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.”

Some commentators have said that artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing rapidly in substantial ways toward human-like intelligence. The case may be overstated. Advances in generative AI are remarkable, but large language models (LLMs) are talkers, not doers. Moves toward some kind of robust agency for AI are, however, coming. Humans and their law must prepare for it. This chapter addresses this preparation from the standpoint of contract law and contract practices. For an AI agent to participate as a contracting agent, in a philosophical or psychological sense, with humans in the formation of a contract, the following requirements will have to be met: (1) the AI in question will need to possess the cognitive functions to act with intention and that intention must cause the AI to take a particular action; (2) humans must be in a position to recognize and respect that intention; (3) the AI must have the capacity to engage with humans (and other AI) in shared intentions, meaning the cognitive capacity to share a goal the parties can plan for and execute; (4) the AI will have to have the capacity to recognize and respect the practical authority of law and legal obligation; (5) the AI will have to have the capacity to recognize and respect practical authority in a claim accountability sense, in accepting that a contract forms a binding commitment to others. In other words, the AI will not only have to be able to engage in shared intentionality but also understand and accept it as a binding commitment recognized by the law; and (6) the AI will have to possess the ability to participate in these actions with humans or in some hybrid form with humans.

Malignant plasma cell proliferations are characterised by specific clinical, immunophenotypic and genetic features. Multiparameter flow cytometry (MFC) is an essential component of the diagnosis of these diseases. Clonal proliferations can be identified through their aberrant cell-surface immunophenotype or, more precisely, by demonstrating monotypy, i.e. selective expression of the same light chain in the cytoplasm of plasma-cells. This chapter reviews these immunophenotypic features, the technical points of caution to observe for proper use of MFC at diagnosis and during therapy to assess measurable residual disease.

Belgium: A Brief Historical Context

To understand Camille's childhood and youth in Belgium, it is imperative to have an overview of the political, social and cultural milieu of that time and some of the historical processes that shaped them. While Belgium was not considered a major European power, it held an enormous influence in Europe and Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Carved out of the Netherlands, Belgium emerged as an independent state in 1830 and was a small country of 30,000 square kilometres; its ‘population was divided between often antagonistic French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch speakers of the Flanders region, alongside a small German community’ (Aldrich and Stucki 2022, p. 430). The birth of Belgium as a new nation-state in 1830 reflected the two interrelated trends of the modernisation of state apparatus such as law, institutions and bureaucracy and the quest for ethno-nationalism.

Like the rest of Europe, this trend of modernisation also marked strains between the state and the Roman Catholic Church and growing tensions between autocracy and democratic principles. Coupled with these political churnings, Belgium also witnessed major social and economic changes; capitalist industrial production advanced rapidly, changing the fundamental nature of the agrarian and cottage-industry-based economy. Remarkably, while Belgium stood out as a champion of liberalism and as the world's second industrial nation, the socio-economic disparities were rampant. Karl Marx found refuge in Brussels between 1845 and 1848 and wrote the Communist Manifesto during his stay, calling Belgium an archetype bourgeoisie state. In Das Capital, Marx presented Belgium as the ‘paradise of continental Liberalism’ against ‘the paradise of capitalists’ (Vanthemsche and Peuter 2023, p. 249).

The population of Belgium remained devoutly and almost exclusively Catholic; the region was seen as ‘a bastion of the Counter-Reformation’ (ibid., p. 6). For the first 50 years, the Belgian parliament was dominated by the Catholics, facilitating the expansion of the Catholic Church and its morals over the society. Liberals were another significant political group who sought an end to religious domination in the state and society. The church overcame the opposition of the liberals to regain domination over the education system, holding a monopoly on primary education while controlling secondary and university education.

The dissensions which go hand in hand with the unfolding of sacrifice begin to take on new forms which reach beyond the executions themselves, after the promulgation of the 1990 Constitution. This democratic turning point in the history of Nepal led to a weakening of the monarchy and to critics of the ‘sacrificial’ organisation of society. The questioning of consecrated forms of violence within a renewed political framework already occurred after the fall of the Rana and the opening of the country to foreigners in 1951. At that time, a first democratic regime which lasted from 1951 to 1959 led to the introduction in 1963 of a new code of law in which the notion of caste and its associated notions of social pollution and contamination were expunged. Following the 1990 Constitution, which re-established political parties that had been banned for thirty years, the Indigenous peoples organised themselves into associations to work towards their emancipation. From them emerged the very first organised protest against sacrifice, targeting Dasaĩ, the supreme moment of the reaffirmation of Hindu power. The Untouchable castes, now federated under the name Dalit, also created associations for the defence and promotion of their group, which advocated boycotting the consumption of sacrificial remains. And animal sacrifice finally became the object of growing opposition in urban and educated circles, who began to contest its violence. In this arguably more diffuse type of activism, the opposition to sacrifice is the most radical, in the sense that it does not target the place or role of a group in the sacrificial system, but its actual core, the ritual killing of animals itself. From this point on, conflicts over sacrifice became more than disputes over local issues of power and governance, with each of the protesting groups supported by an ever-growing network, the most extensive of which being the ‘anti’ animal killing, who combine followers of a purified Hinduism, as practised in India, and international animal rights organisations, both of whom advocate vegetarianism.

In this second context of democratisation the Nepalese Maoist party developed during the second half of the 1990s, growing so large that they ended up eclipsing the entire political landscape.

The chapter explores the varying iconographies of the personification of the River Jordan in Late Antiquity, particularly in the Orthodox and Arian baptisteries in Ravenna, focusing on how these depictions relate to biblical exegesis, and represent the standpoint of Ravenna’s Christian elite. Peter Chrysologus’s Sermon 160 is highlighted for its unique interpretation of the River Jordan, which, the chapter argues, has influenced the dome mosaic of the Orthodox baptistery by presenting the river as a converted, formerly pagan entity. In contrast to the previous case studies, the dome mosaic of the Orthodox baptistery openly condemns the Roman past as pagan but still acknowledges the pre-Christian classical heritage as relevant to Christianity. The Arian baptistery offers an alternative interpretation of the same depiction. The differences in the Orthodox and Arian representations of the River Jordan suggest that the attitude of Ravenna’s Arian clergy towards the Roman past was more positive than that of the Nicene clergy.

The causes of climate change are largely due to the carbon emission activities of nation states and transnational corporations. This chapter considers these activities as crimes of the powerful, a form of ecocide, insofar as they contribute to global warming. In addition to exploring the contours of ecocide as a crime, the chapter deals with issues pertaining to contrarianism and the exploitation of natural resources, both of which protect and sustain sectional private interests rather than the majority public interest. The chapter argues that needed social transformations must go beyond “speaking truth to power” to actually confront the powerful. How this might be accomplished is examined through consideration of green capitalism, the movement toward just transitions, the idea of a Green New Deal, and the importance of transformational nationalisation. Combatting the violence of ecocide fundamentally requires root and branch change in the global political economy.

This chapter reviews the literature on the teaching of history, and defines the purpose of this book: to offer a clearer definition of the aims and benefits of the study of History at the college and university level. Two principles are at the heart of that conception. One is that long-standing methodological and epistemological divisions within the discipline are a source of its unique pedagogical value. The other is that History assumes a particular ethical posture relative to its subjects – the people it studies – and that this too is a source of its unique pedagogical value.

Flow cytometry relies on the use of fluorochrome-conjugated antibodies, most of them identified and produced after the discovery of the technology allowing to generate large amounts of monoclonal antibodies. Hence, nearly all these reagents are named after the cluster of differentiation (CD) number that was given to newly discovered molecules they recognize, many of them having no other name. Although some CDs have become very popular and well known, others are less familiar. This chapter provides a guide to recover the characteristics of surface or cytoplasmic antigens explored with the CDs most frequently used in the field of haematological malignancies.

This chapter provides an historical context for the emergence, and continuation, of a frontier logic of ecoviolence in Guyana, analyzing the hyper-exploitation of the Ameridians, minors and migrants in the mining sector. While Guyana’s Indigenous peoples, the Amerindians, named their home the “Land of Many Waters”, towns and villages such as Rose Hall, New Amsterdam, Queenstown and Anna Regina serve as a reminder of the European colonial regimes which spearheaded capitalist, frontier logics of extractivism which spatialized ecoviolence and precarity; the theft of Indigenous lands and territories; and ongoing structural racial, gender, and economic disparities intersected with environmental injustice. The return of neoliberal frontiers of logic and hyper-exploitation of workers forces readers to think more holistically about harm and hyper-exploitation.

In developmental processes and outcomes, the individual and the context are inextricably connected throughout the lifespan. As an individual from an unorthodox background, my academic career is full of continuities and discontinuities, as one of the most influential books from my advisor, Jerome Kagan, asserted. In retrospect, my upbringing gave me the cultural, ethnic, minority worldview. From the start my education gave me the opportunity to have essential intellectual tools and eventually become bicultural and critical of our academic field. Consistently and strategically, my scholarly, administrative, and volunteer work led to questioning and pushing boundaries of the dominant academic canon; this was achieved by making critical connections with like-minded scholars and institutions, and working directly at the top of mainstream scholarship, educational institutions, and professional organizations. A contextual developmental analysis of my academic trajectory provides evidence of the constant, powerful dialectic relationship of the individual and the context. It all makes sense now.