This chapter argues that much of the complexity and rigour of Geography revolves around the sophisticated conceptualisation that is involved in thinking geographically, something that begins to develop in preschool. It is not so much what the geographer studies but the way they look at the human or physical phenomena they are exploring that makes the study of Geography what it is. This leads some to say that everything can be studied geographically or everything is geography! Going back to the discussion on the ‘grammar’ of a subject, we can again highlight that what many people perceive as geography is purely the vocabulary of the subject and what makes geography is the grammar of the subject; that is, it is the implicit conceptual thinking involved when exploring and trying to make sense of the world in which we live.

The richness and importance of the HASS learning area pivots on the exploration and understanding of how we are human, our interactions with others and our journey as humans in the world. We are the authors and actors in the story of our past, present and future, captured in the published and unpublished texts that inform our learning in HASS. Writings, drawings, maps, data, images, reports, laws, journals, plays, poetry and ephemera are available as physical and online items because they have been collected, organised, preserved, curated and shared by libraries and librarians, and their colleagues in associated institutions in physical and digital spaces.

This chapter presents an overview of social interaction, technology, and language learning within the context of a cross-cultural exchange project. Interaction with others and being an active participant in an environment where the language is used is crucial to language learning. We will first look at social interaction and situate it in the context of language teaching and learning. Next, we present some primary themes of social interaction and discuss the practices that inform the role social interaction plays in collaborative projects in language classes. We provide examples of how technological tools were used to facilitate virtual social interaction between language students in France and the United States. Finally, the chapter concludes by offering insights for cross-cultural projects that prioritize social interaction.

So, here we are at the final chapter, and at this point you might be minded to ask ‘So what?’ Although some of you may have found this book to be so compelling that you have decided to become an epidemiologist, it is likely that most of you will looking for other ways for this epidemiology stuff to value add to your health science learning and ongoing professional or academic lives. In modern life, we are deluged with health information that is provided in multiple formats, including social media, news websites, online videos, televised news bulletins and chat shows, and even academic texts and other published literature. How are we to find something approaching the truth in this plethora of often contradictory information? In its focus on epidemiology, this book has aimed to provide you with the tools for evaluating scientific information using critical thinking – a way of identifying and evaluating evidence that has wide applicability to just about every area of human endeavour.

Epidemiology is the study of patterns and determinants of disease and other health states in populations. It primarily uses quantitative methods (those methods dealing with counting, measuring and comparing things) that definitely use statistics and include statistical methods, but in this book we will not be talking about performing any statistical acrobatics more complicated than completing a sudoku puzzle.

This chapter serves as a guide for heuristic inquiry into the social and emotional intelligences. The intent is for readers to come to know their relationships and emotions in ways that appreciate them as phenomena, where there is always something to be discovered. Heuristic inquiry offers a discovery process for application to a concerning or meaningful issue or challenge, which are associated with emotional experience. This allows readers to develop their own social and emotional intelligences to increase the quality of their lives and the effectiveness of their personal and professional endeavors.

This chapter reprises the arguments advanced in the first four chapters of the book, and assesses the question of what “lessons” history can teach on that basis. It argues that the habits and methods of analysis, interpretation, open-ended inquiry, and intellectual flexibility that study in History cultivates are uniquely valuable in the specific circumstances of our own time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that it is these habits, rather than any specific political values, that make History uniquely valuable as a form of education for citizenship. It argues, finally, that this is the only approach to the civic value of history education that is compatible with the ethical principles foundational to the discipline of History. In closing, it presents the case for viewing the understanding that history offers us no lessons as the most important lesson history can teach us. This is a lesson that can teach us to think and act with due deliberation, to inquire more deeply before acting, and to act in full confidence that our actions will have unintended consequences.

This chapter reviews the literature on the teaching of history, and defines the purpose of this book: to offer a clearer definition of the aims and benefits of the study of History at the college and university level. Two principles are at the heart of that conception. One is that long-standing methodological and epistemological divisions within the discipline are a source of its unique pedagogical value. The other is that History assumes a particular ethical posture relative to its subjects – the people it studies – and that this too is a source of its unique pedagogical value.

Communication is an important professional and life skill. Organisations today are looking for people with the communication skills to contribute productively in the workplace and maintain effective relationships with their stakeholders. While we may all communicate, not all our communication is intended, and not all of it is interpreted and understood as we expect. Communication can break down at any number of points.

Your ability to develop messages that are received as they are intended depends on your emotional intelligence (being able to interpret which aspects of communication are required), your emotional competence (being able to manage emotions of yourself and others) and your technical skills (being able to produce messages that are capable of being understood).

It’s important that we learn how to harness the benefits of all the tools available to make us better communicators rather than let them replace us in our communication-focused roles. The purpose of this book is to help prepare you with the skills to improve or enhance your communication and effectively utilise the communication tools and channels at your fingertips.

The chapter answers the question ‘Why has the rule of law become so fragile?’ as set up by the 2023 Nine Dots Prize competition. It shows how the liberal narrative of the rule of law is built on repressing the political elements of the legal system. Using Jungian psychoanalysis to analyse the crises of the rule of law, the author shows that the more we repress democratic politics from the legal system, the more the politics will strike back as ‘shadow’ in a distorted, anti-democratic form. The chapter also deepens the analysis of how DWE works politically with anger, preventing it from turning into ‘free-floating rage’ that can be exploited by authoritarian populism. It introduces the notion of ‘critical feeling’ to complement ‘critical thinking’ in contemporary academia.

The question of legitimation, according to the analysis of the Frankfurt scholars, contains an unanswered aspect pertaining to the entire normative approach. This is about the final arbiter to decide whether a regulatory system can claim legitimacy. It can be logically suggested that such a final arbiter needs to be positioned outside of the normative system in question. Once we can agree that the natality aspect of fundamental rights is lost in the transfer from the non-digital domain, we see that the Frankfurt school’s aspiration towards the general explanatory power is lost as well. The relational chain stops after the creation of the digital narrative; that is, normativity does not follow as a logical result from internal development inside the digital domain. Despite the relational chain being broken, normativity exists in and for the digital domain. If not a result of the development as proposed by the Frankfurt school, there have to be other explanatory venues. The main among these is the concept of self-normativity.

This chapter opens with a review of the dangers of misinformation and conspiracy theory beliefs. We then review the literature on debunking techniques, highlighting why debunking is largely ineffective at combatting QAnon and other conspiracy theories. Although corrections are largely ineffective, repeated corrections, warnings, and alternative accounts for misinformation can improve their effectiveness. In contrast to debunking, another approach is “prebunking”; trying to prevent conspiracies rather than counter them. Based on inoculation theory, Banas and Miller (2013) found that both fact-based and logic-based messages delivered before a conspiracy film helped build up participants’ resistance to that message. Next, this chapter discusses the role of media literacy in the QAnon—and other more general—conspiracies. Research has indicated that greater news media literacy relates negatively to beliefs in conspiracies (Craft et al., 2017). A brief discussion of how QAnon is similar or different from other groups is offered, along with some research questions for future study about QAnon specifically.

This chapter brings central elements of the book to the fore, reflects the need for critical thinking, and problematizes the future of agreement-making and the study thereof. In doing so, it addresses critical questions that run through all chapters of the book: Why does it matter to “be there”? How do I navigate closeness and emotions? Is my data ever complete? What will “being there” mean in the future? Global environmental agreement-making is in constant flux, adapting to changing institutional circumstances, power relations, and new emerging environmental problems. Although the multilateral setting with its “old-fashioned” diplomatic practices and formalities creates the impression of stability, routine, and immutability, there is change and the possibility to do global environmental relations differently. We understand critical scholarship to have a vital role in illuminating enduring power relations and revealing potential openings for change and transformation to ensure agreement-making enables better collective stewardship of the Earth. This aspiration nourished the objective of this book to problematize how and why we conduct research at and on global environmental negotiations and to evaluate and expand the concepts and methods available to further this study. The chapter closes with a reflection on future research questions and themes.

The ability to respond critically to any text is a learnt ability which needs some innate ability before it can be developed. That is, critical thinking is a variegated talent, linked to intelligence and curiosity, which is hard-wired into the human brain but is not always fostered equally. We are all different according to aspects of biology, intelligence and personality. Likewise, we are all different according to our experience of being encouraged to use these natural abilities. Indeed, there is even some evidence that critical thinking is an ability that is only really developed at all after the teenage years. This idea is consistent with other theories of literacy, which state that there must be an inherent ability to decode language before it can be developed, and that any form of literacy is incremental. That means that each layer of literacy builds on previous levels, and that we must be cognitively ready for each stage. Critical literacy is, therefore, a higher level of literacy which builds on foundational forms of literacy. We need to be able to decode language systems at the semiotic, denotational and connotational levels in order to produce sense. Once we produce this meaning through textual reception, we can start to definitively question what we are being told, building on whatever latent critical ability we already have.

The introductory chapter defines pseudoscience as it relates to therapy. Potential harms of using pseudoscientific interventions are discussed. Pseudoscience is contrasted with attempts to identify science-based therapies. The chapter identifies the challenge in distinguishing between science and pseudoscience due to the fuzzy boundary between these two constructs.