This chapter begins the constructive heart of the book, retrieving concepts from the Christian theological tradition to thematize the meaning of conflict as a feature of creaturely life. An initial exploration into Thomas Aquinas’s theological metaphysics of creation shows the importance of attending to the specific features of human being and action that distinguish human relation from divine relation. I then analyze three central components of human creaturehood – namely, finitude, contingency, and embodiment – and show how each gives rise to conflict as an aspect of creaturely goodness. Conflict, I argue, arises simply when embodied persons pursue their diverse desires, goods, and courses of action in a finite and contingent world shared with others. I conclude the chapter with a reflection on an instance of profoundly ordinary conflict, showing how the kinds of human relationships we tend to prize most are animated by the negotiation of conflict, as well as how personal, relational, and social maturity come by way of these negotiations.

This chapter asks how a politician can tie the amount of central government resources a group receives to the amount of electoral support it delivers. I argue that when a party is dominant, like Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), its members will be able to gain the most votes, conditional on resources delivered, by pitting groups against each other in a competition for resources. This part of the theory draws on prior work that introduces tournaments to political science. I explain that in such a competition, politicians create the perception that groups will be ranked according to their loyalty in the last election and prizes (in the form of resource allocations) will be awarded on the basis of rank. By structuring resources so that the highest-ranked group receives the largest prize, politicians can encourage competition for this position. This drives up their electoral support, in all groups with a chance of attaining this position. This chapter fleshes out the intuition behind a tournament, the mechanics of how tournaments can be pulled off in different settings, and elucidates their implications for longstanding questions of interest, including the sources of incumbency advantage and opposition weakness, the degree of congruence between policy preferences and vote choice, and whether all democratic competition is created equal.

An essential practice of the transport work at the station, one that focuses many of the concurrent and competing attempts to make a living, is the preparation of buses for departure. This is what the station workers refer to as ‘loading’, the significance of which highlights key aspects of hustle as activity. Chapter 4 looks at the practices and the various ruses, tricks, and bluffs that make up the task and craft of loading. It shows how changes in the organisational structure of the station, accelerated by the pressures of the urban labour market, have created a context of loading that is permeated by contingent constellations, a situation of constantly reproduced hustle. After detailing the practices of non-competitive and competitive loading, it turns the analysis around to describe the different ways in which station dwellers experience, accommodate themselves to, and try to exploit situations of hustle.

In this chapter, I examine Moses Maimonides’ conception of worship, concentrating on two questions: (1) On what grounds is a being worthy of worship? and (2) How is worship enacted? Concerning (1), I begin with Maimonides’ objects of false worship, aka idolatry, which are not only material but paradigmatically the intellects that were taken to be the ultimate causes of change in the world. Indeed thinking of God Himself as an intellect is the height of anthropomorphism and idolatry for Maimonides. Instead, the deity is worship-worthy as the unknowable necessarily existent being in virtue of itself on which the existence of everything else is causally dependent. Our attitude of radical contingency on this being is the ultimate grounds for His worship. Addressing (2), I argue that what enacts Maimonidean worship are not bodily acts but totally devoted, constant intellectual activities to achieve the humanly possible understanding of God and the natural world. Worship is not distinct from intellectual activity but a manner of engaging in it – worshippingly – and a way of life that embraces everything the worshipper does. Finally, I argue that idolatrous or false worship really consists in activities of the mind directed toward the wrong beings on which we are not contingent – and specifically ourselves and our own intellects.

Global history stands out by its intimate relationship to the processuality of history. As they put forms and structures of ‘global integration’ centre stage, global historians have not only made statements about the direction of history the foundation of how they define their area of study; they also ascribe at least partial explanatory power to them. The chapter argues that there is a lot to gain from stronger reflection on how global historians construe historical change over time. It delves into the theory of historical processes to develop more precise questions about directionality and presents responses global histories may offer to the teleological pitfalls of global integration. It also discusses the dialectics involved in processes of global integration and offers the outlines of a global history more attuned to the (unrealised) expectations and ‘futures pasts” among historical actors and to historical uncertainties produced under the impact of global interconnection. While the directionality/teleology problem poses particular challenges for global historians, it also can help think about multiple ‘guiding scripts’ global historians may use, refine and variegate in practice.

This chapter analyzes what makes highly affective collaborations unique and how the complexity of such collaborations can be studied. Drawing on previous research, it explores in-depth innovative methodologies that are designed to capture the key elements of complexity during productive interactions. Components of these methods are then applied to two distinct settings: preschooler free play and early elementary playful learning. The qualitative analysis of free play focuses on how synchrony, intersubjectivity, and shared meaning emerge in a dialectical relationship to each other over the course of interaction and how the coding captures the vicissitudes of complexity. An adaptation of the coding scheme for preschoolers is provided for observational coding of teacher-facilitated early elementary interactions that measures both intersubjectivity and exploratory talk. The preliminary results indicate patterns in the coding of episodes that are consistent with the theoretical premise discussed previously.

This chapter provides an introduction to American pragmatism as an ethical tradition with educational ramifications. The chapter first explains the origins of pragmatism and accounts for the primary features of pragmatist ethics. It then profiles the ethical views and educational bearings of two classical pragmatists: William James and John Dewey, and the most prominent neopragmatist, Richard Rorty. The chapter shows how pragmatism, from its nineteenth-century origins to its contemporary iterations, approaches education as integral to the ethical and political cultivation of a vibrant, pluralistic, democratic culture. Its philosophical orientation – away from the fixed and timeless and toward the contingent and contextualized – conceives of humans as active but fallible agents pursuing knowledge to address the concrete problems of their communities. Despite their differences, James, Dewey, and Rorty recognized the need to foster individual habits and collective sensibilities that center our moral imaginations, sympathetic attachments to others, and our situatedness in concrete social and natural environments.

This chapter discusses the philosopher Richard Rorty’s influential writings on the contingent nature of ironic thinking and expression. Rorty argued that irony does not reveal foundational truths, but is employed to help us “depict the world through multiple points of view.” Irony provides a way of individually recreating the world for ourselves rather than offering a special device to demystify assumptions about reality that somehow exists outside of language. Rorty’s claimed that writers such as Proust, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida are ironists given their questions about the stories and vocabularies we inhabit. Literature is especially useful for creating spaces for irony as sites for creative, nonjudgmental self-examination. But philosophy is also a kind of playful ironic writing that helps us to create useful redescriptions of the world and our roles in it. Colebrook emphasizes that Rorty rejected the idea that irony is just a trope in which one thing is said and another is meant. Irony is “the very opposite of searching for essences,” which is why it is so important for understanding liberalism with its emphasis on the “politics of tolerance, anti-foundationalism, and freedom of speech.”

Since the 1920s, American writers have evinced a fascination with and investment in fictional representations of jazz music and jazz musicians. As this essay demonstrates, part of jazz’s appeal for fiction writers is that it offers the opportunity to explore various kinds of border crossing. This essay surveys several jazz fictions to explicate how these fictions portray jazz as a local event, often focusing on musicians who may not be known beyond their own communities, but who live to play the music. Using Nathaniel Mackey’s concept of artistic othering, this essay investigates how writers portray the jazz musician’s search for a space to belong, where artistic forms of risk-taking are affirmed and the contingencies jazz musicians face, whether it be in the form of substance abuse, underemployment, self-doubt, or social injustice can be managed through instances where self-repair, improvisation, and community constitute the foundations of the musician’s lifeworld. Jazz fiction, in other words, is deeply concerned with the contradictions of American life and how playing jazz music involves the act of containing contradictions.

This chapter explores the Laudian critique of the (allegedly) puritan doctrine of absolute predestination, and particularly absolute reprobation. This critique imputed an absolute, fatal or stoic necessity to questions of salvation and damnation, which, the Laudians claimed, reduced the role of human free will and moral effort to nothing. In so doing it created desperately difficult pastoral dilemmas for ministers trying to rescue members of their flocks from the desperation such doctrines all too often induced. This was particularly the case for absolute reprobation. It was in the course of dealing with puritan error on this subject that the Laudians came to deal with the topic of predestination, and faute de mieux, to adumbrate their own position, asserting that saving grace was offered to all, that Christ died for the sins of the whole world, that God willed the salvation of every sinner, that human effort was required for salvation, that true faith could be totally and finally lost and that no one was simply doomed to damnation; contentions which they defended not as resolutions of the paradoxes at the heart of the debate about predestination, but rather as saving truths central to the nature of Christianity.

By integrating the fragmented research on emergency services, armed forces, and humanitarian organizations, this book identifies the components of a new theory on frontline crisis response. To begin with, the work of responders is characterized by persistent operational dilemmas. Since there are no universal solutions, they need to adapt their approaches and decisions to the situational contingencies of a crisis. These adaptations continue throughout the crisis response process as the situation evolves. Responders usually pragmatically act their way through operational dilemmas in the crisis response process. These experiences nevertheless have an existential effect on their identities and lives. Thus, the new theory comprises operational dilemmas, situational contingencies, response processes, pragmatic principles, and existentialist ideas. This theory offers a basis for crisis response improvements and contributes to the literature on strategic crisis management, frontline work in organizations, reliable organizing in risky contexts, and post-crisis operations. The chapter ends with a research agenda and a call for more academic engagement with frontline crisis response.

With Kant’s conception of organisms as “natural ends” nature and freedom are represented as harmoniously cohering with each other thereby giving us a special reassurance of reason’s causal efficacy in nature. For Kant, in order to make organic formations intelligible, we must represent the rule of their organization as reciprocal causality. I contend that this rule of reciprocal causality serves as a schema-analogue of reason’s Idea of absolute freedom. Moreover, I proceed to show that the antinomial conflict of teleological judgment is a conflict between two perspectives on nature: theoretical (scientific) in the thesis and practical in the antithesis. Therefore, the solution to the antinomy does not merely offer a justification for the explanatory compatibility of mechanical and teleological explanation in our representation of a single organic formation but also leads to a view of the world according to which the theoretical and the practical representations of nature “must cohere.”

Chapter 2 focuses on the migration stories of two generations of Kenyans, situating them within wider family and social histories. Although only one person in a family typically moved, I argue that their migration is better understood as family migration, rather than economic migration. While economic gain and social possibilities are related, they are not the same. Rather, these migration projects marked the convergence of individual and familial aspirations, thereby re-centring kinship as a means of realising the futures of both those who moved and those who stayed. The imaginings of migrant and non-migrant kin are important to this discussion and reveal how the United Kingdom was a largely imagined place at the time of migration, though not an arbitrary migration destination. Alongside this focus on place and space, the chapter begins to explore the role of time and temporality in the self- and life-making projects of migrants and their families.