This chapter investigates how belonging is constructed through language in Belize. Inspecting linguistic landscapes, interviews, and ethnographic observations, the study reveals the sometimes paradoxical ways languages are ideologically positioned within local, national and transnational contexts. Kriol is central to constructing national belonging and serves as a unifying symbol of a diverse population. It is also tied to racial and transnational belonging, connecting to Afro-Caribbean cultural spaces. Conversely, Spanish is associated with immigration and Guatemala, despite its historical presence and ongoing use. This tension results in contradictory discourses, where Spanish is simultaneously seen as ‘foreign’ and as a home language. English occupies a dual role as both a foreign and national language. While it indexes Belize’s colonial ties and distinguishes Belizeans from their Hispanic neighbours, it is also regarded as essential for education and economic mobility. The chapter concludes that language ideologies and practices do not always align, reflecting the coexistence of diverse historical, social, and political discourses in shaping linguistic belonging in Belize.

The term “school adjustment” refers not only to the state or phenomenological description of a student at a given point in time; it also refers to the process that newcomers experience once they start to make the transition from home to early childhood care or kindergarten; from kindergarten to elementary school; from elementary school to secondary or junior high-school; from secondary school to high school; from any one school to another (e.g., due to parental divorce or immigration); and from high school to institutions of higher education. The state of school adjustment refers to students’ exhibition of expected academic outcomes, expected interpersonal outcomes, a general motivation to learn, and personal outcomes (e.g., positive self-esteem, lack of depressive symptoms). The process of school adjustment is the advancing process by which the students’ readiness and even eagerness to meet the aforementioned criteria of a state of school adjustment gradually emerge. As one of the life-course transitional events, adjustment too school can be articulated by the Stress and Adjustment Model (STA; Israelashvili, 2023).

One of life’s most fundamental revelations is change. Presenting the fascinating view that pattern is the manifestation of change, this unique book explores the science, mathematics, and philosophy of change and the ways in which they have come to inform our understanding of the world. Through discussions on chance and determinism, symmetry and invariance, information and entropy, quantum theory and paradox, the authors trace the history of science and bridge the gaps between mathematical, physical, and philosophical perspectives. Change as a foundational concept is deeply rooted in ancient Chinese thought, and this perspective is integrated into the narrative throughout, providing philosophical counterpoints to customary Western thought. Ultimately, this is a book about ideas. Intended for a wide audience, not so much as a book of answers, but rather an introduction to new ways of viewing the world.

This chapter explores adolescent involvement in cults. Adolescence is a time in which many individuals engage in group-like activity. However, this chapter defines cult-like behavior as beyond the range of normal group-like activity expected during the transitional time of adolescence. The biological, social, and psychological factors of adolescent development increase their susceptibility to peer pressure, predispose them to self-exploration, and contribute to characteristics that attract adolescents to cults. This chapter describes the characteristics of normal adolescent life that predispose adolescents to cult recruitment, characteristics of adolescents who are likely to join cults, and characteristics of the leaders of cults that attract adolescents. Important regarding adolescents in particular, the increased access to technology, the internet, and social media is redefining adolescent membership in cults and future considerations may offer an updated lens through which to define and consider adolescent involvement in cults.

Development is complex. Individual meaning systems are dynamic, and change can happen at any age. But even change is lawful and is conditioned by one’s history of meaning making. Self-fulfilling processes are part of the nature of adaptation. Those that bring positive expectations to social encounters often have new positive social experiences. As argued in the beginning, meaning lies at the center of a rich life. Those who have a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and a coherent, integrated life story have what can be described as meaningful lives.

Infants and toddlers are immersed in the social culture of their family, community and society from before they are born. Every family has distinct social practices and ways of interacting which shape very young children’s holistic physiological, cognitive and emotional learning, development and wellbeing. These practices reflect the values, beliefs, norms and expectations of their community and culture. Over time, through repeated social encounters and experiences, the social culture of their family and community is passed on as infants and toddlers become socialised into these specific ways of engaging with others. Social practices and interactions thus form the basis of the relationships that infants and toddlers form with significant others. As a result, the social opportunities that very young children experience and participate in during their everyday existence have far-reaching consequences for their sense of identify and belonging.

The introduction situates the old merchant homes of Gujarat between the Indian Ocean region and South Asia. Setting the stage for the rest of the book, the introduction demonstrates that havelis were embedded within British free-trade capitalism across the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though havelis were framed as domestic and private sites outside of the colonial economy, they were linked to slavery and indentured labor, plantation agriculture, and the mass production of commodities. The rich and unsettled grounds of Gujarat’s havelis reveal that the dislocations of colonial capitalism impacted merchant communities’ sense of place and belonging. While Indian Ocean histories of capitalism have placed an inordinate emphasis on paper records, this book argues that old houses suggest that space was not the background of capital’s history but a primary site of its articulation. Drawing the spaces of homes into relation with a range of textual colonial and vernacular archives, this book challenges our static ideas of belonging and argues for reimagining Gujarat through Muslim and Parsi mercantile communities, their itineraries, and their histories.

This chapter focusses on ubiquitous plant presences in some of the literatures of southern Africa, essentially of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Both Indigenous societies and incursive colonial regimes depended fundamentally on plant life for shelter, food, materials, and aesthetics of belonging. Colonials imported numerous alien species, both deliberately cultivated and inadvertently ‘released’, with incalculable impacts on the subcontinent’s variegated local environments. The governing divide between ‘indigenous’ and ‘alien’, however, is complicated by sundry blurrings and ironic cross-overs. These dynamics, affecting commercial, societal, and emotional dimensions alike, are explored through some selected nodes, particularly the iconography of Eden or Arcadia; the complex aesthetic ecology of the suburban garden; and the treatment of trees, especially the native yellowwood and the alien jacaranda.

This chapter explores inclusions and exclusions embedded within the Omani economy as experienced by citizens and foreigners. The chapter shows, first, that contestations around labour market belonging and experiences emerge within the local structures of segmentation and the global nature of Oman’s labour market. Second, in order to understand economic belonging and citizenship in the Gulf, class has to take a central role. The production of difference and competing identities of local regionalism, tribal and community affiliation, religion, interior and coastal cultures, race, heritage, and gender all matter but need to be understood alongside the intervening variable of class. The subjectivity of experiences and perceptions of inclusion and exclusion exposes how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces tensions, value, and forms of power that manifest in labour and class relations. These dynamics also generate resistance and contestation around the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

The current context of regressive border regimes challenges critical theory’s commitments. Can we still take recent legal and political practices as starting points for reimagining political norms and institutions based on a reconstruction of hidden emancipatory potentials? The chapter argues that critical border theory could benefit from recentering the idea of political representation, and especially from building on insights of the recent constructivist turn in representation theory. Understanding political representation as shape-shifting and constituency-mobilizing changes long-held assumptions about the spaces, subjects, and demands articulated in border politics. While this representative perspective has diagnostic advantages, it is unable to criticize the legitimacy of existing border regimes owing to its thin normative assumptions. Reconstructive approaches to border politics should therefore use the diagnostic tools of the recent representation scholarship without committing to their limited critical potential

The Introduction defines the book’s major concepts, such as belonging with, elucidates its major keywords – movement, listening, radiance, resuscitating, restoring, and recycling, and explains its foundational ideas and methodology. These intertwine feminist, historical, ecological, and subject–object analyses to underpin how diminishing women and objects is a related activity. Second, it establishes how texts heal injurious mergings between women and matter and jettison the supposed “female virtues” – dissimulation and passivity – in order to embrace actual ethical beliefs and independence, reconnect women’s corporeality, reason, spirit, sexuality, and virtue, rendering these cooperating, rather than sparring, bodies. Third, it argues that these materialist ethics reveal how consumption can be constructive, a finding that disputes mainstream concerns that women were merely thoughtless consumers. Finally, it illuminates how the political and personal need to incarnate ideals by rendering concrete such abstractions as the “rights of man” entwines with gender debates and subject–object explorations during the revolutionary years.