This chapter explores the WHO 2022 Abortion Care Guideline and some of the debates it engendered through the lens of narrative medicine, as reconceptualised and extended in this book. Rather than treating the guideline as a neutral technical document, the chapter approaches it as a value-laden story narrated by a powerful institution (WHO) about the highly contested topic of abortion care. It examines how the WHO narrative constructs authority, assigns roles (narrators, protagonists, antagonists), selectively highlights certain types of evidence and values, and is informed by specific assumptions about evidence, morality, and care. It further contextualises this story within the broader set of narratives advanced by the guideline’s supporters as well as its opponents in order to develop a nuanced understanding of how global health policies come to be imbued with moral authority or, alternatively, contested as ‘ideological stories’, with far-reaching consequences for global reproductive health governance. Analysing the WHO abortion guideline and its reception through a narrative lens uncovers a struggle between competing storylines – each with its own narrator claiming authority, its own cast of protagonists and antagonists, its curated evidence and value set, and its sense of past and future. These narratives construct very different social realities around abortion care, which in turn shape policy discourse and outcomes.

The stochastic actor-oriented model is a statistical model for network dynamics, meant to be used for network panel data, that is, repeated measurements of a network on a given set of actors. This chapter gives an introduction to the probability model, in three flavors: a short intuitive explanation, a long conceptual one, and a mathematical explanation. These alternative, complementary formulations cater to readers with different interests, backgrounds, and preferences. The model assumes that between the moments of measurement, the network changes gradually in unobserved small steps. The heart of the model is the ministep, playing a basic role together with the evaluation function and the rate function. The ministep is the fundamental event in which actors have the opportunity of changing one network tie; the subsequently measured networks are connected by a sequence of unobserved ministeps. The probabilities of network change in the ministep depend on the evaluation function according to a conditional multinomial logit model. The rate at which ministeps take place is given by the rate function. The model is also formulated as a simulation model. The chapter ends with a brief history of the model.

This chapter approaches emporia as settlements organized to afford new forms of interactions in the context of their landscapes. Such an approach reveals how their spatial patterns were manifested through social norms and institutions, which in turn governed communities and their ability to handle interactions between strangers. I show how communities in emporia used simple, effective devices such as road networks and plot systems to define social rights and obligations in ways that were both similar to and different from our concept of urban places. The physical structure of housing plots or ‘yards’ served to premediate and resolve disputes. I argue that this feature reflects legal provisions for strangers as much as it does practical concerns for space. The chapter also demonstrates the limitations of a focus on the dense waterfront neighbourhoods. Defying a traditional ‘strongbox’ concept model of urbanism, the physical structure and activities of the emporia were in fact dispersed over a much wider landscape. The arguments draw upon insights from settlement and landscape archaeology, together with theories of agency and structuration.

This chapter elaborates the stochastic actor-oriented model for non-directed (also known as symmetric or undirected) networks. This requires taking into account the interdependent agency of the actors at either side of the tie. Five different ways of doing this are presented, each leading to a different model. This is spelled out first in a conceptual way and then in mathematical terms. Some remarks are made about the difference between models and how to choose between them.

As conversational AI systems increasingly generate perceptions of affective capacities, particularly the sense of "feeling heard," questions about AI moral status demand serious attention. We survey prominent approaches to grounding AI moral status, including ethical behaviorism, consciousness-based accounts, and agency-based frameworks. While each offers important insights, they face significant challenges: ethical behaviorism may be too permissive, while debates about consciousness and agency remain theoretically intractable. We argue for an alternative approach that asks direct normative questions about which rights, rules, reasons, and wrongs should protect AI systems, indexed to their specific capacities and vulnerabilities. This framework permits fine-grained, proportional moral consideration without requiring resolution of contested questions about machine consciousness or sentience and thus offers a pragmatic middle ground as AIs become increasingly integrated into social life.

Phillis demonstrated an extraordinary degree of agency in the creation and distribution of her writings. Her letter to Whitefield’s patron, the Countess of Huntingdon, reflects her under-appreciated skill as a rhetorician in prose. She had written enough poems by early 1772 to propose publishing a book, which appeared in London in 1773 as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Phillis spent six weeks in London to help promote the upcoming publication of her Poems. There she met Benjamin Franklin, among other socially and politically prominent men and women. The elaborate format of her Poems would have been remarkable even for a well-known author. The nature of the “critical examination” Phillis supposedly underwent remains disputed. Poems demonstrates Phillis’s skills in a variety of poetic forms. The year 1773 was pivotal in Phillis’s professional and personal lives. Her future looked promising.

Standard applications of psychology to addressing poverty involve the facilitation of decision-making orientations associated with flourishing, such as feeling high personal efficacy and regulating one’s behavior to fit long-term goals. Although such versions of agency and self-regulation may be helpful in Euro-American middle-class settings, their suitability is rarely considered for the kind of non-Western, nonaffluent settings in which the majority of the world’s population lives. In addressing this, we recommend analyzing how the accessibility and suitability of decision-making processes are shaped by the socioecological context in which decision-making takes place. Drawing on socioecological, cultural, and political psychology, we present a multilayered framework in which optimal decision-making mindsets are shaped by the material conditions, interpersonal relations, and societal discursive frames in which people are embedded. We illustrate the framework through the case study of migrant workers who caste marginalized in India, an emerging economy that is host to many behavioral anti-poverty efforts.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been heralded as a new revolution, while also being vilified as destroying critical thinking and creativity and dismissed as overhyped technology. Its growing presence in young people’s lives, however, is undeniable. While AI is cutting-edge and its future is uncertain, we can draw on developmental psychology to think more clearly about how it may influence young people’s growth and trajectories. In this chapter, I argue for using developmental theory and integrative methods focused on how young people make meaning as a flexible, ecologically valid, and valuable approach to better understanding these implications.

Many factors influence the perceptions, attitudes and behaviour of actors in co-management, from trust and perceptions of legitimacy to the timing and extent of participation. The chapter introduces and reviews concepts that have less extensively been applied to analyses of the co-management of renewable natural resources. These concepts are personal values, behaviour, social norms, identity and agency. The chapter draws on literature from social psychology and philosophy to identify key characteristics of each concept and identify what has been learnt from application of these concepts to relevant contexts to the co-management of renewable natural resources. The chapter concludes by identifying key and recurring themes, particularly related to the need to understand the social context of co-management, the role of social norms and the links between values, behaviour, identity and agency and the rights and pursuits of justice of Indigenous Peoples and local communities involved in co-management.

This chapter answers the question, posed in Chapter 3, of who owes reparations for the wrongs of the past. The chapter defends the view that people in the present can be responsible for the actions of people in the past if we share a kinship or association with those people. The chapter discusses a distinction between core and penumbral agency and argues that we can be morally responsible for what happens in our penumbral agency even if we do not take responsiblity for these occurrences. Relying first on discussions of moral luck, the chapter aims to show that we are morally responsible for areas beyond our active agency already. Then the chapter discusses some alternative conceptions of agency, first relying on some Indigenous views of kinship, then relying on one reading of agency during the transatlantic slave trade. The chapter does not defend this conception of agency against more narrow views, but rather presents them as an important alternative to narrow, will-based views of agency.

This chapter makes the case for a robust conception of agency within emotional experience, challenging the traditional view of emotions as passive. Emotions are not simply endured but enacted; they are best understood as forms of spontaneous, reason-responsive engagement that express an agent’s evaluative stance towards their situation. Drawing on Jean Moritz Müller’s account of emotional spontaneity and expanding it through Richard Moran’s concept of the practical stance, the chapter develops a view of emotions as modes of situated responsiveness that manifest a person’s commitments and concerns. It is argued that the emotion-constitutive agency involves capacities to construe and formulate an evolving response to the agent’s existential situation. Moreover, emotions are shown to be not just reflective of the agent’s vulnerabilities but also mediums through which vulnerability is inhabited, negotiated, and at times resisted.

The four symphonies of Michael Tippett occupy a central position in his output. Written at different stages in his compositional career, each symphony not only functions as an important waypoint along Tippett’s stylistic journey, but also has something of significance to express, whether that concerns the genre itself and its relationship to past composers and models, the human condition, or contemporary society. The concept of humanity is central to Tippett’s oeuvre; in interrogating this humanistic element, this chapter examines Tippett’s four symphonies (and the withdrawn early Symphony in B♭) through a triple lens of narrative, agency and embodiment, an approach driven not only by the immediacy of the symphonies’ communicative musical language, but also through a recognition of Tippett’s views of symphonic music as reflecting the ‘inner flow of life’. The chapter argues that listening for narratives of agency and embodiment brings new light, and life, to Tippett’s symphonies and acts as a powerful reminder of what it is to be human.