This chapter covers:

1. • The diverse areas of robot applications where human–robot interaction (HRI) is an important component;

2. • Applications beyond robots that are studied in a research context;

3. • Possible future applications;

4. • Potential problems that would need to be solved when HRI has a larger role in our society.

Human intervention studies are gaining traction and recognition in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) field. Since DOHaD intervention studies will most frequently use complex public health interventions, collaborations across science and social science disciplines are critical for obtaining and interpreting DOHaD evidence in ways that matter for policy recommendation. This chapter explores the application of biosocial collaboration in a DOHaD intervention trial, namely Bukhali, the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI) South Africa randomised controlled trial. Bukhali evaluates a complex intervention initiated prior to conception, through pregnancy, and into early childhood, with the primary aim of addressing childhood obesity. As part of the first trials assessing the potential of preconception interventions to shape intergenerational health, the trial is significant to DOHaD science. Bukhali has adopted a pragmatic approach, allowing for ongoing adaptation to new knowledge as it arises and testing not only the primary hypothesis but also undertaking process evaluation analyses. This requires a multidisciplinary process that serves as a case study of how biosocial collaboration can enhance DOHaD-inspired intervention research.

This chapter follows individual voter flows using panel data for Social Democrats in Germany (1984–2018), the United Kingdom (1991–2018), and Switzerland (1999–2018). To the best of our knowledge, this chapter provides the first long-running study of individual voting transitions among social democratic voters. We aim at a better understanding of contemporary electoral choices of initial social democratic voters and of the individual-level characteristics that predict either staying with or leaving Social Democrats. We find that Social Democrats manage to keep some of their core but a lot of support gets demobilized or moves on to a various electoral competitors, especially to more progressive options (Greens, LibDem, Green Liberal Party). In all three countries under consideration, Social Democrats struggle to attract new voters. This tendency is slightly less pronounced in Switzerland, which we think is at least partly due to the particularly progressive programmatic offer of the Swiss SP. By contrast, the German SPD loses to everyone and gains almost nothing. We also find evidence for an aging core group of social democratic voters, highlighting a certain risk of going extinct: The key factor correlated with “leaving” is the generational cohort Social Democrats belong to. By contrast, often theorized and emphasized factors such as occupation, income, or unemployment show much smaller correlations with former Social Democrats' decision to leave the party behind.

Where the real basis for finding someone to lack capacity is that you consider the beliefs or values that motivate their decision to be distorted by a mental illness, such that the decision is not authentically desired and so is unworthy of respect, this entails a number of empirical and normative claims. This chapter will interrogate these claims by reference to the wide-ranging literature on the nature of mental disorder, and on differing conceptions of autonomy and authenticity (as a component of autonomous decision-making). It will be concluded that while an agent acting on the basis of disordered beliefs or values will often be acting inauthentically (and thus non-autonomously), this will not always be the case, and situations could arise in which there is reason to believe that the agent would endorse or sanction their belief, even knowing it is derived from illness. Moreover, once the shaky conceptual ground on which such judgements must be made is acknowledged, it becomes essential that these judgements are brought out into the open, where they can be subject to appropriate scrutiny.

Although there is little reason to discuss the CMB in relation to classical static models starting with Einstein’s model, a mid-2000s attempt by Sorrell deserves some attention and is discussed in the chapter. Motivated by the strong (perfect) cosmological principle of homogeneity and isotropy of the universe at all times, and drawing on the tired-light hypothesis of Crawford, Sorrell postulated a cosmic ether and a continuous nucleosynthesis that produces two kinds of particles composing it; we observe the resulting photons as the CMB. It is a toy-model with the goal of cautioning against an unconditional acceptance of orthodoxy.

Introduction

Narratives of paid domestic work across time and space point to the dilemmas and contradictions faced by domestic workers seeking respect in their lives. Contemporary accounts of paid domestic work, striving to understand global economic and demographic changes, rarely consider the domestics’ desire for prestige and upward social mobility, important constituents of the notion of respect. Rather, they are driven by the expansion of young female migrant workers from poor, undeveloped regions to service the affluent across the world. This process of globalisation and feminisation of paid domestic work has been attributed to shifts in the structure of the labour market in the developed world with a rise in dual career households (cf. Standing, 1999; Kabeer, 2007) alongside cuts in public services limiting the provision of care services to the elderly and young, in a context of both declining fertility and ageing populations (Yeates, 2005; Razavi, 2007).

Respectability is a signifier of class, but always inscribed in gender identities. It involves a complex set of practices, defined by appropriate behaviour, language and appearance, apart from social rules and moral codes, which enable the framing of people and thereby justify the unequal distribution of resources (Skeggs, 1997). Women domestic workers do have a clear knowledge of their class position and social place; yet in their struggle for social mobility, they invest in symbols of respectability as defined by the dominant. This is, however, not a straightforward process, but highlights the ambivalence about giving up their ethnic identities and symbols of respect for elite, middle-class norms of respectability. The ambivalence persists as they realise that gaining the outward signs of material respectability does not automatically lead to a notion of respect as reflected in the treatment meted out by others (Sennett and Cobb, 1973). Respect involves mutuality, which emerges equally from the development of the self and the interaction with and recognition from others (Sennett, 2003), but for these women, there remains a hidden anxiety about the quality of their experience and its legitimisation in society.

This chapter challenges the idea that rural communities have “declined.” It argues that the term, “decline,” discounts how laws and policies have actively facilitated rural marginalization and socioeconomic distress for decades. “Decline” reframes an active phenomenon as one that occurred passively, making current rural challenges seem natural and inevitable. The chapter assesses how twentieth- and twenty-first-century federal and state laws and policies undermined traditional rural livelihoods in agriculture, natural resource and energy development, and manufacturing. The chapter then provides a legal history of transportation and telecommunications deregulation, and the role deregulation played in exacerbating geographic inequality. Overall, the chapter proposes that instead of declining, rural communities have been undermined, as policymakers have consciously traded rural welfare for some other perceived benefit. While those trade-offs may have afforded tangible societal benefits in some fashion, the decline framing discounts how rural communities were in fact knowingly sacrificed in the name of the greater good.

The apocalyptic is at the core of the vernacular vision of Islam disclosed in the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi. There is nothing unusual about this as the apocalyptic genre is fundamental to all Abrahamic religions. Even more significantly, it is Nund Rishi's shruks on the apocalyptic that endure the most in Kashmiri cultural memory and have passed on into the Kashmiri language as proverb and prophecy. The apocalyptic mode in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry, it is useful to recall, emerges at a distinct historical moment in medieval Kashmir: a time of transitions from the rule of independent Hindu kings to the establishment of a Muslim sultanate and the beginning of religious conversions to Islam in the region. A close reading of the shruks that deal with the apocalyptic material reveals a translated, and vernacular, apocalyptic in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry that mediates relations between pre-Islamic and Islamic eschatology.

A traditional Muslim apocalyptic is deployed by Nund Rishi and hurled against the political structure of his time (the new Muslim sultanate ruled by the Shahmīrī dynasty). But the elements of a traditional Muslim apocalyptic are also displaced on to metaphors of a sudden inner transformation. The catastrophe of end times intimates hope of a new life. There is a tension in the shruks that deal with the apocalyptic between a traditional Muslim apocalypse and a Sufi apocalypse. This is true of much Islamic mystical poetry, but what is unique in Nund Rishi's apocalypticism is that the coming hour of reckoning (the Islamic qiyāmah, or qayāmat in Urdu and Kashmiri) is seen not as the end of history (individual or eschatological) but as the end to an unjust political order in history. Even though the currency of Nund Rishi's apocalyptic shruks in popular memory owes much to enduring cycles of violence in Kashmir's recent history, Nund Rishi's apocalypticism is best approached as the translation of classic Islamic eschatology (traditional Muslim apocalyptic) into the Kashmiri vernacular. The preponderance of the theme of the apocalyptic in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry is also conspicuous because other key Islamic eschatological themes such as the Prophet's mystical ascension to heaven, mi’rāj, do not appear so significantly in the Nund Rishi corpus.

This chapter addresses in detail those rare occasions in which the Court and the Commission have adopted differing positions on the legal questions before them. In exploring both the potential for such disagreements and how they have been handled, the chapter shows that these instances attest to the strength of the inter-institutional relationship rather than undermine it. It also points out, however, that harmony comes at a cost.

History and Bengali Selfhood

The writing of history will always seek out narratives. If one were to look around the cultural, social, religious, or economic tropes scattered across the nineteenth-century Bengali society, it would not be difficult to discover the many reconstructivist narratives that define what may be described as ‘threshold moments’2 in the history of the Bengali people. So many of these narratives employ, implicitly or explicitly, tropes of representation that may be read through lenses of globality, global intellectual history, the world historical, or the universalist, and put into critical categories that bring out differential moments of enunciation which may be interpreted variously. Similarly, while some historians and commentators will tend to read nineteenth-century Bengal as one whole block divided into separate but connected narratives, others would discover a more well-defined disjunction between the first and second parts of the century. Likewise, both the principles of reconstruction and the way the ethos of the Bengali people were interpreted may be seen as different ways of reading history. Or, in other words, different ways of framing a narrative. As I have tried to understand in the last chapter, Akshay Dutta's intervention as both an object and an agent of history involved a rather complicated cultural politics due to his interstitial location within bhadralok Calcutta society, the contingent and unfinished nature of his academic training, and what one might call a certain ideological evasiveness that refused nomenclatures, boundaries, or categories. With time, the debates on representation became more fraught and by the middle of the century, the principles of reconstruction or avenues of representation were complicated by too many interconnections, cross-currents, and hermeneutic challenges that were not easy to grapple with: the modern and non-modern debate; the good and evil of imperialism; the principles of education; nationalism and its manifestations, and the corresponding idea of swadesh; religion, religious practice, and debates on conversion – to name a few. Out of these debates and discussions emerged the question of selfhood, of fashioning the self as a representative body of Bengali (or sometimes national) identity and defined within a moral or cultural register that had a commensurate relationship with modernity.

Chapter Three explores the views of former officials regarding compliance by states with international law. Almost all former officials believed that international law constrains state behavior, at least to some extent, and that states comply with international law much of the time. The top positive factors favoring compliance, as revealed by frequency counts, were reputational concerns; state interest in a stable legal and institutional system; reciprocity, or the prospect of retaliation; ethical considerations, including ethical values underlying international law rules and respect for the rule of law; idiosyncratic factors, including the history and culture of states; and benefits flowing from participation in specific regimes. The significant role of ethical factors gives a boost to normative theories about compliance. The role of systemic interests illustrates the benefits of a multilateral, institutional, and rule-based system. Among the factors militating against compliance, the dominant factor was state interest. Many former officials suggested that decisions about compliance involve a cost–benefit assessment, a consideration of many factors including international law. The chapter concludes by considering the former officials’ perceptions about the reasons that states outside of the United States take into consideration regarding compliance with international law.