Indigenous boarding programs have long been framed as a response to the structural barriers faced by First Nations students from remote and regional communities in accessing secondary education. For many First Nations families, boarding schools represent a double-edged sword: an avenue for opportunity that also perpetuates colonial systems of dislocation and assimilation. This chapter critically examines the lived experiences of Indigenous students in boarding schools, foregrounding the voices of those most impacted – students, families and communities. It interrogates the systemic and cultural challenges faced by these students while celebrating the strength, adaptability and agency of First Nations peoples. Through an Indigenous lens, the chapter seeks to move beyond narratives of ‘success’ and ‘opportunity’, calling instead for culturally led and self-determined ways for boarding to support students who live away from home for schooling.

This chapter explores Aurangzeb’s princely career between his birth in 1618 and his accession to the Mughal throne in 1658. In it, close attention is paid to the decades-long efforts by Prince Aurangzeb to position himself for a successful bid to become the next Mughal emperor. This chapter examines the slow growth of Aurangzeb’s personal household, his networks of support, his efforts to gain military and administrative experience, his attempts to raise money for himself, and his campaign to build his own public image. This chapter draws heavily on his personal letters, a source that has been infrequently used by other historians because it comprises two massive volumes and is in highly stylized Persian.

Chapter 16 examines what it means to be a primary mathematics teacher in a professional context. It considers the attributes of effective mathematics educators, the requirements for professional accreditation, and the value of professional learning and engagement with mathematics education networks. You will also reflect on your preparation for the LANTITE and how to continue developing your identity as a confident and capable mathematics educator.

Our modern sense of what the poetry of the 1800s is and means has been heavily determined by the standards proposed in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads. However, during the 1800s, the ‘Preface’ was a controversial, oppositional proposition. Rather than being seen as the ‘breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’, poetry was more commonly perceived to be a social form of networked writing that was tightly aligned with performances of politeness, privilege, affiliation, and discernment. This essay explores three 1800s publications that sought to regulate poetry as a social world: the Poetical Register (commenced in 1801), the Edinburgh Review (commenced in 1802), and Lord Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). These works serve as exemplars of the contradictions inherent in attempts to delimit poetry during a decade in which its forms and manifestations were becoming increasingly popular, diverse, and contested.

Network and collective choice models are foundational tools in Behavioural Data Science, offering deep insight into how individual decisions scale into system-level outcomes. These models underpin everything from public health planning and traffic optimisation to social media influence and climate action coordination. Yet, as they become more integrated into decision-making architectures – especially under the regulatory framing of the European Union’s AI Act – questions of bias, equity, explainability and accountability become unavoidable. This chapter argues for a responsible approach to network and collective choice modelling, grounded in legal foresight, social ethics and behavioural realism. Beginning with an overview of the theoretical foundations and methodological advantages of these models, it then unpacks critical concerns: selection and confirmation bias, representational fairness, algorithmic opacity and privacy loss. Special attention is paid to the risks of amplification of systemic inequality and marginalisation through flawed modelling assumptions. The chapter draws on real-world applications to show how stakeholder co-design, model interpretability and participatory governance can mitigate harm. By weaving legal obligations under the AI Act with behavioural science principles, this chapter offers a pathway to designing socially beneficial, transparent and context-aware models of collective decision-making in digital systems.

Chapter 4 is the first of the four analytical chapters anchored in the qualitative interviews, and focuses on the topic of women’s representation in the MENA at the national level. The chapter presents an overview of women in parliament from independence to the present day, covering the right to vote and stand for office as well as the number of female parliamentarians per country following the most recent elections. The analysis then moves onto barriers to women’s representation, beginning with the pre-nomination stage and the role of factors such as patriarchy and violence against women. The subsequent sections detail different paths to parliament in the pre- and post-Uprisings eras. Among the topics covered are internal party culture and electoral rules, as well as the background characteristics of the women who make it in politics. The final part of chapter 4 is dedicated to the factors behind success at the campaign stage and once in office with particular reference to the importance of extra-party networks, access to finances and qualifications, as well as the issues of discrimination and self-discrimination at the time of portfolio allocation.

Social network ties represent an important and complex confluence of sundry social processes and their consequences. It is an enduring fact of life that the more socially connected a person is, the better off they are. This goes for well-being, for health, for social stature, for popularity and prestige, for social mobility, and for access to material resources. Social connections give people power. They plug people into a switchboard of opportunities and resources, making them part of a resource-rich social system. Social connections liberate people from the stringencies of what might otherwise be stultifying conditions of everyday life. They create trust and produce the capacity for collective action to deal with local and regional social problems. They help people live longer lives. And social connections generally make life more fun, and richer, in every sense of those terms. It is a bundle of benefits that cannot be unwound. This introductory chapter lays out the primary motivation behind this book, which is an attempt to understand whether everyone has equal access to these valuable social resources, and whether they are so potent as to substitute for other valuable resources, such as wealth and prestige, in shaping people’s life chances.

Because social capital is an inherently multidimensional concept, its study calls for a detailed analysis of a wide variety of social resources, ranging from intimate personal relationships with friends and family to linkages to the broader community via involvement in clubs, groups, and other organizations. Research on this topic usually focuses on particular aspects of social capital, often drawing on just one data source or measure. This chapter describes the wide range of measures we interrogate in our analysis and the numerous data sources upon which it is based, including sources such as the General Social Survey (GSS), the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality (MCSUI), the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), and nearly two dozen other data sources – some nationally representative, some more regionalized, including an analysis of urban elites’ networks in a large city. This chapter clarifies the conceptualizations of social capital implied by this data coverage. It also lays out the steps we take in analyzing these data, including different types of descriptive analysis, heavy reliance on tables and figures, and a parsimonious and uniform approach to multivariate analysis.

The overarching question that guides this chapter is: Are social ties, and the resources they represent, equally distributed throughout society? That is, are these connections so free and abundant that they transcend the relentless constraints that people face in obtaining other forms of capital? In particular, do people from disadvantaged backgrounds enjoy the same level of access to such ties as wealthy people? This requires close examination of factors such as people’s connectedness to friends and family; the number of such ties they have and how often they engage them; how much turnover and instability there is in people’s networks; the internal wiring of the networks in which they are embedded, and how that relates to dense connections and brokerage potential; the status and wealth of their contacts; involvement in exchange processes; and connections to community organizations. This chapter navigates the thicket of findings regarding the distribution of these various forms of social capital by first walking through analyses of personal, micro-level connections, and then proceeding upward to more macro-level, organization-oriented indicators. This set of analyses reveals some latent, surprising, and fateful truths about how universally bountiful and reachable these valuable social resources really are.

From its humble beginnings in the hills of Appalachia – where Weber, while witnessing a baptism, had his epiphany about the importance of clubs and groups as resources – the concept of social capital has captured the attention of thousands of social scientists. It is a concept that lends itself to multidimensional interpretations in many disciplines, including sociology, economics, and political science. Classical theorists such as de Tocqueville, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel laid the groundwork for more focused treatments of the concept. These include unique conceptualizations and expansions that have focused on different aspects forms of social network ties, stemming from the work of scholars such as Bourdieu, Coleman, Burt, Lin, and Putnam. Together, these theories culminated in the perspective that social connections are valuable resources that can change the course of people’s lives. They point to the role that hidden features of social structure, such as the presence of structural holes in networks, play in channeling resources across social groups. They also raise the specter that valuable features of networks are unequally distributed throughout the population in such a way as to confer greater advantage upon those who are already wealthy and powerful.

One of the most spirited debates about social capital raises the promising and reassuring prospect that the social connections and networks in which it resides are so omnipotent as to serve as an optional equal substitute for other valuable resources such as wealth. Some scholars are optimistic in this regard, seeing social ties as potential social levelers. Others, in recognizing the extraordinary value of these ties, are less certain, feeling that anything that is so incredibly valuable as social capital appears to be will inevitably be closely intertwined with other forms of capital: that is, that social capital and more material resources – such as money – tend to move together. This chapter undertakes an analysis of all of the varieties of social capital that were examined, theorized, and documented earlier chapters, with an eye toward assessing the extent to which they are associated with income in particular. These analyses tell us a lot about how universally “free” these ties really are, and provide a provisional answer to the question about whether social capital is a potentially viable substitute for material resources, or whether the two forms of capital are inseparably tied together.

It is tempting and heartening to think of social relationships as readily available substitutes for access to other, harder-to-reach resources such as money. Imagine the social problems that could be solved if they were: the promise that as long as one is sociable, all of the resources one needs to maximize one’s life chances are there for the taking. As one steps back and takes in the body of evidence we present, though, it does not take long for doubts concerning the more optimistic scenario to settle in – suggesting that impoverished people will continue to toil in poverty in spite of their theoretical access to social relationships, and elites will continue to enjoy power, prestige, and prosperity because of these connections. This is not to say that social relationships do not confer their own rewards and help ease the pressures of everyday life. That is part of their enduring power. But for a variety of reasons, discussed in this chapter, it may not be enough to overcome the constraints on access to other forms of capital that are embedded in social structure. Understanding the causes and consequences of this potentiality will remain of vital importance in future social science research.

If the past half-century of social science research has taught us anything, it has taught us both that people can gain advantages and resources through social networks and, at the same time, that any valuable resource is prone to unsparing social inequality. This book is therefore motivated by the worrying concern that access to social network ties is not, in fact, distributed equally throughout the population. This chapter outlines the scope and structure of our foray into this complex problem. It briefly discusses the outline of the book, addressing what we cover in each chapter: the theoretical origins of and controversies surrounding the concept of social capital, introducing the questions of how it is distributed throughout society and whether it is linked to other forms of capital (Chapter 2); an overview of the data and methods we use to study this topic (Chapter 3); a detailed set of analyses using multiple indicators and data sources to ascertain how social capital is distributed (Chapter 4); an examination of how social capital is linked to other valuable resources, such as money (Chapter 5); and our ultimate conclusions and suggestions for future research on this topic (Chapter 6).

The story of a trader introduces the historical actors who made and transformed Mexico City during the seventeenth century. A tour of the landscape situates their lives in an American metropolis – a capital and commercial city sustained by working people. A discussion of residents’ economies underlines the focus on individuals and their economic goals. An overview of the city’s governance explains how and where people acted politically. A demographic profile confirms that this history is about people from all over the world: Native Americans; free and enslaved people from Africa and Asia; colonists and migrants from Europe; and all their descendants. Their experiences, their urban history, affirm archival reconstruction as a way to chart change over time from the perspective of people who made a living doing essential work, selling food, transporting goods, providing care, and valuing silver, the city’s money.

The concluding chapter summarizes the main argument of the book. It emphasizes the specificity and particularity of systems. It also repeats the insight that religion and systems theory belong in the humanities because the response to systemic dissonance requires the conscious attention of participants in the system. However, the responses are not predetermined by the nature of the dissonance and can take a variety of forms. Finally, the basis for comparing religion, is not the similarities among phenomena but the role of the systemic mitigation within specific systems.

Central banks are promising a more climate-based focus on matters ranging from communication to prudential regulation and supervision, including monetary policy. The chapter examines the various arguments that analyze whether the European Central Bank (ECB) can tackle climate change, in light of its mandates. In our view, climate change fits within the narrower central bank mandates, focused on price stability, while other ‘peripheral’ mandates and ‘transversal’ environmental principles can play a supporting role. Prudential regulation and supervision can also be a main point for assimilation. Finally, we examine the considerations of courts of climate change when scrutinizing governmental action and compare them to the considerations of courts of ECB acts. We conclude that the integration of sustainability considerations, and especially climate change, into the ECB price stability mandate seems to be on relatively firm legal ground.