There is perhaps no greater anathema to the vocational attitude of George MacDonald than the concept of solitary genius. Implicit in the rural community of his youth, the explicit teaching and practice of such relational theology by key mentors further shaped MacDonald’s own practice. His web of friendships grew notably broad, a compendium of illustrious names from multiple countries, in addition to many obscure figures from a mix of classes and cultures. His keenness to share such friends – be they voices on a page or present in the flesh – is a signature of his craft and scholarship that warrants closer attention. This chapter considers a range of these relationships, from his mentors A. J. Scott and F. D. Maurice to Victorian critics John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and many more. A fundamental aspect of MacDonald’s significance to the Victorian era is that this commitment to relationships impacted not only his own work but the lives and works of many notable Victorians.

Efforts to develop “empathic AI” often assume a universal definition for empathy – a singular, objective understanding of “human” experiences. This framing treats achieving empathic AI as an optimization challenge, where researchers should find the “correct” way to align AI with human empathy. In this chapter, we challenge this assumption by emphasizing the empathy’s multifaceted nature and examining how variation across its forms and the social groups we are embedded within complicates efforts to design a universally applicable empathic AI. We argue that codifying empathy into artificial systems is difficult, given that empathy is an inherently context-dependent phenomenon. Drawing on recent evidence of cultural biases in large language models, we highlight broader ethical, epistemic, and potentially existential concerns in designing machines that “understand” or “feel” others. We conclude by advocating for a more contextualized and culture-aware approach to empathic AI, moving beyond the reductionist notion of “humans” as a monolith.

This is a concluding chapter that summarizes previous findings. The importance of greater cultural competence on the part of elites is a particular emphasis.

Sets forth the attitudes and institutions that determine the interaction of science and democracy in the United States, Sweden, and Japan. While the United States has a strong populist, anti-intellectual tradition, Sweden tends to defer more to experts with sometimes uneven results. Japan has a consensus-based culture which filters expertise through bureaucracy and political parties with no precise parallel elsewhere.

Culture, and specifically its technological element, should be seen as the primordial connector between the World system and the Earth system. The chapter argues that culture is a natural phenomenon emerging from human interaction with planetary conditions experienced at multiple scales. Culture drives human transformations of the lived environment to the extent of affecting the very ‘metabolism’ of the Earth system. It is key to understanding the history and future of Earth–World connections. After a conceptual elaboration of the argument, the chapter offers a reading of the earliest and latest major developments in the history of agriculture as an illustration.

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.

Chapter 7 looks at the cultural and ethical considerations that are relevant to nursing people from diverse cultures, with a focus on nursing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and describes nursing practice that is culturally safe. It is important to remember that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are diverse groups who live a variety of lifestyles, from highly traditional to highly modern, on tropical islands, in remote deserts and in cities. Indigenous culture encompasses elements from ancient practices to contemporary technology. Appreciating the complexity of Indigenous Australian culture and its historical context is fundamental to providing ethical and therapeutic care.

In this chapter, we take advantage of James Tully’s imaginative recasting of constitutionalism to consider how anarchy operates as a constitutional principle, pushing the boundaries of sensible politics. The chapter breaks into four parts. We begin with the concept and ontology of anarchy and examine the philosophy of science anarchists championed to describe it. The second part outlines a theory of association to complement the idea of the social constitution outlined in Chapter 2. In the third part, we use anarchy and multiplicity to rethink constituent power. In the final part, we explore this broad social theory as it is articulated in Rudolf Rocker’s comprehensive anarchist account of constitutionalisation. The chapter establishes the ontological reality and normative force of anarchy as a constitutional principle. Anarchist constitutional politics uses anarchy to describe the empirical norm of all constitutional projects, ‘internally’, vis-à-vis their constituent parts, ‘externally’, in relation to every other constitution, and trans-locally, as a function of the criss-crossing jurisdictional, functional and normative reach of the myriad constitutions that make up contemporary global society.

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.

The salience of culture is recognized in psychiatric research and practice as the population grows increasingly diverse and complex. It is therefore of great importance to appreciate cultural humility as an essential framework in psychiatric prescribing to improve patient–physician alliance, effective prescribing and overall patient outcomes. The approach of traditional cultural competence training in medical education is limited, and indirectly perpetuates disparities as physicians and other practitioners assume proficiency in patients’ cultures, but cultural humility emphasizes self-reflection and lifelong learning as key ingredients to understanding our culturally and linguistically complex patient population. The challenge of incorporating cultural humility into existing medical curricula include didactic space constraints, lack of mentors, and difficulty in the designing assessment metrics for cultural humility in medical education.

Although potential immigrants had an opportunity to migrate abroad, some gradually become disenchanted with the future life they envisioned they would have in countries of immigration. Synthesizing their narratives illuminates a common sequence of processes, with immigrants first becoming bored and disappointed with a host society unlike what they had envisioned, then frustrated with the language barrier and sentiments of cultural alienation due to their unfamiliarity with cultural references, customs, and norms. Then even after they culturally assimilate, aspiring immigrants encounter both racial discrimination that they perceive as hostile and local gender norms that make it difficult to find a stable relationship. After working for several years, they gradually become aware of how they are unable to advance their career within their job as an immigrant. The social forces and restrictive immigration policies discussed earlier can lead aspiring immigrants to cut their losses from their immigration project out of the belief they will have a happier life as an ex-immigrant in their homeland than “just an immigrant.”

Compares those to whom the US government denies nonimmigrant visas to those it grants such visas in order to show how officers are more likely to deny visas to those who tell surveyors would not immigrate if they had the opportunity to do so whereas they are more likely to grant visas to those who told surveyors they would immigrate if they had an opportunity – contrary to what US immigration law ostensibly mandates visa officers to do. Officers are more likely to grant visas to those who possess indicators of what I define as (im)mobility capital. Such (im)mobility capital consists of only a subset of many measures of socioeconomic status and social ties, such as high levels of formal education, extensive travel experience, attendance at a selective school, and the number of years at their current job. The components I identified to comprise (im)mobility capital are also associated with whether a (non)immigrant visa applicant would be willing to spend more than half of the rest of their life in the country of destination if they had the opportunity. Adjudication about who to deny visas to by US visa officers is similar to how consulates of other countries operate.

Chapter 8 approaches diversity through cultural and moral lenses. It concerns the acceptance of EU intervention, the legitimacy of its action in a sensitive field, ripe with moral and ethical controversies. The EU’s approach can broadly be divided into three strands, which are not mutually exclusive. The first is the Europeanisation of choice, most apparent in tobacco regulation, where the EU has adopted a quasi-prohibitionist stance with seemingly broad support from Member States. Strikingly, this occurs in the absence, both legally and politically, of arguments grounded in individual rights and autonomy. The second is an approach of insulation, relevant to alcohol and certain ‘heritage’ foods, where national regulatory choices remain shielded from European influence, either because of the EU’s reluctance to act or because of political deadlock. The third concerns the application of proportionality in free movement cases, and the extent to which cultural and moral arguments are accommodated in the adjudication of national restrictive measures.