Chapter 8 is concerned with the use of historical corpora in the study of language relating to health. We present two case studies – one where an issue is well understood and discussed publicly, the other where there was a clear issue with the framing of a discussion. For the former study we explore the VicVaDis corpus, first introduced in chapter 1. We combine different corpus techniques to show the main anti-vaccination arguments in the corpus and to point out parallels with present-day anti-vaccination discourse. The second case study looks at the emergence of venereal disease in the seventeenth century using the Early English Books Online corpus. By examining collocates of the word pox, we are able to weed out relevant uses of the word (e.g., those which referred to venereal disease) as opposed to those which do not. Additionally, we show that through the investigation of one type of collocate (words referring to geographical locations) the analysis was taken in an unexpected but rewarding direction.

Drawing on research conducted in Iran’s criminal justice system, the chapter explores the linkages between mercy in criminal justice and the increasingly global turn away from social justice movements based on logics of human rights and toward care-based appeals, such as humanitarianism. The latter is just one major arena of increased reliance on and appeals to care or “care work” over claims to inherent rights; others include charity, aid, and philanthropy. In Iran’s “victim-centered” criminal justice system, in homicide and other major crimes, the victims’ families possess a right of “exact” retribution. That is, victims’ immediate family members may exercise their right to have a perpetrator executed. In these cases, however, victims’ family members may also forgo retributive sentencing and forgive the perpetrator. A variety of interests – legal, social, religious, and even economic – shape the concerns of victims’ families as they consider whether to exercise the right of retribution by forgoing rather than executing it. While being merciful or seeking mercy may possess qualities associated with a “seasoning” of justice, the inclination toward mercy and merciful grants, such as granting pardons to persons convicted of crimes, is both a legitimation and entrenchment of an absolute sovereign over the judiciary or the legislative branch, as in Iran. As the chapter argues, this normalization of the resort to mercy has the capacity to reduce everyone in society to a potential supplicant with broader implications for the quest for social justice and legal reckoning.

Morocco has experienced numerous ethnic shifts throughout its long history, and a succession of human populations, cultures, and legal codes have strongly molded the different traditions of the country. This paper focuses on High Atlas Amazigh Peoples, who are deeply intertwined with their local environment through the agdal system, a customary institution of territorial and natural resource governance. The agdal-like systems are centered in the control and resilient management of a myriad of natural resources but most importantly pastures, forests, and water, and in the face of constant uncertainty and scarcity, support the Amazighs to adapt and preserve their rights and biocultural diversity in an increasingly globalized context.

Chapter 9 considers how the experience of illness is represented linguistically, focussing on two contexts. In the first case study, collocational patterns were examined in order to show how people represented the word anxiety. Different patterns around anxiety were grouped together in order to identify oppositional pairs of representation (e.g., medicalising/normalising). The second case study involved an examination of the ways in which cancer was constructed in a corpus of interviews with and online forum posts by people with cancer, family carers, and healthcare professionals. Using a combination of manual analysis and corpus searches, we considered how metaphors were used to convey a sense of empowerment or disempowerment in the experience of cancer. More specifically, the analysis of metaphors around cancer revealed insights into people’s identity construction and the relationships between doctors and patients.

Land and forests are integral to India’s Adivasi (Indigenous) Peoples. Lands provide sustenance and livelihoods, are a symbol of social status and dignity, and are central to the Adivasi “philosophy of life.” This chapter analyzes the various nuances of Adivasi land rights in India. It discusses the Adivasi land tenure systems, legal measures for protecting and allocating land, land holding patterns, the nature and scale of Adivasi land dispossession, and the strategies that the Adivasis have adopted to advance and safeguard their land rights. It is argued that, despite constitutional and statutory provisions and various policy measures to protect, promote, and secure Adivasi land rights, they increasingly experience land dispossession in different forms – reflecting an “implementation gap” in practice. This chapter concludes with recommendations for safeguarding Adivasi land rights, such as collaboration between Adivasi movements and civil society organizations, consistent governance measures for different land rights regimes (such as Sixth Schedule in Fifth Schedule Areas), and independent monitoring agencies to maintain accountability on land rights duties.

In Malaysia, three ethnic groups identify as “Indigenous Peoples”: the heterogeneous Peninsular Malaysia Orang Asli, natives of Sabah, and natives of Sarawak. Malaysia’s hybrid legal system confers differing constitutional, statutory, and common law rights and privileges to Indigenous Peoples, which present distinct yet shared experiences of their land rights. These Indigenous groups were granted differing levels of constitutional privileges during Malaysia’s constitutional formation, which resulted in divergent written laws for the protection and recognition of their customary lands and resources. These differing laws and histories have functioned to dispossess these communities of their traditional lands, territories, and resources in their own ways. The strategy of litigation has afforded Indigenous communities some recourse for gaps in the written law but common law development of such rights and the court process have equally proven to be a barrier in some cases. Although international commitments to the sustainable management of resources have increased possibilities for the inclusion of Indigenous communities in matters concerning their lands and resources, constitutionally-entrenched legal privileges have yet to translate to the effective protection and recognition of traditional Indigenous lands and resources in Malaysia.

This chapter brings into conversation two powerful, imbricated forces in contemporary Nigeria: the dramatic rise in fundamentalist religious Christian and Islamic formations that place hope and prosperity in the afterlife, and the proliferation of community-based technology projects that offer ordinary victims and survivors the power of data as a way to make sense of past and future violence. The chapter argues that these trends are imbricated both with one another and with the history of colonialism from earlier periods to the contemporary moment. The chapter raises questions about the extent to which this Nigerian case study foreshadows a more global shift away from long established (western) authorities – in particular, the law and the nation-state – and toward futures where more and more people could turn toward a kind of moral and political vigilantism, taking the tools for creating hope and meaning (back) into their own hands.

This chapter expands on a series of recent interventions about the consequences of the unraveling of juristocracy at a more diffuse transnational level: consequences for critical scholarship (both disciplinary and interdisciplinary), for the state of (mostly Euro-American) progressive politics, and for the urgent project to imagine alternatives to rights-based frameworks for change and justice-seeking that guard against the use of violence, ethnocentrism, and other expressions of an exclusionary juristocratic reckoning. The chapter begins by summarizing the well-known intellectual historical narrative of notable developments in the wake of the “endtimes” (Hopgood 2013) of human rights and other categories of law that were invested with the weight of social, political, and, to a lesser extent, economic transformation. After focusing on and tracing the afterlives of existing human rights up to the present, the chapter then introduces an alternative vision for what is described as the “future lives” of human rights, a proposition that recognizes the force of the different critiques underlining the profound turn away from human rights in the present, but which nevertheless seeks to go beyond these critiques. Although the original argument for “reinventing human rights” (Goodale 2022) was meant to examine fairly comprehensively the ways in which a radically reformulated account of human rights was still possible, an account, moreover, that might yet prove capable of galvanizing new and more sustainable forms of translocal social and political action, the 2022 intervention nevertheless left certain key concepts rather underdeveloped. As a response, the chapter returns to these key concepts in order to thicken the presentation of a reinvented human rights as a framework for multiscalar social mobilization and justice-seeking. Yet as the chapter emphasizes, this framework does not return “human rights” to its grounding in law – national, regional, or international. In this sense, the proposition builds on the transformative potential of the turn away from certain kinds of law. As the chapter concludes, the case for detaching human rights – conceptually and institutionally – from law seems as compelling as ever, perhaps even more so in light of the violent impotence of the international system writ large in the face of recent crises such as the global COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.