This chapter looks at early interactions between parent and infant, from joint looking at faces, gaze following, and attention to hands and gestures, to later interactions where infants and adults readily capture each other’s attention. It examines the ways adults modify their speech to infants and young children, e.g., with short, grammatical utterances, formulaic routines, repetitions in variation sets, higher pitch, slower rate, and pausing at the ends of utterances. Adults adjust their speech to what their children understand and provide feedback on children’s errors, checking up to make sure they have understood them and so offering them a conventional way to say what they appear to intend. Adults establish joint attention and engage with infant and child activities, anchoring their conversational contributions to what is physically present and visible, and talking about the child’s current activities. And infants become adept at attracting adult attention and enlisting their help in different activities. In child-directed speech, adults focus on what is physically and conversationally present, and respond to the topics children introduce. They choose short, high-frequency words, with high neighborhood density, many with concrete referents present in the here and now. Conversational interactions provide the setting for acquisition.

Since their inception in the middle of the twentieth century, digital technologies developed from big machines accessed only by small groups of scientists and corporative experts, to “personal” devices providing opportunities for interaction to large masses of users. As a wide range of hardware and software interfaces were introduced, the field of human–computer interaction (HCI) tackled the pragmatic and theoretical implications of this change. This chapter takes up the toolbox developed in this context to ask new kinds of questions about the history of automata in the nineteenth century. As automata were offered to public spectacle and, to some extent, consumption, commentators discussed the reactions of “users” and observers of these devices, creating a body of theoretical reflections that can be read as HCI ante litteram. By considering cultural texts and artifacts that contributed to debates about “human–automata interactions,” the chapter mobilizes later debates in HCI and artificial intelligence to reconsider the ways in which Victorians discussed and imagined how people react to automata exhibiting the appearance of intelligent behavior.

The introduction argues that Cavell’s democratic perfectionism is uniquely situated to respond to the democratic crisis of post-truth politics. It argues that post-truth politics is a political response to the epistemological problem of skepticism. As a first step in exploring democratic perfectionism, the introduction offers a brief overview of Cavell’s interpretation of skepticism and its salience for politics. Section 2 provides a preliminary sketch of skepticism. Section 3 expands what Cavell means by responsiveness. Section 4 discusses how these two concepts shape democratic perfectionism. Section 5 asks, where is the politics in Cavell’s writings? While Cavell never wrote a text that was explicitly about political philosophy, his thoughts on politics are scattered throughout his writings. An initial obstacle to interpreting his democratic perfectionism is identifying where in his thought to look for those ideas. Section 6 explains how these themes are analyzed throughout the remainder of the book.

This chapter explains the importance of social support for relationship maintenance and individual functioning. It first reviews common stressors (e.g., life events, low socioeconomic status, minority stress and stigma), their accompanying personal and relational costs, and the consequences of social support in adverse or stressful contexts. In particular, this section highlights the different consequences of perceiving support availability and actual support receipt during stress. Next, this chapter reviews the role of supportive relationships to facilitate personal goal pursuit and desired self-change in non-adverse contexts. Finally, this chapter considers social support from the perspective of the support provider and describes how caregiving can be both rewarding and costly.

Calls to ‘be responsible’ render relations, dependencies, and interdependencies visible, and they make demands and claims on others and on oneself. To speak about responsibility is to speak of our diverse attempts to build a good life within relational worlds, and our commonplace failure to do so. By exploring the modes and meanings of responsibility in an array of cultural settings, this chapter reveals how calls for responsibility hinge upon specific enactments of agency, freedom, intentionality, reflexivity, mutuality, responsiveness, and recognition. Yet there remains no stable or universal expression and arrangement of these enactments of responsibility; as an anthropology of ethics makes clear, responsibility’s seemingly self-evident or essential nature dissolves upon closer ethnographic attention. In explicating a multiplicity of responsibilities, this chapter explores how calls for responsibilities shift with scale, from the individual to the collective, within diverse temporal frames, and in response to technologies, techniques, and ideologies that bring new accountabilities and agencies to life.

In this chapter, we extend the learnings from Chapter 4 to expand your knowledge and skills on reflective practice for building effective and dynamic relationships for partnerships. You will understand how further elements of the TWINE Model of Partnership inform your reflective practice in partnership work. You will also come to learn about tools of reflective practice and how these tools can be useful in helping you to build meaningful relationships that contribute to partnerships with families and communities. This chapter will invite you to challenge yourself by asking key questions that will help you to become a reflective practitioner who builds dynamic relationships with children, families and communities.

Private hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies, and the doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who staff them provide a large portion of healthcare services in low- and middle-income countries (L&MICs). In some, the private sector delivers much more care than the government. Understanding the scale, capacity, quality, constraints and motivations of private providers and private facilities – whether for-profit, non-profit, formal or informal – is critical to assuring that health services and medicines support and expand the goals of access to quality health care for all. This chapter sets out what is known regarding private care provision, from world-class hospitals to unlicensed and untrained village drug-sellers and summarizes the experience and frameworks being applied around the world to measure, regulate, and assure the efficient and effective provision of private health care as part of mixed-health-systems in L&MICs. In many settings the challenges of private sector governance are complicated by limited data, minimal financial transfers, and weak regulatory systems. Despite this, advances have been made in L&MICs to defining and applying good governance strategies.

Contemporary welfare states in advanced post-industrial democracies have been under pressure for some time, dealing with multiple challenges such as population aging, globalization and technological change. Initially, scholars focused on pointing out how a fiscal policy climate of “permanent austerity” (Pierson 2001) constrains the leeway for expansionary reform. Over time, however, observers noted that welfare state retrenchment is not “the only game left in town” (Van Kersbergen et al. 2014). Instead, welfare states have undergone and are still undergoing a significant transformation from a more transfer- and insurance-based model towards a “social investment” model (Bonoli 2013; Hemerijck 2013, 2017, 2018; Morel et al. 2012), in which the creation, mobilization and preservation of human capital and skills are central (Garritzmann et al. 2017). For sure, there are significant cross-country differences in the extent to which the transformation towards the social investment model has occurred, depending on particular institutional, political and socio-economic contexts. Yet, the overall trend is clearly discernible.

Many rich democracies witness a rising tide of populism. With very few exceptions, populist parties have scored electoral successes and often entered national parliaments. In Poland and Hungary, for example, populist parties dominate the respective party system, and in Austria, the FPÖ was part of the previous government coalition. For the first time since the fall of the Nazi regime, a right-wing populist party entered the Bundestag after the 2017 general election in Germany. The most spectacular instance of populist success is probably the presidency of Donald Trump, who won the 2016 US presidential election to the surprise of many observers. Even where populist parties are less successful on Election Day, they sometimes have a strong impact on policies. Brexit is just the most far-reaching example. In reaction to the rise of populism, a wealth of research has emerged. It deals with the most suitable definition of populism, the programmatic outlook of populist parties, supportive attitudes or the social base of the populist vote. Despite the richness of this research, we argue that most approaches to the study of populism fail to integrate fully the insights on unequal representation that have emerged in recent years.

On January 6, 2021, angry supporters of the outgoing president, Donald Trump, stormed the US Capitol building, harassed members of Congress and staff, and mocked democratic symbols. The protestors violently expressed a widespread sentiment among Republican voters that the election was rigged, and that Joe Biden should not be sworn in as the new president of the United States. If democracy depends on the support of those who voted for the losing party to accept the result of the election as legitimate, the events on Capitol Hill showed that this “losers’ consent” (Anderson et al., 2005) is crumbling. Although the degree of polarization in the United States is severe, other advanced democracies face similar challenges. A substantial number of citizens feel that the political system has deep flaws, that politicians have lost touch, and that political decisions do not reflect the preferences of the majority anymore. The chapters in this book highlight the pervasiveness of these problems across a variety of institutional and political settings well beyond the United States.