This chapter explores the nature of the legislature and its relationship to constitutional government, focusing in particular on the importance of legislative agency and the dynamics that frame its exercise. The chapter begins by reflecting on the objects of legislative action, arguing that authorising a legislative assembly to legislate changes who legislates but not what it is to legislate. The object of legislative deliberation and action should be the common good and securing this end requires agency. The assembly faces many challenges in exercising agency, which it is structured to overcome, partly by way of its relationship to government, a relationship that goes well beyond acts of legislation. The relationship between legislature and government shapes the character of a constitutional order and bears on the relationship between legislature and the people. The legislature’s duty is to represent the people, which makes self-government possible. The legislature should deliberate and act for the people and be accountable to the people, with legislative deliberation taking its place in a wider public conversation. The legislature’s capacity for agency informs how legislative acts should be understood to change the law and helps explain the moral importance of legislative freedom and the limits on that freedom.

Private employers and their health insurers have come to occupy a central role in access to reproductive care for the majority of Americans through a complex legal infrastructure that effectuates employers’ choices in their employee benefit plans. While some aspects of state insurance law, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and anti-discrimination laws encourage employers to cover reproductive care, this web of laws is very porous and predominantly supports employers’ choices. Sometimes, this validation of employer choices expands access to reproductive care services, as in the case of Walmart extending its benefits to cover abortion-related travel expenses in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. But employers who wish to restrict access to reproductive care also find their preferences validated by law, as illustrated in Hobby Lobby’s successful bid to refuse coverage for certain contraceptive drugs, despite the ACA’s mandate to cover them. The additional deregulation that employers’ “self-insured” plans enjoy under ERISA preemption, combined with the prevalence of these plans, amplifies these effects. In essence, the availability of funding for reproductive care for the majority of Americans of reproductive age is left to the promises enshrined in employers’ health benefit plans and the incentives that these entities pursue in designing their plans. This chapter untangles the legal web that gives private sector employers this gatekeeper role, and explores the implications of our reliance on employers for individuals’ reproductive freedom.

The introduction sets out how Mike came to write the book, why it is so important for us to face up to the challenges ahead for humanity, how dismally we have so far failed to do so, how the book is structured and what kind of future we can hope for.

Regardless of the intellectual coherence of hierocratic theory and the pope’s formal status as head of the universal Catholic Church and lynchpin of its central administration, the practical reality of papal monarchy had to reconcile that curial centralism with the logistical impossibility of exercising and enforcing direct control over all of Catholic Europe. Configured by local variables and interests, the integration of regional churches and polities within the papal network rested insecurely on a delicate balance combining delegation of authority, administrative decentralization, and local acquiescence. Incomplete subjection left space for local agency to exploit the perceived benefits of papal authority and obstruct its unwelcome intrusions. Using England as a case study, this chapter considers various manifestation of those complex ties (the activities of papal emissaries, and responses to and exploitation of the legal, fiscal, and dispensatory claims and structures), emphasizing the bottom-up perspective on medieval papal monarchy.

This chapter of the handbook discusses the role of mind perception in the categorization of individuals as moral agents and moral patients. Moral agents are defined as individuals that can commit morally wrong actions; moral patients are defined as individuals that can be morally wronged. It is generally agreed that the attribution of moral agency and moral patiency is linked to the attribution of mental capacities and traits. The chapter surveys a variety of models of mind perception, some of which focus on the representation of mental capacities, some of which focus on the representation of mental traits. The dominant model of mind perception in moral psychology is the experience-agency model, which divides the space of mindedness into experiential capacities like sentience and self-awareness, and agentic capacities like deliberative reasoning and self-control. Reviewing the empirical literature on moral categorization, the author argues that neither the experience-agency model nor any of the major alternatives to it captures all the factors to which everyday attributions of moral agency and moral patiency are sensitive.

This autobiographical fragment begins in a working-class high school and traces a career trajectory shaped by the world I grew up in and the world I entered. As a White woman from an American working-class background, I was an uneasy fit for the academy, circa 1979. I experienced obstacles and intellectual pleasures. I found many fascinating topics to study (e.g., class and cultural variation in early narrative) and many fascinating colleagues and students to work with. The outsider/insider position I occupied offered novel vantage points on the what, who, and how of developmental inquiry and on its telling omissions. My story of marginalization intersected with a historical moment when developmental psychology began to reckon with its narrowness and ethnocentrism. Thanks to the efforts of many developmental scholars, the field is now headed in a more context-sensitive and pluralistic direction while still contending with entrenched deficit discourses and other blind spots.

This study examines English Medium Instruction (EMI) teacher identities in two Colombian universities within the context of the country's linguistic diversity and sociopolitical shifts. It highlights the educational preference for English over indigenous languages and the contentious introduction of EMI and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). The research focuses on the identity (re)configurations of EMI educators within this evolving landscape, influenced by both personal and broader sociopolitical factors. Utilizing a qualitative approach, the study examines seven professors across disciplines to capture their experiences with EMI. The findings underscore the complexity of EMI teacher identity (EMITI), which intersects language, discipline, context, and pedagogy. The ROAD-MAPPING framework facilitates an exploration of these identities, highlighting the critical role of teacher agency in EMI settings. The research illuminates how EMI teachers navigate their roles amid global and local pressures, disciplinary demands, and the linguistic aspects of EMI. This study enriches the understanding of language policy, teacher identity, and educational practices in multilingual higher education contexts.

To most contributors in this volume, international organizations (IOs) act both as agents of, and inhibitors of peaceful change. This leaves the task of identifying exactly how and why they foster or inhibit peaceful change to empirical analysis and mid-level theorizing. Yet, as Ian Hurd points out in his chapter, understanding the deep power politics at play in institutionalized peaceful change requires a higher level of theorizing. This concluding chapter takes stock of the collective findings in light of Hurd’s cautionary tale and suggests future avenues of research engaging with postpositivist, relational, and critical theories. It identifies three main areas in need of further theorizing: the agents, the stakes, and the processes of peaceful change. It argues that such further theorizing would not only shed light on transformative processes of maximalist peaceful change which are yet to be fully explored in this volume, but it would also help develop a more pluralistic research agenda.

This chapter reviews ways of analyzing interactional and grammatical regularities of spoken, dialogically organized language in a constructional framework. The basic tenet is that grammatical constructions, when used in talk-in-interaction, are housed in interactional sequences, and it is the constructions’ positions in certain sequential locations that motivates their use and shapes their form. Therefore, aspects of sequence and discourse organization are potentially distinctive features of constructions, and reflections of the interactional contingencies that generate them. Four types of construction are examined: receipt questions, second assessments, a construction of meaning negotiation, and pseudo-clefts. All these patterns can be said to be responsive in one way or another, thus lending themselves well to a dialogically sensitive analysis. The analytic examples highlight the necessity of abstracted interactional information for a fuller understanding of the workings of grammatical constructions in talk-in-interaction and for how an interactional perspective can enrich constructional approaches to analyzing linguistic structure.

Women’s agency was contingent on the multiple parties concerned with it, and they formed its gendered understandings and practices. This chapter traces those understandings and practices in the courtroom, where Taiwanese women in premarital sexual relationships expressed their interests. From the early 1920s, more women made their voices heard in civil cases on marital affairs and divorce, which revealed changing attitudes toward marriage and premarital sexual relationships among themselves, their partners and family members, and Japanese judges. The judges joined the male litigants in highlighting the formal state of marriage and wifehood against women’s informal personal status and their sexual histories. Meanwhile, Taiwanese women continued to react against the discriminatory treatment of premarital sexual relationships and eventually won the more flexible treatment of premarital relationships as if they were formal marriages in the mid-1930s. However, this result was achieved only when those women agreed to be submissive to their male partners or otherwise considered promiscuous. Changing the direction of their sexual, marital, and family lives took on a gender-specific tone.

This chapter bridges environmental humanities and Black humanities by examining a figure largely, if curiously, excluded from the “ecocritical” canon: Charles Chesnutt, the first African American writer of commercially successful fiction. Reading literary environmentalism beyond the lenses of Romanticism or transcendentalism, Forbes finds in Chesnutt’s late nineteenth-century conjure tales a richly imagined Black environmental heritage that connected race and nature. Chesnutt’s short fiction featuring metamorphoses of humans into plants and animals represents a key node in an alternate, and nonlinear, Black environmentalist timeline. In contrast to environmentalisms that pit nature’s interests against humans’, the insights we see at flashpoints across this tradition, and crucially in Chesnutt’s conjure tales, belie narratives of human/nature separation that underpin most “white” environmentalisms. Moreover, his marshaling of racialized nonhuman agencies also helps us address persistent difficulties associated with new materialist theorizing. Fusing human/plant/animal agencies to frameworks of care and nurturance, characters in Chesnutt’s conjure tales weaponize “waste” against enslavement’s inhuman valuation systems.

Here I defend the view that freedom requires more than merely opportunities to act but also the provision of resources needed for agents to enjoy capabilities to pursue valued activities and ways of life.

The border exists not only as a function of its physicality, but also of the way its discipline is internalized by migrants and asylum seekers. At the intersection of both, this chapter focuses on how asylum seekers are led to minimize the element of migrancy in their trajectories, making the reasons why they aspire to seek asylum in some countries than others invisible to international law. Contra this invisibility, it makes the case that asylum seekers, even as they flee persecution, are migrants too, drawn by certain countries rather than others on the basis of varying life projects and ongoing connections. The impossibility to normatively articulate such an ambition within the categories of international law must count as one of the considerable costs imposed by the border’s disciplining effect.

This chapter examines the popularity of Kinyarwanda-language rap and hip hop in urban Rwanda. It considers how it can be understood as a genre both of anger and sorrow, revealing Kigali as a site not of progress and modernity but rather of poverty and deception. The genre’s use and invention of Kinyarwanda slang is considered, as well as its politics. The chapter argues that a simple resistance–domination binary is unhelpful for truly understanding hip hop’s local complexities. Instead, it takes into account the carefully guarded silences that hip hop artists maintained, and the ways in which the performance of swaga was less available to young women than to young men.

This chapter introduces the main arguments of the book by exploring the case of Kizito Mihigo, a well-known popular singer who was imprisoned, was released, and later died while in police custody. It discusses the idiom of the heart – or, more particularly, the need to transform the heart – as key to understanding post-genocide social life and urban young people’s attempts to navigate a difficult political terrain. Instead of reproducing theoretical binaries – resistance–domination, sound–silence, past–present – this chapter proposes looking to popular culture and Pentecostalism in order to understand the different ways young people in Kigali attempt to assert agency and make ‘noise’ despite a wider context of silence.