Abstract: Chapter 5 presents an untold tale of an older brother and his younger sister. While their mother was the protagonist in Wolf’s classic ethnography, "A Thrice-told-Tale," the story of these children was obscured. Childhood sibling relation in “the Chinese family” was rarely studied by anthropologists, yet it is an important relation that shapes children’s moral development and family dynamics. I present systematic patterns of this sibling dyad’s social network positioning, uncover their distinct personalities, and trace their nuanced dynamics of care, rivalry and coalitional maneuvers. I closely examine projective tests data to reveal children's own emotional experience in and perspectives about their family life. This chapter is a unique narrative: in addition to illuminating childhood sibling relation, it simultaneously rediscovers the voices of these two children from ethnographic omissions and silences. Therefore, this case study echoes the dual themes of the entire book, children learning morality and anthropologists reconstructing an ethnography.

Corporations and other powerful contemporary institutions take decisions that increasingly impact the possibilities for well-being not only of those who work or live within them and are governed by them but also of distant people who are deeply affected by their functioning. This democratic deficit raises the question of whether the workers and others who are so affected should have a say in the policies that set the basic conditions for their own livelihoods and flourishing. This chapter sketches an understanding of the scope of the All-Affected Principle, taking it as an important addition to the “common activities” principle that requires democratic rights for the members of an institution or community. It proposes that both principles require democratic management (or “workplace democracy”) within firms, and suggests that the All-Affected Principle is especially apt for addressing the exogenous effects of decisions on people beyond the firm, or on distant people impacted by the institutions of global governance. The chapter goes on to consider applications of the All-Affected Principle for other labor rights under capitalism, including the right to form unions, support for care work, and for the unemployed.

Comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) has been one of the cornerstones of geriatric medicine since its introduction by Marjory Warren in 1936. This kind of assessment is defined as a multidimensional and multidisciplinary process related to identifying medical, social, and functional needs and developing an integrated care plan designed to meet the patien’st needs.The practice and applications of CGA have been used to various degrees in mainstream care for older people in the UK and internationally.

Some limitations still exist around the wider implementation of CGA, as its practice relies on members of the multidisciplinary team (MDT) and on an effective communication between them, the patients, and their families. This kind of assessment has been criticised for not adequately acknowledging frailty and for not using patient-reported outcome measures to test its efficacy.

Randomised controlled studies, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses provided considerable evidence for the clinical and financial effectiveness of CGA in various hospital specialties. However, there are still concerns about the generalisability of CGA in community settings. Further research to identify target populations for CGA-led interventions and a consensus on outcome measures are required to realise CGA benefits.

In this chapter we describe required skills and practical tips to deliver CGA across a variety of settings.

Psychiatric intensive care units (PICUs) treat patients with an acute episode of a major mental illness who present with additional risk of harm to themselves or others that cannot be managed on an acute psychiatric ward. This chapter outlines standards of care that are expected upon such units, what they are and how the standards were developed with clinical rationale. It also gives examples of other guidelines and standards that impact practice within a PICU setting. It also describes the process of quality improvement in such units and how this relates to continual positive progress within a PICU setting. It alludes to how the principles of psychiatric intensive care can be incorporated within other settings and the need for clear definition of subspecialities within psychiatry.

This chapter advocates for a naturalistic ethical framework that bases normative components in basic human functions, such as emotions, as an effective approach to address intergenerational ethics questions. Using Mencius’s ethical framework as an example, which establishes emotional pivot points to incorporate others’ concerns and worries into moral deliberation, the chapter argues that this approach provides significant theoretical advantages over frameworks that rely on a familial-role-based relational understanding of Confucian ethics and moral cultivation through rituals. The chapter also highlights the flexibility and adaptability of Mencian ethics, which was redeveloped over a thousand years later during the Neo-Confucian flowering and serves as evidence of its philosophical framework’s ability to connect people emotionally and ethically across time.

Women have been perceived as a ‘problem’ for visions of social justice since the emergence of the ‘social question’ in the nineteenth century, prompting feminist debates about whether social justice for women is best pursued on the basis of their equality with, or difference from, men. This chapter reconstructs those debates with a focus on Central Europe, the heartland of the late nineteenth-century European socialist and sexual-reform movements and, throughout the twentieth century, the site of conflicts between fascist, state-socialist, and liberal-democratic regimes of social justice. But these conflicts also have a strongly contemporary character, given the deeply gendered experiences of transition to a capitalist economy in the former socialist states of Central Europe since 1989. The absence of an agreed definition of how social justice for women might be achieved (and in which political contexts) was reinforced throughout the twentieth century by the weight of embedded inequalities of gender, which have remained a defining element of Europe’s modern experience. Bringing women into the story of social justice in twentieth-century Europe highlights the perceived deficit of social justice that the editors of this volume identify as the hallmark of contemporary understandings of social justice in Europe today.

Looking at French writer Édouard Louis’s oeuvre – including En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy) (2014), Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father) (2018), Changer: Méthode (Change: Method) (2021), Combat et Métamorphoses d’une femme (Battles and Metamorphoses of a Woman) (2021), and Dialogue sur l’art et la politique (Dialogue on Art and Politics) (2021) – this chapter analyses the relationship between (white) working-class/poor individuals and medicine, masculinity and care. This study sheds light on Louis’s strategy to deploy a ’democracy of care’ – that is, a type of social organization grounded in equality, more horizontal relations, and which values care (and care workers) over economic production – by using his artistic practice to draw attention to lived experiences of trauma, pain, silence, and social invisibilization. Further, it does not only appear that Louis’s writing about pain serves to reflect on France’s healthcare policies and inequalities, but also that power dynamics (such as patient-doctor) inform his writing practice.

The proportion of the population living into old age has been increasing worldwide. For the first time in history, there are more older people than children under 5 years of age. The task for public health is to understand the relationships between ageing, health and the environment (physical, social and economic) in which people live, to promote healthy ageing and prevent the disability and subsequent dependency that is often associated with growing old.

This chapter examines the factors that lead to ageing populations and explores the health, social and economic consequences of the change in the population structure. It then goes on to outline strategies that can lead to healthy ageing and other public health actions that could help to manage the challenges posed – and the opportunities afforded – by the relative and absolute increase in the number of older people.

Focusing on key themes, this chapter highlights how kinship and relatedness constitute a vital lens for understanding gender. First, the everyday is the principal ground for examining relatedness. It illumines how gender shapes our lives and is, in turn, formed, maintained, and altered over time. The borders between gender and other aspects of life can be porous. Second, the seemingly merely domestic or intimate can be generative – a theme that builds on earlier feminist insights. Kinship has wider consequences, including for politics or economics. Finally, kinship is imbued with the potential for hierarchy and inequality, ambivalence, ruptures, and failure. Its generativity includes its less amiable aspects. Gendered inequities and enmities arise from these aspects. Breaks in the fabric of kinship, however, imply the possibility of repair, which may depend on gendered forms of labor. Threading through these themes is care, a key aspect of everyday life and relatedness alike. Care encompasses whole economies and traverses national borders. Care speaks, too, to the vulnerability that is at the heart of what it means to be human. It mirrors, and at times heightens, the difficulties inherent in kinship.

Limited reparenting is a cornerstone of schema therapy. It is a style of interacting with clients in which the therapist aims to give the client experiences of having their emotional needs met directly within the therapeutic relationship. The therapist here serves as a ‘healthy model’ or template of caring, self-control, and guidance that, over time, is internalised by the client into their own ‘Healthy Adult’ mode. The core ingredients of limited reparenting include offering care, guidance, empathic confrontation, and limit setting. The aim of this therapeutic relationship is to provide corrective experiences that ‘kick start’ the emotional development of the client. Based on a thorough assessment and conceptualisation, limited reparenting offers a specific roadmap to harnessing the power of the therapeutic alliance to promote schema change.

In this concluding chapter, we give a brief overview of the key themes in the book, emphasizing the importance of care in the relational pedagogy we have been discussing. We argue that practitioners should take children seriously by seeking their perspectives and identifying what matters for them while building common knowledge with them and working relationally to help take forward their social situations of development. But our primary purpose here is to look forward and consider the implications of the subtle skilled work we are advocating for practitioners. Care alone is insufficient. Practitioners who work with children and families need knowledge of child and adolescent development; subject matter knowledge in schools, and for other caring professionals their core professional knowledge, such as legal responsibilities for social workers; and knowledge of pedagogy. The professional interactions with children, families and other practitioners in a relational pedagogy are reciprocal, involving ongoing mutual engagement, where power differences are played down, and professional agency is crucial. Much therefore depends on how institutional leaders mediate government policies: Creating and supporting agentic responsive practitioners is a leadership responsibility. Questions of values therefore crucially underpin the ideas shared in this book.