An introduction to attachment theory while completing an undergraduate degree in South Africa opened an opportunity to study at Johns Hopkins University with the recognized mother of attachment theory, Mary Ainsworth. My tenure with her was intensive but short, as she decided to leave Hopkins for Virginia, leading me to head further north to Yale, though not until Ainsworth had introduced me to both Melvin Konner (a distinguished anthropologist) and Urie Bronfenbrenner, a doyen of developmental psychology then determined to radically transform stuffy developmental psychology into a contextually sensitive sub-discipline. With Ainsworth and Bronfenbrenner as off-site mentors, William Kessen introduced sophisticated developmental theory while Edward Zigler expounded the importance of using research to inform social policy in pursuit of a better world for children.

In developmental processes and outcomes, the individual and the context are inextricably connected throughout the lifespan. As an individual from an unorthodox background, my academic career is full of continuities and discontinuities, as one of the most influential books from my advisor, Jerome Kagan, asserted. In retrospect, my upbringing gave me the cultural, ethnic, minority worldview. From the start my education gave me the opportunity to have essential intellectual tools and eventually become bicultural and critical of our academic field. Consistently and strategically, my scholarly, administrative, and volunteer work led to questioning and pushing boundaries of the dominant academic canon; this was achieved by making critical connections with like-minded scholars and institutions, and working directly at the top of mainstream scholarship, educational institutions, and professional organizations. A contextual developmental analysis of my academic trajectory provides evidence of the constant, powerful dialectic relationship of the individual and the context. It all makes sense now.

The chapter establishes the role of context in an analysis. This is done by defining context, presenting a context continuum that can be used to understand an object of study, and introducing the types of conditions that shape understandings of discourse. Six different approaches to studying context are discussed in this chapter: systemic functional linguistics, the SPEAKING model, frames, indexicality, contextualization cues, and next-turn proof procedure. After reading this chapter, readers will understand what context is and why it is important; be able to study context using different models and constructs; and know how discourse and context work together to create meaning.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of how emoticons and emojis are a human adaptation to online written conversation to compensate for the absence of non-verbal cues and physical context, but also an affordance of most written conversation to promote affiliation, creativity and play. The analysis highlights the role of emojis as ‘attendant activities’ (Jefferson, 1987) which express politeness (and impoliteness) and other pragmatic functions, including prosocial and anti-social behaviours, identities, contextualizations (physical/virtual), irony and meaning enhancement. By analysing the multiple, often overlapping interactional functions of emoticons and emojis, this chapter provides original insights into the unique role of emojis in children’s written conversation, highlighting some major differences between spoken and written interaction. Findings indicate that emojis fulfil interactional functions which go beyond simply replacing fundamental non-verbal, voice and contextual resources which are available to speakers in phone and face-to-face interaction. While further research in this area is required across different age groups and genders, the various categories of emojis identified in this chapter provide a comprehensive account of how children are likely to deploy and respond to these symbols in online interaction, and how multiple meanings are possible depending on the interactional context

Forgetting is a phenomenon that is familiar to everyone and among the most extensively investigated in psychological science. It is, therefore, quite surprising that forgetting is widely misunderstood by the layperson and even by researchers. Evidence for the permanence of long-term memories is presented, and the distinction between the accessibility and availability of memories is discussed. Search of associative memory (SAM) and retrieving effectively from memory (REM) models of forgetting are described and extended as a proposal for everyday forgetting.

In this chapter we consider two examples of the situation when the classicalobservables should be described by a noncommutative (quantum-like)probability space. A possible experimental approach to find quantum-like correlationsfor classical disordered systems is discussed. The interpretation ofnoncommutative probability in experiments with classical systems as a resultof context (complex of experimental physical conditions) dependence ofprobability is considered.

The chapter begins with the observation that global history has an ambivalent attitude towards explanation. In many cases, the mere presentation of sources and voices from many different parts of the world seems sufficient to justify a global approach. The need for explanation is ignored or even denied. In other cases, global explanation is eagerly pursued, but often at the expense of more complex explanatory models that incorporate factors at different scales. In this perspective, global explanations are claimed to be inherently superior and a privileged way of explaining historical phenomena. After a cursory survey of current positions on causality and explanation in general methodology and ‘formal’ historical theory, the chapter proposes a brief typology of explanatory strategies. It goes on to discuss the peculiarities of explanation within a framework of connections across great distances and cultural boundaries. The much-exclaimed concept of narrative explanation is found to be of limited value, as it underestimates the difficulties of producing coherent narratives on a global scale. Concepts offered in the social science literature, such as the analysis of mechanisms and temporal sequences, could be helpful in refining purely narrative approaches to explanation.

This chapter tackles two additional activities of the pollster as fortune teller. The first is the assessment and prediction of government approval ratings. As we have already seen in Chapter 8, approval ratings are extremely important in predicting elections. There is both an art and science to the analysis of such measures. Here, we want to lay out an analytical framework which will allow pollsters to assess both structural and policy factors related to approval ratings and then how to utilize multiple methods to triangulate future outcomes. We will focus on the Biden administration circa August 2022. Ultimately, a fairly large component of a pollster’s workload is the continual assessment of government initiatives and their convergence (or not) with what people want.

The second is a discussion of more context-based analysis. The pollster has an important role in helping decision-makers understand the bigger picture. Here, broader demographic and social trends help gird such analysis.

Linguistic pragmatics is one of the fastest growing fields in contemporary theoretical linguistics. It grew from the influential work of philosophers such as Grice, Austin, Stalnaker, Lewis, and others on context and communicative inferences. It engages directly with general rationality, theory of mind, and systems of intention. One of the major debates in pragmatics has been where to precisely draw the line between semantic phenomena and pragmatic phenomena. In this chapter, three classical and influential ideas on the nature of pragmatics, courtesy of Grice (1975), Stalnaker (1978), and Lewis (1979), are discussed. This discussion leads to three further general philosophical frameworks for separating semantic from pragmatic processes and analyses that have roots in the aforementioned triumvirate: (P1) the indexical conception, (P2) the cognitivist conception, and (P3) social-inferential conception. Each option offers a different demarcation. Finally, three linguistic theories of pragmatics are selected as candidate representations of the contemporary state of the art: (L1) optimality-theoretic pragmatics, (L2) game-theoretic pragmatics, and (L3) Bayesian pragmatics. It’s shown that each of these prominent frameworks exploit the philosophical demarcations (P1–P3) presented to different degrees.

Metasemantics is a relatively recent philosophical project. Therefore, there are a number of competing approaches to the investigation of the philosophical nature of the study of meaning. In this chapter, I narrow the focus to the foundations of the scientific study of semantics, not the broader philosophical or metaphysical programme often associated with the philosophy of language. The philosophical foundations project allows for a priori metaphysical considerations to trump naturalistic inquiry. The metascientific project, on the other hand, investigates the formal apparatus, mathematics, and scientific structures of semantics as a science. I argue for the latter interpretation over the former. After establishing the remit of the investigation, the principle of compositionality and the general methodology of formal model-theoretic semantics is explored. Next, the role of context is explained and used as a tool to establish a continuum from formal semantics through dynamic approaches to computational distributional semantics. This is just one lens through which to appreciate often overlooked commonalities between disparate theories. Lastly, formal semantic machinery is extended in a number of directions, from lexical semantics to the burgeoning field of supersemantics. The formal finds complex compositional structure below the word and the latter applies it to phenomena beyond language.

When we think about the health and wellbeing of children, we need a model that is holistic in its conceptualisation and comprehensive in its design, to ensure we gain the best understanding of their health needs and can provide the most effective support. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) (WHO, 2001) was developed by the WHO to provide a comprehensive and holistic framework for conceptualising health. WHO first defined health in a holistic way in 1946, regarding it as ‘the state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ (p. 100). WHO recognised a need to develop a framework that would enable professionals, services and governments to enact that definition. The ICF is based on a biopsychosocial framework and aims to integrate the medical and social models of health. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the components of the ICF and describe educational, clinical and research applications of the framework to early years learners.

Chapter four examines the Muses, the sole female divinities who are regularly depicted as musicians in the surviving visual material. The ambiguity inherent to their representation, where it is never clear whether they are goddesses or human women, allows for their bodies to become visual forms capable of taking on multiple identities. Laferrière considers the images within their original contexts, including the domestic sphere, the cemetery, the sanctuary, and the symposium, to examine how the images invited their viewers to imagine the sounds of divine music and what effect this visualized music had upon the viewing audience. In each instance, she argues that the depictions of the Muses respond to the spaces in which they are encountered, so that their visual interpretation becomes inherently multivalent and malleable. When representations of the Muses are considered within a range of possible contexts of use, the vases make a powerful statement about the Muses: not only may they appear in any context or work through any female figure, but as divinities who are flexible in their visual representation, the Muses become visual forms capable of taking on multiple identities.

Health interventions are purposeful activities intended to improve health. They may involve treatment or care of the ill, or health promotion to prevent disease and illness. Complex health interventions have multiple components interacting with each other and with the context of delivery. Evaluation is important to ensure that complex health interventions are effective in achieving their intended outcomes, represent good value for money and cause minimal harm. Evaluation is also important to detect if interventions reduce or increase health inequalities. Intervention effects are not always obvious. They can easily be confused with other changes that occur. Hence, there is a need for evaluation to use rigorous methods to distinguish the ‘signal’ of intervention effects from the ‘noise’ of other effects in the absence of intervention. Evaluation should provide evidence to inform policy. If not based on evidence, there is a risk that policies may not achieve their intended effects or may create harms.

This chapter explores how policymakers and practitioners in settings beyond the sites of evaluation might make use of evidence from realist trials and systematic reviews, plus local needs assessment, to identify the best candidate interventions for their local contexts. To do this, local decision-makers need to assess how likely are interventions to achieve benefits in their contexts. This is partly a matter of assessing whether interventions are likely to be feasible, accessible and acceptable in their settings, which will be influenced by local capacity and norms. It is also a matter of assessing whether intervention mechanisms will be triggered and whether these are likely to generate beneficial outcomes. This will be influenced by what aetiological mechanisms are generating adverse outcomes in the context and hence what vulnerabilities exist which the intervention may be able to address. It will also be influenced by whether the local context provides affordances so that potential beneficiaries may be able to benefit from the intervention. Thinking through these issues should enable local policymakers and practitioners to decide whether such interventions could be delivered immediately at scale, be implementing but only within evaluated pilot studies or be rejected in favour of other interventions.

Theories of change propose how intervention resources and activities might lead to the generation of outcomes. They are sometimes presented diagrammatically as logic models. Realist evaluators and others have suggested that interventions should be theorised in terms of how intervention mechanisms interact with context to generate outcomes. Our own trial of the Learning Together whole-school intervention to prevent bullying set out to define, refine and test such theories in the form of context–mechanism–outcome configurations (CMOCs). We drew on several sources to define our starting CMOCs. These included existing middle range theory. This is scientific theory about the general mechanisms (i.e. not necessarily concerning an intervention) that generate outcomes. This should be analytically general enough to apply to a range of settings, populations and/or outcomes, but specific enough to be useful in a given application. We also used previous research and public consultation to inform our CMOCs.

Chapter 2 introduces identity analysis and uses it to examine whether the Homo economicus conception can identify real-world individuals. It describes the self-referential, circular character of that conception, and shows that the belief that Homo economicus identifies real-world individuals rests on a fallacious inference known as affirming the consequent. The chapter reviews how the identity concept came into economics by making a person’s individual identity their utility function. This is compared with how social identity theory understands individual identity, and economics and social identity’s view of representative agents is then distinguished. Sen’s multiple selves view of individual identity is contrasted with both in light of its ontological basis. Section 4 of the chapter critically evaluates rationality theory’s two independence axioms regarding preferences, the logical basis for saying choice is context-independent and for the unembedded Homo economicus individual conception. It argues neither can be defended and that not only must choice be seen to be context-dependent, but that individuals need to be seen as socially and historically embedded.

This chapter introduces the context and rationale for the book, noting the increased media and policy focus over the last decade, as well as the broader sociopolitical context of the Covid-19 pandemic, post-Brexit, and post-Trump milieux. The case is made for revisiting and challenging the dominant national frame for understanding academic freedom, noting the internationalisation and massification of higher education globally. The outline of the book is situated as addressing this gap and examining three theoretical and interrelated challenges: i) the presumed dichotomy between freedom and diversity/inclusion, ii) the relative lack of attention to the role of academic freedom in knowledge production, and iii) the lack of recognition of the transnational nature of academic freedom.