This chapter chronicles a career spent at the intersection of micro and macro forces in development. Macro forces such as public policy or ideology intersect with individual developmental trajectories in mutually constitutive ways in my research – across topics such as immigration, poverty reduction policy, and forced displacement. I intertwine narrating the development of these themes in my career with a more personal narrative of how micro interactions in my life (particularly with mentors across psychology, anthropology, and economics) intersected with macro policy and societal change across the last three decades.

While my research life course is not typical, I have been able to focus on developmental psychology in full. Studying change and continuity, risk and resilience, timing/tempo and transitions, babies to boomers. Topics include self-recognition, social cognition, puberty, pregnancy, sexuality, depression, aggression, and parenting. Poverty, inequality, family structure, neighborhood, and immigration contexts are of interest. Policy-oriented research focuses on federal policies (subsidized childcare, Head Start and Early Head Start, income transfers, housing) as well as prevention programs. My greatest pleasure has been the amazing scholars and students from psychology as well as economics, sociology, demography, endocrinology, pediatrics, biologists, and social workers.

The chapter is concerned with metaphor and focusses specifically on war metaphors in political discourses. The cognitive mechanisms at work in metaphor are described with an emphasis on frames as the unit of conceptual organisation that gets mapped in political metaphors. Recent experimental studies demonstrating the framing effects of metaphor are discussed. The war frame is described to include discussion of intertextuality as a means of accessing it. Three case studies are then presented exploring war metaphors in discourses of Covid-19, Brexit and immigration. Analogies with the first and second world wars in particular are highlighted and critiqued. The chapter defines and discusses extreme metaphors illustrated through examples in which immigrants are compared to animals and closes with a discussion of how readers may resist extreme metaphors.

The chapter addresses attentional distribution in conceptualisations of events. It argues that language directs attention over particular portions of an event-structure selecting certain elements for focal attention while conceptually backgrounding other elements. The ideological implications of attentional distribution are discussed with reference to mystification whereby either human agency in or the human impact of harmful social actions is obscured. Two case studies are presented. The first considers action-chain profiling in media coverage of fatalities on the Gaza border. It shows how attentional distributions evoked by intransitive, passive and agentless passive constructions as well as nominalisations conceptually background those responsible for the fatalities. It further shows the conceptual means by which the impact of violent actions may be mitigated. The second considers path-profiling in immigration discourse. It shows how different verb choices serve to highlight humanitarian motivations for migration versus the impact of migration on host countries and considers the role of metonymy in legitimating hostile immigration policies.

The chapter examines co-text images in multimodal texts. It highlights the increasing importance of images in political discourse. The intersemiotic relations which language and image may enter into are described with an emphasis placed on intersemiotic convergence. Two areas of multimodal research in Cognitive CDA are identified: multimodal constructions and multimodal metaphor. In connection with multimodal constructions, the chapter considers news photographs and shows how news photographs and their captions may coincide with respect to the conceptual dimensions of schematisation, viewpoint and attentional distribution. In connection with multimodal metaphor, the chapter shows how metaphors expressed verbally may also be expressed visually or cross-modally in verbal and visual components of the text. The role of intertextuality and interdiscursivity in accessing source-frames is highlighted. Two case studies are presented. The first considers visual and cross-modal examples of war and animal metaphors in immigration discourse. The second considers body-poses as a particular source of metaphoricity in images.

The chapter focusses on schematisation – the image-schematic structuring of events in conceptualisation. Image schemas are defined as representations of recurrent patterns of experience which are called up in discourse to constitute our basic understanding of the situation or event described. The different domains of experience in which image schemas arise are considered alongside their ideological role in the discursive construction of events. Two case studies are presented. The first examines the motion event in media discourses of immigration. It highlights a number of conceptual parameters along which conceptualisations of immigration may depart from a basic model of motion, including in manner of motion and configuration of the ground, quantification and plexity in the figure, and the rate and iteration of the motion encoded, and considers the implications of these departures for ideology and the legitimation of hostile immigration policies. The second focusses on schematisation in media coverage of a Black Lives Matter protest. In a comparative analysis of two texts it shows the patterns of conceptualisation implicated in realising the protest paradigm in media reporting.

Now capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, and playing a leading role in Europe and the wider world, Berlin has risen from insignificant origins in two small medieval trading centres on swampy soil at the confluence of two rivers, the Spree and the Havel, in the Brandenburg marches (or Mark) in the centre of Europe. This chapter introduces the notion of a key moment, and outlines the three elements guiding the book: people, or changing demographic profiles; place, or the ways in which the size, shape, and principal functions of the city changed over time; and identity, or the ways in which Berliners and others imagined the city and constructed an ever-changing present in light of selected aspects of the past and contested aspirations for the future.

How, given that in 1885 those unable to support themselves were considered personal failures, were they seen as victims of the failures of markets and governments to ensure their welfare by 1931?

The economic boom of the 1980s turbocharged longer term trends and patterns of daily life in the city, as money flowed freely and the world seemed to be Japan’s oyster. Tokyo grew into a financial powerhouse as a seat of global finance, a hub of media and information, and a center of high-tech innovation. Real estate prices soared, and the government eyed the redevelopment of the waterfront. The global capital also flexed its cultural muscle, exporting creations such as Hello Kitty and sushi to enthusiastic audiences around the world while importing goods and services with an international flair for Tokyoites to consume. The city became more multiethnic and unevenness in concentrations of money were reflected in its social geography, not so much in socioeconomically distinct islands as in its patchwork of neighborhoods. As the economy deflated in the 1990s, in what would later be dubbed the “lost decade,” consumption and tastes moderated but Tokyoites continued to live and work in an undeniably global and thoroughly consumerist society.

This chapter illustrates how the United Kingdom’s distinctive understanding of sovereignty combined with New Labour’s vision of the United Kingdom’s place in the global economy to shape the government’s approach to human trafficking. Targeting trafficking for sexual exploitation, the government cracked down on migrant sex workers and domestic prostitution. It also associated labour trafficking with illegal working and cast society as a victim of exploitation along with individuals who had been trafficked. The chapter describes New Labour’s selective acceptance of European Union and Council of Europe antitrafficking instruments; it adopted those instruments that reinforced the United Kingdom’s borders while avoiding those that gave rights to victims of trafficking. By equating its action plan for tackling human trafficking with the abolition of the slave trade, the government elevated its antitrafficking policies to a moral crusade.

In the last few decades, governments have increasingly sought to relocate away from their territorial limits border practices that serve to identify, filter, and, if necessary, prevent foreigners’ crossings into their national space. This shift is facilitated by digital innovations that offer new opportunities for making migrants legible from afar, miles away from the border. Yet the turn to emerging technologies is not the preserve of governments. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been using digital technologies, including biometrics data, for several decades. For UNHCR these are becoming an essential tool in accounting for the populations under its protection. This chapter explores this development. The first part surveys the deterritorialization of border controls in state practice with a focus on the enabling role of biometrics and digitization in that process. Then, it demonstrates how the use of biometrics by UNHCR maps onto these states’ practices. The second part considers the consequences of UNHCR’s practices surrounding the biometric registration of refugees, the risks posed by the collection of biometric data in the refugee context, and how the institutional and structural conditions in which UNHCR operates, especially with regard to consent, accountability mechanisms, and legal safeguards, may undermine refugees’ control over their data.

This chapter argues that if anti-sweatshop activists want to help workers they should specifically target and boycott slave labor sweatshops such as those in China with forced Uyghur labor; advocate and monitor “ethical branding”; buy goods made in the Third World; pay children to go to school to reduce child labor; promote the process of development; and advocate for relaxing immigration restrictions.

The aim of this chapter is to provide an understanding of the structural constraints and opportunities for the populist radical right (PRR) in Latin America. Unlike Western Europe, material values are still of vital importance in many Latin American countries because of high levels of inequality in the region. This represents a major constraint for the emergence of the PRR, and only some parties have been able to overcome it. The author argues that the growth of the PRR relies on three factors: the appeal of the PRR’s hardline discourses, the mobilization of voters dissatisfied with sexual and reproductive rights and secularization, and a crisis of representation among the traditional parties, who are painted by PRR leaders as a corrupt elite.

The nationalist element of Brexit populism had an entrenched ethnocentric character that was capable of breaking out in the in the form of racism. By 2016 overt racism had become taboo in public, but Brexitspeak had the linguistic means to dog whistle it. The new racism also enlarged the sense of ‘racism’ to cover refugee migrants entering the UK who were not dark-skinned. The sources of racism in the UK are diverse and subject to debate. In this chapter the focus is on the likely impact of racist demagoguery in generating and sustaining long-term racist attitudes. The example of Enoch Powell and his ‘rivers of blood’ speech is scrutinised in detail. But Powellism persisted well beyond the 1960s and 1970s: twenty years on it motivated the murder of Stephen Lawrence. In the age of the internet, Powell was a legitimising icon among neo-Nazi networks and appeared in website videos quoting and visualising his notorious speech. But veneration of Powell also remained apparent among right-wing Conservative politicians, activists and writers, and in their networking with ultra-right individuals.

The notion of identity plays a central role in contemporary culture, both as the core of individualism and as the proclaimed principle of nationalist populist movements – and thus also of Brexit ideology. To have a national identity implies being different from other persons, groups, nations and, in Brexitspeak, the EU. This means that Brexitism is not just a British phenomenon, but part of the wave of national populism that has swept across Europe and the Americas. This chapter includes a survey of European identitarian movements and of the far-right writers whose ideas were in tune with them. It was immigrants that were made into a threatening ‘other’ in the pro-Brexit campaigns, and the EU was blamed for increased immigration. While other factors, such as economic deprivations, levels of immigration in particular locations are part of the story, it can be argued, as this book does, that it was demagoguery targeting immigrants – loudly amplified by the popular press – that sufficiently persuaded voters to vote Leave.