An important aspect of the developmental pathway for international adoptees involves issues of self-identification and the formation of a cultural–social identity. This chapter will review existing literature and highlight key challenges related to identity development among international adoptees. A major focus within this research is transracial adoption, which will also be discussed. Special attention will be given to practices aimed at fostering identity, including partial identification with the country of birth through linguistic and cultural connections.

This chapter discusses the development of international law in the post-war era that aimed to liberate global information flow to guarantee world peace. It starts by discussing the achievements and failures of the 1948 Geneva conference on the freedom of information and considers two avenues in which the post-war project of freedom of information continued after the 1948 conference. First, in the drafting of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, freedom of information as a peace project became framed into a fundamental human right, displacing the question about the material and interstate aspects of freedom of information. Second, freedom of information was addressed in forums of international telecommunication and trade dominated by the United States, where freedom of information became equated with the elimination of discriminatory telecommunication rates to enable American global trade. This chapter shows a division of labour and crucial conceptual compatibility between the human rights framing and free trade framing of freedom of information and multiple fault lines surrounding the early intimation of the dual-sided framework.

This essay explores the intersection of race and the field of war and society in U.S. history. Centering race as a critical fault line, it examines how racial identities, hierarchies, and constructions have shaped—and been shaped by—U.S. experiences of war, both during and beyond moments of active conflict. While race is the central focus, the essay also considers how gender, ethnicity, and class intersect with it. These interconnected forces help define not only who is recognized within "society" but also how war is waged, experienced, and remembered. By analyzing key historiographic debates, the essay considers how scholarship on race has contributed to a deeper, more complex understanding of the war and society field. It also argues that race-based inquiry challenges conventional definitions of war and society, expanding them beyond state-sanctioned actors and discrete wartime events to include long-term, systemic forms of violence and resistance. In doing so, the essay highlights the co-productive relationship between war and society and how race reshapes our understanding of both.

Pacific peoples disproportionately experience health and social complexity that contributes to poorer health outcomes compared to those of the total population in New Zealand. The Pacific healthcare workforce plays a critical role in providing health care, influencing service delivery and system design that can reduce health inequities for Pacific communities. Pacific nursing specifically has been recognised as critical in delivering and assisting with the design of culturally appropriate and equitable healthcare services that can positively contribute to addressing these disparities. This chapter will provide insights to deepen nurses’ understanding of Pacific peoples in New Zealand and support reflective practice as part of continued professional development. Culturally safe care enhances the ability to provide clinically safe practice and is a continual process of reflection and applied critical thinking.

Discrimination measures do not capture experiences specific to people who were transracially and transnationally adopted. Using a small measurement approach, a new seventeen-item measure of transracial, transnational adoption discrimination encompassing three dimensions – ethnic and racial discrimination, coethnic discrimination (i.e., cultural exclusion from being Korean), and adoption discrimination – was administered to 155 Korean American young adults. We conducted a confirmatory factor analysis, tested for demographic differences, and performed correlation and multiple linear regression analyses to establish validity. The three-factor model of discrimination demonstrated good fit, and the subscale scores had good internal reliability. All three discrimination subscales were significantly correlated with one another. Ethnic and racial discrimination correlated with ethnic and adoptive identity subscales except ethnic identity exploration; coethnic discrimination correlated with ethnic identity affirmation and adoptive identity; and adoption discrimination did not correlate with any identity subscales. Ethnic and racial discrimination was related to psychological distress.

This chapter provides a critical reflection on past and current research on ethnic and racial discrimination and youth development with recommendations for future research directions. First and foremost, I emphasize the need for positionality, reflexivity, and representational ethics to avoid advancing false or problematic narratives and to advance research that is more transparent and accountable. It also is necessary to distinguish and better contextualize ethnic discrimination (rooted in ethnocentrism) and racial discrimination (rooted in modern imperialism and White supremacy) rather than conflate these two constructs and measure them in ahistorical ways. These considerations require researchers to select or develop critically appropriate measurement tools, moving beyond commonly used measures that may not be relevant or appropriate to all racialized groups. Ethnic and racial discrimination during youth development requires special considerations, as discrimination coincides with identity formation and pubertal development. Yet there remains limited research on the ways in which these developmental tasks and experiences interplay. Given the complexities of how ethnic and racial discrimination manifest during youth development, researchers may want to consider novel methods like storytelling to embody discriminatory experiences and strengthen ecological validity.

Chapter 1 examines what mental illness stigma is and analyzes the components of mental illness stigma to show how people with mental illness experience stigma in their daily lives. These components include labeling, stereotyping, prejudice, moral distancing, social exclusion, status loss, dehumanization, microaggressions, discrimination, and epistemic injustice. In each case, I use empirical evidence from the social psychology literature on stigma to show ways in which people with mental illness experience these forms of stigma. Next, I look at factors that affect the kind, degree, and scope of stigma associated with mental illness, including beliefs, political values, cultural values, socioeconomic status, education, and gender. Finally, I examine how many people experience compounding stigmas that come from multiple sources.

Chapter 6 examines what makes discrimination and microaggressions (as a form of discrimination) wrongful. Discrimination involves differential treatment where some people are treated in different, unequal, and worse ways compared to others, and where that differential treatment is based on possessing a socially undesirable trait that marks a person as bad and inferior. Discrimination is wrongful because it harms people in a variety of ways, impacting their circumstances, resources and opportunities, options, agency, autonomy, and well-being. It causes material disadvantage and distributive injustice that denies people access to resources and opportunities and prevents them from having the basic goods necessary to participation in society. It also demeans people and leads to unfair subordination, loss of deliberative freedom, and decreased autonomy. This chapter reviews the philosophical literature on discrimination to provide a pluralistic account of the many harms discrimination and microaggressions cause to people with mental illness, which altogether make discrimination wrongful.

The introduction motivates the book’s arguments by showing how mental illness stigma remains pervasive despite greater awareness of mental health issues and more resources directed at mental health treatment and destigmatization. The forms of mental illness stigma most commonly expressed are stigma against people with severe mental illness who are perceived as homeless, and internalized stigma that people with mental illness project onto themselves. Mental illness stigma arises as a reaction to the violation of social norms of what a human being should be in the Western world in the twenty-first century. I give an account of stigma as the devaluing and discrediting of a person based on possessing a social trait that is seen as violating social norms, constituting a relationship of power. Components of stigma include labeling, stereotyping, prejudice, moral distancing, social exclusion, status loss, dehumanization, microaggressions, discrimination, and epistemic injustice. The chapter ends with a description of the book’s scope, methodology, and chapter outline.

Chapter 7 begins with a discussion of how colonialism and the climate issue in the MENA are strongly linked, and how this relationship affects not only development trajectories, but also the status of the climate as a policy area and women’s representation. The second part of the chapter covers Othering, that is, the portrayal of women as vulnerable victims or saviours, focusing on the dangers of feminizing vulnerability and responsibility, whilst also showcasing how Othering of women in the Global South occurs among female parliamentarians in the MENA. In terms of the global climate crisis, this has led to a situation where the climate issue is not prioritized as much as it could be if the female parliamentarians were more accountable to the electorate and identified more strongly with a broader group of women, that is, beyond the narrow elite segment of the population from which they themselves were recruited. At present, those that are the most passionate about combatting the climate crisis are the youth, whereas those who stand to gain the most are marginalized women — two groups that are nothing like the female parliamentarians, who are supposed to act in their interest.

This chapter explores the complexities of discrimination in international trade law, a core principle that mandates equal treatment of foreign and domestic goods, services, and intellectual property. Despite its significance, the definition of discrimination remains contested, with debates focusing on intent versus impact and the comparability of products. The chapter analyses these issues, examining key legal texts like the GATT, GATS, and TRIPS agreements, and the evolving jurisprudence of GATT panels and the WTO Appellate Body. It highlights the shifts in interpreting ‘discrimination’, including the move from considering both ‘aim and effect’ to focusing primarily on the effect of trade measures. The chapter concludes by discussing the challenges in reaching a clear, agreed-upon standard for discrimination and the implications for international trade.

Methadone maintenance therapy arose as a treatment for opiate use in the mid 1960s. At the time, neither drug use nor treatment for it were considered disabilities. When Vincent Dole, the Rockefeller Institute metabolic researcher who was one of the progenitors of methadone maintenance therapy (MMT), asked, ‘What kind of disablement does a drug produce?’ (Courtwright et al., 1989, p. 334), this was a prescient question.1 Dole’s team stabilised patient-subjects on methadone, hoping to displace reliance on shorter-acting opiates, and explored dosages that would enable ‘cooperative relationships with patients’ (Courtwright, et al., 1989, p. 336). Opposing detoxification and abstinence as the sole basis for treatment, Dole saw opioid use disorder as a metabolic condition that required ongoing pharmacological stability. Contrasting the stabilising effects of one opiate (methadone) to another (heroin), Dole emphasised that drugs should be judged in terms of their social effects – did they improve or undermine capacity for stable relationships with family members, treatment providers or employers? Did they produce ‘disablement’ or did they instead ‘enable’ capacities for productive citizenship? Such questions dominated the social contexts into which methadone maintenance was inserted. Making stable, productive citizens was adopted as the goal of methadone maintenance.

The research for this chapter was undertaken on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. As is customary in the country in which I live and work, or so-called ‘Australia’ (see Watego, 2021), I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of country, as well as elders past and present. I acknowledge that sovereignty over these lands was never ceded, and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain strong in their enduring connections to land, sky, water and culture.

When it became clear that gender critical belief is protected in our anti-discrimination law, it was often said that, while such views were protected, manifesting or expressing them was not. This is simply not true. Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects both the absolute right to hold a belief and the qualified right to manifest a belief. The manifestation of protected beliefs is also protected under Article 10, which protects the right to freedom of expression. Because these are qualified rights, it may be permissible to interfere with them where proportionate. Where discrimination or harassment arises because someone holds gender critical views, this will be unlawful. However, where the treatment complained of is a genuine response to the fact or manner of manifestation of a protected belief, the legal situation becomes more complex. In assessing the extent to which is it permissible for an employer or other duty-bearer to interfere with the fact or manner of manifestation of a protected belief, the central importance of freedom of expression must be recognised as the background context of any analysis.

This use of preferred pronouns for those with trnsgender identities is extraordinarily contentious within the context of debates on sex and gender identity. This chapter begins by exploring why pronouns are so contentious, arguing that their use is an important signifier of underlying beliefs about the relationship between sex and gender identity. From here, the chapter explores whether and under what conditions an emplouyer could interfere with the expression of employees to prohibit or compell the use of particular pronouns. It concludes that this will require a fact-sensitive analysis which begins from the understanding that the right to freedom of expression is robustly protected, especially in the context of compelled speech.

The Court of Appeal in Higgs v Farmor’s School has provided a detailed analysis of the relationship between anti-discrimination and human rights standards in the workplace where employees manifest protected beliefs. Unfortunately, this analysis suffers from a central flaw by presuming that if manifestation of belief is protected under direct discrimination, it will always be unlawful for an employer to interfere. It is this presumption which prompted the Court of Appeal to defend the introduction of a justification test into what was previously a factual analysis of causation, by deeming less favourable treatment in response to ‘objectionable’ manifestations to have not been ‘because of’ the protected belief itself. This chapter argues that such an approach is unnecessary because it responds to a problem which does not exist. It is simply incorrect to presume that protection from direct discrimination necessarily implies that any interference with the manifestation of a protected belief is directly discriminatory. The ordinary application of the Equality Act is already coextensive with the protections afforded under the European Convention on Human Rights. Any interpretation needed under s.3 of the Human Rights Act is needed within the sphere of indirect discrimination, not direct discrimination.