In Chapter 3, the author introduces the concepts of context, purpose, and impact. The chapter begins with a discussion of sociopolitical, cultural, and educational contextual influences on language assessments. The author uses well-known language assessment examples of these effects, including Norton and Stein’s Monkey Passage and how sociopolitical factors affected a group of Black African high school students when they took a reading assessment. The author uses Hall’s framework that considers people’s tendencies to act in certain ways depending on their cultural backgrounds and considers how these tendencies are important when designing and using an assessment for a particular purpose. The author also discusses levels of impact that an assessment can have on individuals, including its effect on test takers and their families, people who have a close relationship with test takers, and even people who do not have a close relationship with test takers.

Often regarded as the oldest surviving work on strategy, the Sun Tzu text has influence in many quarters today. This study organizes Sun Tzu’s ideas under fourteen thematic headings. It also clarifies Sun Tzu’s limitations and blind spots. Building on Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret.)’s translation, this study analyzes Sun Tzu from three standpoints: Sun Tzu (1), Sun Tzu’s ideas in their original Warring States Chinese context; Sun Tzu (2), Sun Tzu’s ideas applied to warfare in a military sense in other times and places; Sun Tzu (3), generalizations of those ideas, including to cyber warfare and other twenty-first-century strategic competitions. Whereas Sun Tzu (1) analysis addresses ways in which the text is a product of its times, intertwined with traditional Chinese cultural milieux, Sun Tzu (2) and (3) analyses, often building on analogical thinking, map universalistic aspects of Sun Tzu’s insights into war and conflict, strategy, logistics, information, intelligence, and espionage. Those analyses also identify ways in which Sun Tzu’s thinking has relevance to gaining strategic advantage in twenty-first-century conflicts.

Often regarded as the oldest surviving work on strategy, the Sun Tzu text has influence in many quarters today. This study organizes Sun Tzu’s ideas under fourteen thematic headings. It also clarifies Sun Tzu’s limitations and blind spots. Building on Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret.)’s translation, this study analyzes Sun Tzu from three standpoints: Sun Tzu (1), Sun Tzu’s ideas in their original Warring States Chinese context; Sun Tzu (2), Sun Tzu’s ideas applied to warfare in a military sense in other times and places; Sun Tzu (3), generalizations of those ideas, including to cyber warfare and other twenty-first-century strategic competitions. Whereas Sun Tzu (1) analysis addresses ways in which the text is a product of its times, intertwined with traditional Chinese cultural milieux, Sun Tzu (2) and (3) analyses, often building on analogical thinking, map universalistic aspects of Sun Tzu’s insights into war and conflict, strategy, logistics, information, intelligence, and espionage. Those analyses also identify ways in which Sun Tzu’s thinking has relevance to gaining strategic advantage in twenty-first-century conflicts.

This chapter guides therapists to examine their social and cultural identities and their power and privilege as an essential part of becoming culturally competent therapists. This chapter emphasizes the importance of therapist cultural self-awareness as the basis for creating meaningful relationships with clients of all social and cultural backgrounds. We suggest concrete strategies to respect and validate the social identities of the self and clients to demonstrate comfort and readiness to work.

The movement toward increasing maternal age comes with many new challenges. As reproductive physicians now see increasingly older patients, they are also confronted with complex ethical questions regarding the medical, psychological, and psychosocial implications of providing services to this population. It is well established that increased maternal age is associated with many obstetric complications. These complications may have both short and long-term effects on the mother as well as the fetus and child. In addition to medical complications, many providers are concerned about psychosocial ramifications of pregnancies at the extremes of maternal age. These concerns largely pertain to the well-being of children born to older parents, and are often subject to societal and cultural norms. These factors combined have led many to question the ethics of providing ART to patients in their 40s and beyond, however most ethical scrutiny has been aimed at post-menopausal mothers and those greater than 50 years of age. This chapter explores the ethical issues and available guidance in relation to this group of patients and the practical application of medical ethics and the core ethical principles.

This chapter dwells on the beauty of a woman’s hair and explains the cultural value attached to the head. The hair is seen as an agentive part of the body, crucial to the wholesome understanding of the entire human framework. It can distinguish gender. For example, the Kojusoko hairstyle is “forbidden” for men. Furthermore, Kojusoko (meaning “face your husband”) is not only known for distinguishing between gender, but also for describing women. The discipline and values inherent in the message being expressed are the typical moral standards of the Yoruba. Besides the gender role and message being conveyed by hairstyles, hairstyles also express spiritual connotations. For example, there is traditional importance to the loose state of the hair of a mourning woman. Other occasions include “naming, cult festivities, pageantry, and celebrations.” With pictorial evidence, the chapter emphasizes how hair shows age, identity, religion, political status, or social categorization and differences in the styles adopted at executing the patterns and drawing the lines, as well as the length used.

This chapter is a conclusion, a revisit from the beginning to recapture all that has been written. Analogously and methodically, the West had encountered Africa, witnessed its cultural practices but made the wrong, albeit demeaning, interpretation of it. Then came the “native,” attempting to walk them to the light through vast decades of experience and armed with an arsenal of cultural materials as evidence. The result is the challenge of the colonial matrix of power and resituating African literature at the center of African epistemology via autoethnography. Reemphasizing the points earlier made, the chapter discusses the position of self as an ambassador of the society it (self) comes from, having allowed its cultural ethos to manifest through self. Thus, everything about the individual manifests and reflects the “internal dynamics sustaining society.” This is further backed by the fact that the society shapes an individual through its “mores” and “institutions,” and thus makes it expedient to read a society through the character of an individual (an emissary), as opposed to an alien who cannot know beyond what is visible to the eyes.

Jameson’s writings modelled ethnoexocentrism and cultural exchange and reflected the cross-cultural freedoms and opportunities she enjoyed as a result of her interchange with Germany and Ottilie von Goethe. Her three resulting ‘German’ books advanced feminist agendas in England by way of German models. Visits and Sketches (1834) details the empowerment of Jameson as writer, cultural critic, and intellectual underwritten by solo travels and her commentaries on German women’s literature, art, intellectual exchange, and sociability. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) represents Jameson’s fullest command of contemporary German letters, often by way of writers and thinkers such as Rahel, who were underestimated or ignored by English masculine writers on German culture. Her cultural exchange with Ojibwa women including June Schoolcraft and Schoolcraft’s mother, while more limited, built in part upon the ethnoexocentrism she had learned to exercise in Germany. Social Life in Germany represents Jameson’s work as a translator but, more important, her recourse to German models for alternative marriage and divorce practices she tacitly endorsed for Britain. Her subsequent writings, while not focusing so exclusively on Germany, still drew upon the freedoms and opportunities she discovered there.

The introduction presents the key theoretical concepts of cultural exchange and Mercio P. Gomes’s theory of ethnoexocentrism; the historical parameters of 1833–1910; the ten writers on which this study focuses, who arrived in Germany in three successive waves; the varied reasons women travelled to Germany; the relation of this book to studies of cosmopolitanism; and Anna Jameson’s and Vernon Lee’s own theories of cosmopolitanism that demonstrate their understanding of what it meant and its importance. The introduction then briefly outlines chapters to come.

To endure, policies and institutions that both protect the environment and promote human security must have an architecture based on principles that lead to creation and maintenance of a rational relationship between human places and human practices.Flexibility and open texture allow meaning to change and endure over time, as both times and people change, and to remain embedded in its cultural context.In every corner of the globe, people have devised small pieces of institutional architecture that show remarkable creativity and potential for expansion.The objective should not be replicating these experiences at grander and higher scales, nor achieving greater levels of consistency or integration in governance architecture.Instead, consilience is what should be sought in our environmental governance architecture – a greater level of coherence in our knowledge.This is the level of democratic discourse, which depends on a more solid and substantive level of explanation – grounded in holistic social experimentation – for both its subject matter and its evaluative criteria.

Appreciating how government budgeting systems and policies vary is best understood by comparing and analyzing the political cultural, historic, economic, and institutional contexts in which they are formulated, adopted, and executed. This book argues that even similar-appearing institutions and budgetary procedures may very well differ in practice due to the influence of a government’s political cultural and historical experiences.