This chapter revisits the book’s central argument and conclusions from each chapter. It concludes that there has been substantial misunderstanding about core aspects of deterrence, which can be addressed by working from a comprehensive approach to theorizing deterrence and using this approach to guide and evaluate research. The chapter also concludes that most extant deterrence-based policies cannot and will not appreciably deter crime, and may even worsen it. The solution lies in policies grounded in stronger science built on better theory and research. Our sincere hope is that comprehensive deterrence theory (CDT) provides a helpful step in that direction.

This chapter discusses the centrality of deterrence to criminological theory and to policy, and then highlights critical shortcomings in classical deterrence theory. It points to critical problems that these shortcomings create, including incomplete or inaccurate understanding of deterrence and ineffective policy. The chapter then describes the motivation for the book, which is to advance theory and policy, the structure of the book, each of the chapters, and recommendations for sequences of chapters readers can follow to pursue their particular interests.

This chapter describes the origins of deterrence theory and problems with the overly narrow conceptualization of deterrence. It discusses the problems within the context of contemporary criminology and criminal justice policy. Many policies rest on weak or inaccurate understanding of deterrence, or are premised on research that has limited generalizability. One example: A great deal of criminal justice policy focuses only on punishment severity as a way of influencing deterrence, but one can increase deterrence in other ways, such as increasing the certainty of punishment or increasing the rewards of non-crime.

This introductory chapter presents the aims of the book and its rationale in Section 1.1, including some insight into the author’s experience of teaching sign language for many years. Next, Section 1.2 provides some suggestions for how you can best use the book to advance your learning and provides explanation for some of the terminology and conventions used in the book. This section also provides some awareness of the systemic barriers faced by many sign language teachers and the limited amount of research on BSL teaching and learning. The following section, Section 1.3, then gives some details about the research and evidence basis of the book in order to provide the reader with some awareness of current research and understanding of this visual nature of the language. Lastly, Section 1.4 addresses a few questions that students commonly ask and expels some common myths around learning BSL.

In this book, I examined how public authorities’ reliance on algorithmic regulation can affect the rule of law and erode its protective role. I conceptualised this threat as algorithmic rule by law and evaluated the EU legal framework’s safeguards to counter it. In this chapter, I summarise my findings, conclude that this threat is insufficiently addressed (Section 6.1) and provide a number of recommendations (Section 6.2). Finally, I offer some closing remarks (Section 6.3). Algorithmic regulation promises simplicity and a route to avoid the complex tensions of legal rules that are continuously open to multiple interpretations. Yet the same promise also threatens liberal democracy today, as illiberal and authoritarian tendencies seek to eliminate plurality in favour of simplicity. The threat of algorithmic rule by law is hence the same that also threatens liberal democracy: the elimination of normative tensions by essentialising a single view. The antidote is hence to accept not only the normative tensions that are inherent in law but also the tensions inherent in a pluralistic society. We should not essentialise the law’s interpretation, but embrace its normative complexity.

This chapter takes seriously the concerns of Eliot’s early reviewers with a tension in her fiction between the devoted depiction of life later associated with realism, and a didactic impulse to which they increasingly felt she succumbed. Asking why Eliot interrupted representation with theorisation, the chapter takes as a case study her alternating dramatisation and analysis of incongruous versions of history in Chapter 20 of Middlemarch. It traces the lineage of such alternation, via an allusion to her friend John Sibree’s translation of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, into one of the notebooks Eliot used as she developed Middlemarch, which is read less as a source for either the novel’s theories or its facts than as a laboratory for its experiments in moving between them. The chapter suggests that Eliot valued the dissonance her reviewers detected when dogma intruded upon depiction. It thereby elucidates her contribution to the dialectical novel of ideas this book explores.

This chapter provides an overview of foundational principles that guide CA research, offered both on the basis of our own experiences as researchers, and from our discussions with other conversation analysts as they authored contributions for the present volume. We begin by briefly sketching of some of the fundamentals of human social interaction, in order to underscore CA’s central focus, the study of social action, and describe some of the basic features of how interaction is procedurally organized. These basic features of interaction, which CA research has rigorously evidenced and which guide our examination of new data, are then shown directly to inform CA as a research methodology. Put another way, it is precisely due to the procedural infrastructure of action in interaction that conversation analysts use and work with interactional data in particular ways. We conclude with advice for readers as they continue to explore the volume’s contents.

In the preceding chapters we have covered the core principles and methods of epidemiology and have shown you some of the main areas where epidemiological evidence is crucial for policy and planning. You will also have gained a sense of the breadth and depth of the subject from the examples throughout the book. To finish, we take a broader look at the role of epidemiological practice and logic in improving health. There is a growing desire for public health and medical research to be ‘translational’; that is, directly applicable to a population or patient. The process, whereby research evidence is used to change practice or policy, is known as ‘translation’, and the research outputs from epidemiology are critical at all stages (see Box 16.2); indeed, epidemiology has been described as ‘the epicenter of translational science’ (Hiatt, 2010).

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s focus as a whole and explores its relation to existing historiography, including its engagement with decolonial and postcolonial theory and scholarship in Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies. In highlighting the book’s unique arguments, contributions, and perspectives, the Introduction explains the concept and double meaning of "troubling encounters" and provides the book’s thematic organization. Noting that some chapters adopt a local perspective, others a national one, and yet others draw attention to transnational and even global domains, the Introduction reflects upon the variety of scales for interpreting and troubling the history of encounters in the human sciences. For the authors, the legacies of those scales are read in the myriad interactions of expedition science, in the relationality implied in fieldwork or the logic of settler colonial custodial institutions, and finally in the resulting theories about human nature and behavior that circulated globally within scientific circles and beyond.