University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) has achieved regional and national prominence in the US for its remarkable success preparing African American students in the STEM fields. The success is the result of the institution’s approach to innovation - framing challenges as researchable questions and testing to see which strategies work and replicating them. It has fostered a culture of curiosity and mutual support that makes the pursuit of excellence an ongoing collective effort.

Barbara Rogoff reflects on the sources and pathway of her work on understanding culture and individual learning as aspects of a mutually constituting process. She describes her efforts across decades to convey the idea that learning is a process of transforming one’s participation in cultural communities, which simultaneously contributes to transforming and maintaining the communities’ cultural practices. As ways of getting traction on understanding and researching from the mutually constituting perspective, Rogoff offers the metaphors of lenses that bring aspects of the overall process into focus, and fractals that aid in seeing the similarity of cultural patterns across both small moments and generations. She connects these ideas with several concepts and lines of research that she and her colleagues have contributed: everyday cognition, guided participation, Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI) to family and community endeavors, interdependence with autonomy, collaborative initiative, simultaneous attention, fluid collaboration, and “Barbara’s do-do theory.”

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 chapter demonstrates how young male Taiwanese elites turned to gendered masculinity in response to colonial redefinitions of women within the family and marriage from the 1920s onward. Taiwanese masculinity derived from the mixture of Han Chinese tradition and Japanese colonialism. Chinese men had developed their masculinity on sociocultural standings and power in and outside of the household. Meanwhile, male Taiwanese elites often received higher education in Japan, and they built Taiwanese nationalism on calls for regulating or ending the practices of bride prices, daughter adoption, and premarital sex among ordinary Taiwanese men and women. In those top-down calls, Taiwanese elites defined themselves as men in terms of their ability to facilitate individual willpower and liberalize society. Far from being personal, their masculinity made it necessary for the elites to work with the colonial authorities to materialize family reforms in the late 1920s. To shore up their sociopolitical standing, those elites held women responsible for obstructing family reforms and painted them in a negative light, constructing masculinity while assigning additional gendered burdens.

The internet is a global communication tool that is used to create and share vast amounts of information. The internet and all its associated technology are so ubiquitous that we cannot imagine a world without it. Such a force driving social change has not been seen since the invention of the printing press and the advent of global literacy.

Digital connectivity has become integral to our personal and professional lives. It has evolved into a fundamental necessity, shaping how we communicate, collaborate and engage in various aspects of our personal and work environments. It is continually evolving rapidly; our current machines, platforms, programs and applications will soon be superseded. As a business professional, you must keep learning new skills, adapt and constantly move forward to stay abreast of technological change.

This chapter explores online and digital spaces for organisational communication and outlines strategies business professional should consider when engaging with online audiences. It offers best-practice advice for creating and managing personal branding for a digital environment.

Working collaboratively with others is inevitable in a business context. In larger organisations, the increasing complexity of business processes requires combinations of abilities and knowledge that a single person is unlikely to have. Even if one person could technically do everything, it would take too long.

As business operations and organisations have expanded globally, the spread of, and access to, expertise has increased. The expansion and global reach of organisations has created more complex tasks and decision-making that teams can help overcome. We are now seeing an increase in geographically dispersed and culturally diverse work groups that are connected via the digital communication technologies that make virtual group engagement and networking possible.

As most businesses aim for growth, the amount of work is increasing. Yet, time frames are shortening. Thus, collaborative activities, whether it be two people, larger groups or even multiple organisations, are a necessary feature of modern organisations. Collaboration will require you to draw on your active listening, emotional intelligence and relationship-building skills to ensure success.

Recent research endeavors have demonstrated the immense promise of team science to move the field of social and personality psychology forward. In this chapter, we introduce readers to the concept of team science as a model in which diverse teams collaborate on larger-scale research projects. These teams can bring people together from multiple labs, academic disciplines, or sectors to answer a shared question. Working in teams offers a number of benefits, allowing us to increase access and representation in our research, implement different methods and tools, answer more complex questions, and have greater social impact. We offer an overview of different models of team science and how researchers can expand their own teams, adhering to the principles of open communication, commitment to diversity and inclusion, clear roles and expectations, and cooperative decision-making. We also address some of the challenges inherent to team science and how to overcome them in order to make our science as efficient, fair, and impactful as possible.

The conclusion turns to the implications of this study today, both in terms of our own view of liberal democratic society and the place of women in it. Grouchy shows us, firstly, how significant ideas can persist through an era of upheaval like the French Revolution: through constant negotiation, continual re-interrogation, and a determination to hold on to core concepts while adapting and discarding others. It argues, furthermore, that Grouchy’s politics and philosophy provide further evidence that women in history have thought and acted politically, but not always in the ways we commonly understand as ‘thinking’ or ‘acting’. It expresses the hope that the example of Grouchy will provide inspiration for other historians who wish to reconstruct the ideas of those in the past – in particular women and other marginalised groups – who did not do all, or any, of their thinking over the course of long texts. The reconstruction of this rich history will, in turn, help combat the problem of authority still encountered by women today in political and intellectual spheres. Finally, it ends with the suggestion that Grouchy’s thought may be of use for those twenty-first century theorists who argue that emotions are essential to successful liberal democracies.

As much as COVID-19 illustrates the shortcomings of our siloed medical and scientific professions, it also represents an opportunity to rethink and reorganize scientific research infrastructure. COVID-19 has become a scientific “nucleating event” of sorts: forcing researchers from many specialties into fragile but promising forms of collaboration around a shared – and pressing – problem, and giving rise to multiple infrastructures to facilitate such collaboration.This chapter argues that forging sustainable cross-cutting collaborations will require ongoing policy action along three axes: (1) building information-sharing infrastructure; (2) creating cross-disciplinary teams; and (3) countering anti-innovation norms.