How can we regulate private power in a globalized, digitized world where state-centered sovereignty, territorial boundaries, and traditional legal frameworks fall short? This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book, its arguments, methodology, and contributions, addressing the urgent need for accountability mechanisms to tame the increasingly unilateral global governance by a handful of corporations. Focusing on content moderation, it examines two key case studies: the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Meta’s Oversight Board. Both exemplify “emulation,” where public law mechanisms, particularly constitutional and administrative, are adapted to private governance.

Analyzing these “Emulated Guardians”–institutions borrowing the legitimacy of courts while operating in private or hybrid contexts–this book highlights their reliance on performativity and public perception to assert authority. Through interdisciplinary analysis, empirical findings, and expert interviews, the book reveals the ambivalent outcomes of emulation: promising tools for accountability yet sometimes lacking practical efficacy. Ultimately, this work frames these mechanisms as harbingers of new accountability norms, arguing that governance in the digital age demands not only novel institutions but also robust public engagement. It situates these developments within broader debates about power, legitimacy, and the evolving role of public law ideals in globalized, networked environments.

The history of astronomy and the history of philosophy are inextricably fused. This chapter highlights some of the dramatic episodes when astronomy confronted philosophical issues in metaphysics – questions regarding the objects astronomy studies; in epistemology – what is the most fruitful way to acquire knowledge in astronomy? And finally the ultimate existential question – what kind of a science is astronomy? Is it even a natural science at all?

This chapter introduces the broad conceptual framework of the processes of subjectivisation within global discourses and connects it to agency. It introduces the idea of situational agency and draws upon Mahmood’s work to suggest that agency can be found in the ‘inhabitation of norms’. the chapter provides a background context to post-genocide Rwandan policies, introducing the key agenda of unity and reconciliation, and presents Rwanda as a post-colonial state. Finally, this chapter problematises the collection and interpretation of field data in a post-colonial setting.

Chapter 7 reviews the main findings of the analyses presented in Chapters 1-6. These identify essential characteristics of ideology and demonstrate that the appeals exhibit these characteristics and that the methods typically used for the analysis of nefarious ideologies can be profitably applied to liberational ones. They augment Verschueren’s analytic procedures with technical and theoretical devices to account for the interplay among implicit and explicit meanings, indices of discourse interaction, and metapragmatic activities. It reviews the claim that the appeals are designed for at least two audiences: their addressees and Amnesty members. It revisits discussion of ideology in light of the analyses of the Amnesty documents, contrasting these and other human rights documents with mythic and ritualistic elements of two US Nazi documents. The chapter concludes by discussing unexpected findings, changes in human rights, Amnesty’s adaptations to changes in communication technologies, reasons for counterscreening and an invitation to use the additional corpus of appeals in Appendix 3 for this purpose, and suggestions for further research on oppositional activist discourses.

In this introduction, I explore theories of injury and ethnographic methods for studying them. I treat injuries and their causes holistically, as reflecting the wounding and coactive effects of an array of harmful exposures, historical circumstances, technologies, environments, and political systems. In conceiving of injury across different scales of time, I offer insights into what health scholars term the ‘secondary’ impacts of injury on claimants and their families. Increasingly, scholars recognize that compensation systems, medico-legal assessments, and claim-making practices themselves contribute to or cause significant negative harm and secondary impacts to both the injured and their families. In contrast to the medical language of primary and secondary illness, I argue for a participant-centred and experience-near approach, one that can trace the connections test veterans themselves draw across time and within their personal and community illness narratives, as they built understandings of radiation injury and harm. Original injury or exposure ‘events’ were narratively enfolded within the cascade of transforming and accumulating harms that participants experienced.

This chapter opens the doors and allows readers to enter French courtrooms. It examines the architecture and dynamics of French terror courtrooms, focusing on the spatial layout and the positioning of actors within the courtroom setting. By analyzing the physical structure, we reflect how space and reinforces the roles of participants, from judges and prosecutors to defendants and victims. In addition, the chapter outlines the methodology developed during our research, our immersive approach within the courthouse. This immersion includes participatory observation beyond the courtroom itself to include the cafeteria, the courts’ corridors, security lines and the courtyard. These seemingly mundane settings reveal significant insights into the routines, relationships, and informal exchanges that frame the broader judicial process. By bridging architectural analysis and ethnographic observation, this chapter provides a presentation of the French terror trial setting as both a physical space and a site of social interaction.

Three questions have usually been asked about the French Revolution: why did it happen?; why was it so violent? and what was its legacy? At first sight all three questions seem to beg other, more conceptually ambitious questions, whether about causation, violence or legacies. The aim of this short book is to answer both sets of questions by bringing together events with ideas. Combining the two actually helps to make the answers to the second, more conceptually oriented set of questions more historically and analytically focussed. It does so because the French Revolution owes much of its complexity to ideas and, more particularly, to the range and multiplicity of appearances and temporalities that ideas can lend to events. Complexity, not only in France and not only at the time of the French Revolution, is more than an effect of large numbers of people living in different circumstances with different, sometimes antagonistic, interests. It is also an effect of the range of occasionally compelling, but occasionally competing, emotional responses, moral evaluations and causal assessments made by, or of, people living in similar circumstances with similar, overlapping or complementary interests.

This introduction establishes a foundation for the chapters that follow by providing an overview of Vasari’s work at Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo and the state of the research on the topic. It also maps out the structure of the book, identifies the methodologies and primary and secondary source material upon which it is based, and establishes its contribution to the literature on Vasari and the history of Italian Renaissance art.

The Introduction sets the stage for the project. It situates the idea of the book in the scholarly landscape, by explicating the main directions of the present account and how it relates to other accounts. It briefly introduces some of the central positions appearing in the text (e.g., ‘normativism,’ ‘eliminativism,’ ‘(non)revisionism’), presents the methodological commitments of the work, and gives summaries of the chapters.

How is people’s happiness determined by economic factors such as their income? Big data (particularly, behavioural data at scale) are essential to answering this question, but there is disagreement about the strength of evidence for causal relationships that is given by different types of analysis. This chapter reviews the different approaches to analysis that have been taken. First, it is argued that most existing literature both under-claims regarding the evidence for causality given by some types of analysis of big data, such as correlational analyses, and over-claims for other types of analyses, such as those involving panel data. Thus, even correlational data can be informative to the extent that associations are generally rare and that theoretical targets and alternatives are fully specified and given prior probabilities. Second, a new methodological problem is identified for a specific model of the income–rank relationship. According to the income rank hypothesis, people’s well-being is determined not by their income but by the ranked position that their income occupies within a social comparison group. It is shown by simulation that spurious rank effects can occur in regression analyses if there is noise in measured income, but that this problem can be reduced with the use of robust regression techniques. A new analysis of a large dataset, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, is reported. The results show that income rank effects are not reduced by the use of robust regression techniques, suggesting that previous support for the income rank hypothesis is not due to an artefact.

Pointing, for humans, is a communicative act – we intend to share information with one another by pointing. The intentional nature of ape pointing has been questioned, but a substantial set of data show that apes in communicative contexts alter their behavior with audience and attentional variables, indicating intentional communication. In contrast, the comprehension (receiving and understanding the information) of the point gesture in apes and other nonhumans has most often been tested using object choice task (OCT), an artificial experimental task removed from typical communicative contexts. This recent preoccupation with nonhuman point following has been fueled, in part, by the claim that dogs perform well at these tasks and apes do not. This claim, in turn, was built on the assumption that the OCT requires the understanding of the communicative nature of the point gesture – specifically it requires understanding the signaler’s intent to communicate – an assumption not backed up by historical or recent data. The chapter presents a review and a case study supporting three hypotheses: 1) Apes and dogs follow points quite well in the OCT if simple associative mechanisms like local enhancement can be used to solve the problem; 2) Some apes and dogs may understand the communicative intent underlying point gestures, however, these are the minority and likely require enriched environments; and 3) Methodologies and interpretations must be continuously and critically evaluated, especially when drawing species comparisons.

Chapter 3 centres on case selection and methodological considerations. The discussion opens up with a brief analysis that details how the MENA is understudied from both a climate and gender representation perspective, before moving on to a discussion of why it is important to study representation and climate change in authoritarian settings, i.e., not only in the MENA, but broadly speaking. The discussion in the first part of the chapter also covers the status of the MENA as a so-called ‘climate change hot-spot’. A considerable section of the case selection rationale in chapter 3 is dedicated to the study of gender and climate change within the MENA, which illustrates how the MENA case aligns with studies elsewhere in the Global South, i.e., focusing on women at the micro level and their vulnerability. The final (second) part of the chapter goes into detail with the methodology after briefly outlining the approaches favoured in the extant academic literature, coving both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Research is important in the creation of new knowledge or as a way of understanding phenomena. This chapter primarily concerns quantitative research. The chapter begins with a discussion about quantitative research and Indigenous peoples in context to provide an overview of the vexed discussion of methodological approaches advocated in Indigenous research. This is followed by an overview of Indigenous quantitative research in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander context, including what is defined as research and the key differences between research methodology and methods. The authors then introduce concepts of Indigenous quantitative research practices and include a case study on the Yawuru wellbeing framework to illuminate how methodology affects research and therefore understanding. The final section describes participatory action research as an appropriate methodology when conducting research with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia, and looks at how appropriate quantitative methods can contribute to new knowledge and understanding through the case study of an Aboriginal Ranger in Central Australia.

In this chapter, the lives of persons are put in dialogue with the transformation of the Vineyard region, thus highlighting complex transactions. How did changes in policies affect daily interactions in which older persons live, or the possibilities open to them when experiencing ruptures? How could they, in turn, draw on their experience to participate in daily arrangements or social transformations? And finally, what does it mean to be involved, as researchers, in some of these dynamics? This chapter reflects on the dialogical case study perspective chosen to approach ageing in the Vineyard region. It first examines how propositions, voices or perspectives emitted sociogenetically, shape or enter in dialogue at the other levels, and how ontogenetic or microgenetic dynamics are expressing or shaped by other dynamics. It then focuses on dialogues, misunderstandings, blind spots and tensions in such a complex case. Finally, it shows how, as researchers, we participated in this regional dialogue via an art-based method – theatre – that could be seen as a dialogical catalyst.

The exploration proposed here is pursued through a complex, regional case study. Regional case studies enable delineating a portion of the world, with a consistent set of institutions and policies as well as geographical and material conditions that set the frame for people’s lives, and to identify the complex dynamics by which sociogenetic, microgenetic and ontogenetic transformation co-occur. This chapter presents how we approached, conceived and analysed this case study. To start with, I define my approach to ageing as a form of personal engagement, which progressively developed into a collaborative project. After showing the relevance of a regional case study for sociocultural psychology of the lifecourse, I present the fieldwork, the data collection, an overview of the participants and the main line of the analysis.