In the long sweep of human history, certain key innovations were so dramatic in their impacts that they changed our world forever. What do we know from historical studies and archaeology of the topics chosen for five key chapters of this book?

When we study technology transitions of the past – the shifts from horses to cars, from cesspools to sewers, from traditional farming to intensive agriculture – we can see how they were enabled and accelerated by government policy. Coordinated action by groups of countries could accelerate change even more – through faster innovation, larger economies of scale, and level playing fields where needed. International cooperation of this kind could dramatically accelerate low-carbon transitions in each of the greenhouse-gas-emitting sectors of the global economy. Until now, it has barely been attempted.

People often assume that to give ourselves a fighting chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, we need either inspired political leadership, or a moral revolution in society. Both would be nice to have, but there are more plausible ways to make faster progress. They involve thinking differently. We need science that gives us risk assessment instead of prediction; economics that understands change instead of assuming stability; and diplomacy that focusses on international collaboration instead of unilateral national action.

This chapter presents an overview of the book and positions it in the context of the development of expertise and the pursuit of excellence. It presents the historical context of the development of expertise and the theoretical context of the study of expertise.

When prolonging life with acceptable quality of life becomes difficult, goals of care discussion are necessary. For clinicians and patients, the discontinuation of disease-modifying therapy can feel like a failure. This can lead clinicians to offer treatments we don’t believe are good options or offering treatment on the condition that our patients make an improbable recovery. The roadmap for late stage goals of care discussions is REMAP. Reframe why the status quo isn’t working, expect emotion and respond with empathy, map big picture values, align with the patient’s values, and finally plan medical treatments based on what’s important to your patient. Some things to note: Mapping thoroughly will help you make sure you don’t miss something important. A useful shift in thinking for many clinicians is first talking about what you will do before talking about what should be stopped or you won’t offer. And, clearly linking your recommendations to the patient’s values will help your proposed plan be more acceptable. By grounding ourselves in what is medically possible and using the patient’s values to guide our next steps, we can cocreate a plan that is both possible and meaningful.

This introductory chapter outlines how children are active agents with motives and intentions, and what practitioners can do to support children’s learning, development and well-being in different age periods. It is therefore relevant for adults who work with children from birth to late adolescence, both within and beyond formal institutions. We also intend it to be useful to researchers and other professionals concerned with children and young people.

Our aim is to look forward toward children’s futures and how they can be supported to benefit from and contribute to what society has to offer. We argue that, by taking children’s intentions and emotions seriously, we can create an education that benefits children across the age periods. When children move through the institutional practices that society creates for them, they will learn, acquire new motives and develop. Therefore, the tools that we offer will allow carers and practitioners to tailor their support to children in different age periods. These ideas underpin a caring relational form of pedagogy, which is particularly but not only, important when children are dealing with changes in society’s expectations for them. These changes occur as they move, for example, between family, day-care or school, and when new challenges arise in familiar situations.

This chapter moves beyond Fambul Tok and looks at how processes of transition and justice occur outside of the official scope and discourse, or through what I refer to as unrecognized mechanisms. I problematize the notion of transition, looking again at the official transitional justice discourses and contrast these with interview narratives that demonstrate the fluidity of conflict and post-conflict periods. The chapter further examines how unrecognized mechanisms that were employed by Sierra Leoneans served as more meaningful avenues of ‘transitioning’ past their war-related experiences. Individuals engaged in everyday activities, such as economic restoration, agriculture and religion in an effort to transition to what I call a new normal. The importance of the everyday and re-obtaining a sense of normality were key priorities. Individuals, therefore, define and enact their own ideas of what it means to transition, engaging with alternative, often more immediate and pragmatic, channels within their existing social structures to reach their own defined goals. Using Sierra Leone as an example, this chapter demonstrates how individuals in post-conflict societies are active agents in defining and facilitating their own post-conflict processes, thereby recognizing the unrecognized and understanding notions of transition and justice at work.

People often assume that to give ourselves a fighting chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, we need either inspired political leadership, or a moral revolution in society. Both would be nice to have, but there are more plausible ways to make faster progress. They involve thinking differently. We need science that gives us risk assessment instead of prediction; economics that understands change instead of assuming stability; and diplomacy that focusses on international collaboration instead of unilateral national action.

When we study technology transitions of the past – the shifts from horses to cars, from cesspools to sewers, from traditional farming to intensive agriculture – we can see how they were enabled and accelerated by government policy. Coordinated action by groups of countries could accelerate change even more – through faster innovation, larger economies of scale, and level playing fields where needed. International cooperation of this kind could dramatically accelerate low-carbon transitions in each of the greenhouse-gas-emitting sectors of the global economy. Until now, it has barely been attempted.

The decade of the 1960s provoked a specific interest in Latin America and its literature, largely owing to the impact of the Cuban Revolution and the attention it paid to the struggle in the cultural field. If until that point the continent’s great writers were perceived as isolated figures, the new context after 1959 created the conditions for them to be read as part of a group that was committed to the common duty of putting a new face on Latin American literature. In fact, the so-called Boom cannot be understood without considering the specific political context that acted as its sounding board. An intrinsic part of the atmosphere at the time, then, were heated debates that foregrounded the role of the intellectual in society, intense polemics regarding the limits of freedom of expression under socialism, and fiery conflicts about the status of literature in a revolutionary society. Paradoxically, the very same period was also seen by its protagonists as one of transition toward a new, as yet undefined, stage. If the decade of the 1960s was dominated by left-wing thought and by the idea of the continental revolution, the 1970s meant the withdrawal of the left, and a gradual rise for the right. In its own way – always and naturally tangentially – literature has narrated all those transitions.

The decade of the 1960s provoked a specific interest in Latin America and its literature, largely owing to the impact of the Cuban Revolution and the attention it paid to the struggle in the cultural field. If until that point the continent’s great writers were perceived as isolated figures, the new context after 1959 created the conditions for them to be read as part of a group that was committed to the common duty of putting a new face on Latin American literature. In fact, the so-called Boom cannot be understood without considering the specific political context that acted as its sounding board. An intrinsic part of the atmosphere at the time, then, were heated debates that foregrounded the role of the intellectual in society, intense polemics regarding the limits of freedom of expression under socialism, and fiery conflicts about the status of literature in a revolutionary society. Paradoxically, the very same period was also seen by its protagonists as one of transition toward a new, as yet undefined, stage. If the decade of the 1960s was dominated by left-wing thought and by the idea of the continental revolution, the 1970s meant the withdrawal of the left, and a gradual rise for the right. In its own way – always and naturally tangentially – literature has narrated all those transitions.