What does it take for international institutional law to break away from its problem-solving tendencies and fixed list of subjects and methods, and explore international organisations as sites of socio-political struggles over the shape of local and global life? This editorial introduction discusses ethos and epistemological boundaries of the mainstream international law scholarship, and the prospects of critical and interdisciplinary approaches for the study of international organisations in international law. It offers an overview of the objectives of the volume and its five sections, and argues that combining macro and micro critique, as reflected in the volume chapters, offers a promising pathway for mapping power, stability, and change in the world order.

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.

“Ars” came to be laden with specific meaning in the intellectual culture of late-Republican Rome, with some artes being regarded as intellectually and socially worthier than others. These “higher artes” were distinguished by several features that would form the premises for the scientific culture of the artes in the early Roman Empire. These premises were established in Rome by the reception of Greek notions of technê (τέχνη) but were elaborated independently and joined for the first time into a unified conception of specialized knowledge by Roman thinkers, including Cicero and Varro. The higher artes are logically organized and systematically presented, hence systematic. They are related to one another in their principles and methods, hence interdisciplinary. They entail explanatory knowledge of their methods in terms of causes in nature, and are hence explanatory. And they balance experience and practical know-how with theoretical knowledge, and are hence balanced.

Interaction in Poetic Imagery was my first book. It was based on my doctoral researches at Cambridge in the mid-1960s. I set out to formulate a theory of a significant, but previously untheorised, aspect or potentiality of poetic imagery – indeed an aspect or potentiality not previously demarcated, either under the name I gave it, ‘interaction’, or any other name. With ‘imagery’ understood as ‘metaphor, simile and the various forms of comparatio’, I identified interaction as ‘any local cross-terminological relation between the tenor and vehicle of an image’, explicitly adapting ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ from I. A. Richards’ The Philosophy of Rhetoric. I then categorised the modes of interaction into four groups (with subsequent subdivisions). The cross-terminological relation might be effected aurally or extra-grammatically or by intrusion or (most commonly) by neutral terminology. All this was established on the basis of a corpus of Greek poetry – early lyric and dramatic poetry, from Archilochus to Aeschylus – with additional examples from English poetry, from Shakespeare to the twentieth century.

The introduction outlines the major themes of the book and its scope and rationale. It explains briefly the origins of the book and its relationship to the companion volume by the historian David Fitzpatrick, The Americanisation of Ireland: Migration and Settlement 1841–1925 (2020). The chapter sets out the volume’s use of the term Americanisation and the value of applying this framework for examining Irish society in the decades after the Great Famine. It considers the question of race and the multicultural American identity and briefly discusses the scholarship on whiteness and Irish identity. Returned migration is a key aspect of the influence of the United States of America on Irish culture and the chapter provides information on the extent and exceptionalism of Ireland’s returned migration trends. The chapter includes a survey of the international and Irish historiography of the phenomenon and of Ireland’s relationship to America. It concludes by outlining the structure of the book, emphasising the thematic and interdisciplinary approach.

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.

This book sets out to look at what language is and what languages are with a view to arriving not at one practical theory of language, but rather at ways of assembling practical ways of thinking about language, or understanding applied linguistics as a practical assemblage. Rather than thinking about applied linguistics in disciplinary or interdisciplinary terms, this view suggests the coming together of language-oriented projects (social or educational endeavours that involve language), practical theories of language (different ways of approaching linguistic questions) and critical appraisals (ethical, material and political concerns). As applied linguists, we have to start to take responsibility for the ways we think about language. Approaches to language that derive from attempts to describe language structures or to account for language use in structural terms may not be so useful. The terrain has changed from when applied linguistics was first seen as the application of linguistic knowledge to real-world contexts. We can now start to think seriously about practical theories of language or ways of thinking about language that derive from contexts of practice.

The avant-garde writers of the Hellenistic period demonstrate an acute sense of literary tradition. In the previous chapter we have already seen some of the ways in which Theocritus develops his distinctive fragmented and polyphonous voice in relation to the past. In the programmatic narrative of Idyll 7, the search for an exemplary voice recedes through a series of lost poets’ songs towards an always already distanced model of excellence. So in Idyll 11, the much-discussed Hellenistic technique of reversing and restructuring the phraseology of earlier writing finds a parallel in the appropriation and manipulation of a Homeric figure: the Cyclops is taken back to a green and loving youth, back to a time before Homer’s writing of him as a paradigm of monstrous brutality. Indeed, in Hellenistic poetry we see again and again a search for an original and originating moment in the past ’before Homer wrote’.

In this chapter, Michael McKinnie explores how methods drawn from the social sciences can help theatre scholars formulate different, and more systematic, ways to think about theatre and its place in the world. Social scientists make ‘moves’ with their material that theatre scholars are unlikely to make with theirs. When transposed to analysis of theatre, these moves suggest different, sometimes counter-intuitive, approaches. ‘Tricks’, an idea taken from sociologist Howard S. Becker, are formal procedures that help draw out theatre’s relationality at subsequent stages of the research process. Thinking about theatre’s place in the world poses a wide variety of problems that TaPS is not always equipped to tackle. Theatre scholars need to make different moves, and formulate new tricks, to begin to address them.

After many years during which indigenous laws were mostly absent from narratives of Latin American law, presently, legal historians wish to integrate them. However, to do so requires answering the question of what we know about indigenous laws and how we can approach them. Writing the history of indigenous laws from precolonial times is especially challenging not only because of the diversity of human groups that occupied the continent, but also because of the disparity of available sources, ranging from material vestiges and pictographic documents to texts produced in indigenous writing systems. Furthermore, the colonial period has left us with a wide range of alphabetic texts, diverse in authorship, languages, formats, degree of accuracy, and sources selected, that describe precolonial law. Indigenous peoples, mestizos, and Spaniards also wrote historical narratives and accounts of deeds and services; furthermore, they participated as litigants in lawsuits in which they expressed their vision of law and justice. What does this evidence tell us about precolonial normative orders and the way in which they intersected with colonial law after the Iberian imperial conquests? To answer this question, this chapter proposes an interdisciplinary approach, surveying what has been done, and what could still be done.

The book concludes with a discussion of the ways that virtue science can influence the discipline of psychology. First, it reiterates that virtue science is off to a good start. The success of virtue science calls the fact–value dichotomy into question because scientifically studying virtues is deeply imbued with value commitments. Virtue science is more interdisciplinary than psychology, and the value of working across disciplinary lines in virtue science recommends greater interdisciplinarity among psychologists. This interdisciplinarity in virtue science has helped to clarify the many philosophical contentions that tend to be ignored by psychologists or just built in as contentious assumptions. The STRIVE-4 Model clarifies how much improved conceptualization can enhance a research area, suggesting that psychology, as a discipline, can benefit from more systematic theory. Virtue science also calls for improved research, especially person-centered research and transcending self-report measures. Finally, virtue science calls for the recognition of the centrality of the aspiration to live well as human beings. Greater attention to this core aim can help psychologists to be much clearer and more direct about their objectives.