically, we imagine the potential that an Indigenous strengths-based approach to developmental science has for promoting the healing, growth, and flourishing of Indigenous futures. Towards this end, we describe what an Indigenous strengths-based developmental science may entail, which we adapted from recent research conceptualizing an Indigenous strengths-based approach in health and wellness research. Overall, an Indigenous strengths-based approach to developmental science withstands coloniality, honors relationships, transforms Indigenous futures, promotes intergenerational healing, incorporates original instructions, and centers Indigenous cultures.

Adolescents of color experience accelerated premature aging (e.g., more epigenetic age acceleration) and are disproportionately stopped by the police. To protect their children against the possible physiological stress linked to police intrusion, fathers may have beliefs and practices that reflect their ethnic and racial identities, which may spillover into their interactions with children. To test our theories, we leveraged a longitudinal study of 1,688 fathers and their biological children in the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing study (54 percent Black, 26 percent Latinx, 20 percent Other youth of color; 50 percent female). Adolescents who experienced more police intrusion showed more accelerated epigenetic aging, according to the second-generation epigenetic clocks (i.e., GrimAge, PhenoAge, and DunedinPACE). Fathers’ ethnic and racial identity commitment (but not their exploration) weakened the link between police intrusion and adolescents’ epigenetic age acceleration. Although fathers were sources of resilience for the youth, policies and practices need to be amended to reduce police surveillance in youths’ lives.

The general problem of three bodies, considered by Whittaker as “the most celebrated of all dynamical problems”, is stated as follows.

Creativity and innovation involve moving beyond conventional solutions, preconceptions, disciplinary boundaries, and assumptions about materials. They rely on a style of thinking termed open-minded engagement: playful, nimble, and cognitively flexible, and receptive to and embracing of new ideas, values, beliefs, lifestyles, and cultures, but in a critical and bounded way. This chapter surveys philosophical and empirical literature to explore how such thinking is engaged and developed through the arts. It suggests that if you can embrace and accept that you may not quite know what could happen, pause on projecting your preconceptions, be open to what the artwork is saying to you on its own terms, you will surely engage more fully, come to understand more about the artworks and artist themselves, and deepen your own capacity for continued openness.

The book concludes with reflections on the implications of the documented instances of group and bureaucrat involvement in crafting a significant proportion of our state laws. Tracking the relative success that various actors have in getting their petitions transformed into statutory law is essential in furthering our understanding of whose voices are heard in this important branch of state power. My book project makes a major contribution to understanding state legislative decision making, interest group involvement, and interbranch interactions. Whose preferences are reflected at the agenda setting stage and ultimately passed? This chapter concludes that the volume, correlates of uptake, and relative success of these bills demonstrate that this pathway to legislation is a key to understanding how law is made in these important legislative institutions.

So far we have dealt with classical analytic methods, concerning in particular the system of three bodies. Beginning with this chapter we make a jump in time to the second half of the twentieth century. The aim is to illustrate some recent developments. Reference is made in particular to the two main theorems proved after 1950: Kolmogorov’s theorem on persistence of invariant tori [127], and Nekhoroshev’s theorem on exponential stability [195][196].

Pushbacks are designed to prevent people on the move from accessing procedural and/or substantive legal safeguards. States thus tend to deny practising them and actively erase evidence of their occurrence. The resulting acute evidentiary challenges in any subsequent human rights litigation require adjustments to be made to the evidentiary framework. This chapter offers a four-branch matrix of what can logically happen to facts disputed in litigation. It then proceeds to critically examine how evidentiary issues have been handled in UNTB pushback case law, concluding the right findings have been made, but on a generally weak reasoning. The chapter finally stresses that the burden of proof should be shifted from complainant to state when two conditions are met: a context-proven to a high standard, such that the state can be presumed to have violated human rights; the complaint is linked to this context – with this proven prima facie. If the linkage is evidenced to a higher standard, the factual allegations must be recognised as established on the strength of the evidence –without any shift being alluded to, so as to avoid an upward slippage in the purposefully low standard of proof applied.

This chapter addresses evidence-related recommendations for the consideration of the UN treaty bodies. Written by three practitioners from the civil society sector, with direct experience of the individual communication procedure before the UNTBs, it also benefited from input from all the contributors to the volume, which it concludes. Part I offers normative reflections. It deals with legal questions, including: What should the applicable standard be when determining human rights claims? How should this standard vary according to the type of claim and the stage of the proceedings? In what circumstances and under which conditions should the burden of proof be shifted from the complainant to the respondent state? Part II deals with organisational, and thus more mundane issues, but it highlights how proper identification and communication of the applicable evidentiary concepts and norms are essential to a transparent, accessible and fair system, therefore necessitating proper resourcing.