For a group of Spanish Gitano families, who now refer to themselves as American Gitanos, the reproduction of a cosmopolitan habitus has a social and historical basis. Transnational mobility is a key aspect of identity, whereby cosmopolitanism is the translation of internationality as an emic discourse. The migration of this network of families in the late 1950s provides the starting point for an analysis of the cultural mechanisms of this new cultural style and self-identification. The interface of cosmopolitanism, transnational migration and social mobility is shown through the protagonists’ narratives about migratory trajectories and their implantation in America.

Approaching the issue of theodicy, this chapter reflects – in dialogue with John Hick – on the external conditions necessary for love’s perfection. It is contended that if human love is essentially sacrificial, it follows that the perfection of love requires the actualization of love’s sacrificial aspect. This means that God has reason to permit suffering and death to the extent that these evils are natural for humans as embodied and vulnerable creatures.

This chapter analyses a decision of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, which devises a regulatory framework for judicial use of AI. I claim that as long as AI tools are responsive to legal queries, judges will continue to use them. This has significant consequences for the legal profession. Using AI for judicial decision-making prevents important discussions within the profession, which provide cohesiveness, certainty, and legitimacy to legal outcomes. Reliance on AI may undermine the role of professional socialisation in fostering convergent, predictable, and legitimate legal outcomes. Instead, it can facilitate the ‘colonisation’ of the legal field by a disembodied and unaccountable universe of programmers and training dataset authors from outside the (national) legal field. To fully illustrate the magnitude of AI’s effect on the profession, this chapter outlines the Constitutional Court’s decision and its limitations in effectively regulating AI. I then discuss the role of professional socialisation and how AI can displace it. The chapter concludes by suggesting that built-in restrictions in the algorithm itself should be the focus of any regulation of the judicial use of AI.

This chapter introduces the Aristotelian conception of moral character that is predominant in philosophical virtue ethics as well as in adjacent disciplines such as social psychology. According to the Aristotelian conception, moral character traits – virtues and vices – are hexeis, or dispositions to experience emotions, feelings, and desires, as well as to make choices. Following this, the chapter points to the growing number of studies in recent decades that have engaged with Kant’s concept of moral character and virtue. It concludes by sketching a philosophical problem that serves as the starting point for the subsequent study: central aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy, particularly his emphasis on transcendental freedom as the freedom of choice, seem to make it difficult to assign a significant role to the concept of character within his moral philosophy, at least as long as it is interpreted along Aristotelian lines. This suggests that the best way forward is to examine the aspects in which Kant’s conception of moral character fundamentally diverges from Aristotle’s.

Chapter 5 layers in investigation of notions of empire and longevity, examined here through the lens of more mundane and pervasive structures—its streets and public highways—to reckon with the attenuated and amalgamated temporalities that these infrastructures construct through the accumulation of large- and small-scale acts of maintenance and repair and the referencing of those interventions by milestone monuments in the extra-urban landscape.

Chapter 3 examines the origins of modern territoriality in settler colonies, centring on the English colonies of North America. A range of existing accounts view property as important in the history of sovereignty. This chapter engages with them, offering an account of how property surveying drove the emergence of modern territoriality in North America. A host of settler colonial conditions, ranging from cultural understandings of property to non-recognition of Native American boundaries, resulted in the use of geometric surveying techniques in the creation of private property becoming central to colonial life. Territorial disputes between colonies were then addressed using boundary-making techniques of delimitation and demarcation already familiar from the resolution of property disputes. After US independence, these techniques were used to create interimperial boundaries. Comparisons between different types of settler colonialisms globally are used to add weight to this explanation and to justify the focus on English North American colonies.

The introduction sets out the main themes of the book: that the role of gesture in religious worship was highlighted by the Reformation, and that it was especially significant in the English Reformation. It develops these themes by showing that gesture was central to some of the key concepts of the English Reformation: indifference, uniformity and conformity. First, were certain gestures essential to worship, or were they merely matters of indifference? Secondly, was variation in gesture permissible in public worship, or should all people use the same gestures in order to create a uniform Protestant body? Finally, was gesture a matter of free choice, or did the church have the right to impose gestural conformity on its members? It argues that these questions of church order opened up a larger epistemological question about what gestures meant, or whether, in the end, they meant anything at all.

This chapter critiques the All-Affected Principle (AAP) for its inattention to structural power relations. Illustrating with the case of school desegregation in the American metropolis, it argues that people are significantly affected not only by decisions, but also by nondecisions, doxic norms, and positioning in systemic relations of domination. It makes the case for reformulating the AAP in a way that broadens it to focus on people’s social capacity to shape the power relations that delimit their fields of possible action.

This chapter shows that while African journalists are upset at being marginalized in the global narrative construction about events in Africa, they, too, are vital players in marginalizing African voices in the source selection processes. Thus, an African reader is much more likely to know what an American senator thinks about an international event on the continent than they are likely to hear from a regional expert immersed in the unfolding event. It empirically shows that African journalists are crucial players in silencing African voices despite their complaints of marginalization in Chapter 4.

There is a tendency to treat African journalism fields as insignificant to scholarship unless the scholarly focus is on “improving” or “modernizing” them. This chapter argues against this tendency by arguing that African journalism is engaged in knowledge production and all its attendant politics. It argues that by taking a conflict such as Darfur as a locus, scholars can excavate the multiple discursive struggles over questions such as the role of African journalism, the place of African news organizations in global narrative construction about Africa, and the politics of belonging in which African journalists debate what it means to be African. Relying on field theory, postcolonial theory, and the sociology of knowledge, this chapter argues for a de-Westernization of journalism studies while cogently locating the origins of field theory in Algeria; thus connecting it not just to the colonial project but specifically locating field theory with a larger discourse of postcoloniality.

This penultimate chapter shows how the story of the constitution is not only told by the written text of a constitution but (even predominantly so) by symbols, images, icons, gestures, behaviour, flags, rituals and so on. The constitutional story is conveyed directly and indirectly in very many (unstudied) ways.

This chapter addresses the book’s first question by focusing on what classical Pragmatism can tell us about the ‘practice turn’ in International Relations. It assesses the value – both descriptive and normative – of defining practice as pre-reflexive or habitual. Dewey was clear: habits can be useful, but only if those subject to their hold can improvise when practice produces unwanted consequences. Applying this to International Relations, the chapter shows how a failure to adequately reflect on the situational value of an ideological commitment to ‘democracy promotion’ – what Bourdieusian-informed Practice theory might call a Western ‘habitus’ – contributed to the maladapted response to the humanitarian crises in Syria and Myanmar. This again points to the centrality of reflection, deliberation, judgement and learning to the Pragmatist approach. The chapter develops that argument by examining how Dewey’s ‘pedagogic creed’ aimed to put individuals and societies in control of their habits and how his critique of the unhelpful hierarchies in formal education was extrapolated to form a theory of social learning, which included an emphasis on the role democracy plays in facilitating the reflexivity and deliberation.