This Introduction configures Messiaen’s life and works, and the culture, aesthetics, and legacy of his art in terms of various kinds of images. In particular, this chapter focuses on the complexity and construction of these images, which are sometimes surprising and contradictory, to reveal the ‘contexts’ that inform this book.

Chapter 7 explores the ways in which personal and situational factors influence metaphor interpretation through a second temporal reasoning paradigm, thereby strengthening our confidence in the individualized role of the cognizer in the complex construction of metaphoric meaning.

This chapter is a critical reflection on the reform and its implementation. It looks at the challenges in the past, present and future and some key lessons learned along the way. It examines the changes in the context and the importance of cultural and political factors and what can be learned about implementing large-scale reform, and speculates on the next steps.

This chapter examines a core hypothesis of the intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck: that modern political concepts underwent an accelerated period of change during the latter half of the eigheenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, a period he calls the ‘Sattelzeit’ or hinge period of intellectual history. Adapting word embedding models and metrics of novelty and the pace of change, this chapter helps to measure, visualise and disentangle the precise semantic transformations occuring at this threshold period: the consolidation of Koselleck’s ‘collective singular’ noun, for example, appears alongside a host of other cultural, technological, intellectual innovations in word usage. Finally, the data reveal not one but two revolutionary semantic periods between 1720 and 1960, a finding which both troubles the concept of a Sattelzeit while also extending it into new discursive, historical – and digital – contexts.

Narratives function at different levels. We have personal narratives, interpersonal narratives, sub-cultural narratives and, at the top level, master narratives. These are the narratives that govern how a society or culture thinks, the general rules by which everyone, or nearly everyone abides. They help demonstrate that we are fundamentally in agreement with most of the rules and mores by which a society works, and help social psychologists and others understand subcultures and the nature of multiculturalism. Master narratives are difficult to define and very difficult to study. Often, in terms of sciences, it is more important to be aware of the role master narratives play in dictating how individuals behave. Where there is a clash of master narratives, there are potential problems for a society or culture, suggesting that multiculturalism, where there are two or more dominant master narratives, may be problematic. Master narratives play an important part in understanding individual identity and politics, demonstrating the constraints on the individual.

In this essay, we review the Technology and Measurement around the Globe chapters with an eye toward integration and synthesis. We primarily focus on implications for testing, and then make connections to the broader world of nontest assessment. We identify themes of privacy, fairness, workplace applications, and emerging technologies, and offer a research agenda for future investigations that seek to understand culture, technology, and measurement.

This chapter offers a critical analysis of how scholars have interpreted the relationship between eighteenth-century cultural practice and revolutionary politics, circa 1760 to 1825. The chapter first surveys and classifies eighteenth century cultural practice, identifying three main types: the social arts, practices of everyday life, and fine arts. The bulk of the essay then reflects on three major paradigms for interpreting how these forms of culture interacted with revolutionary politics. The dominant approach, exemplified by literature on the “bourgeois public sphere,” argues that eighteenth-century culture prefigured or lay the groundwork for revolutionary politics. Other scholars, particularly those working on the fine arts in the revolutionary era, have emphasized how cultural practices were transformed by revolutionary politics. A third, newer approach emphasizes the autonomy of cultural practice. Scholars working within this paradigm argue that cultural change was itself a form of revolution and that culture acted as an independent container for new political practices during the revolutionary era. This paradigm points the way to a broader, more inclusive account of revolution in this period. The essay covers the historiographies of eighteenth-century culture and revolutionary politics in North America, Europe (especially France and the Netherlands), and Latin America (especially Peru).

In this set of reflections, Sir David Baragwanath, former Justice of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand, part-time President of the Court of Appeal of Samoa and Appellate Judge of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague, considers some of the ways in which judges and lawyers situate themselves within the familiar and the foreign. He urges reflection on the challenge of the judicial oath to ‘do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm without fear, favour, affection or ill-will’, as enriched by the basic judicial precepts of modestie et audace – caution – and mains tremblantes – the need for care, sensitivity and humility – to control personal predilections and learn and comprehend the distinctive values that underlie what, to an outsider, is novel jurisprudence. Judges ought to strive for a ‘periscope’ approach, in order to penetrate the mists of their own education and experience and search for answers congruent with the values of the unfamiliar law or society illuminated by a vision of its highest standards.

In this chapter, we examine the nascent research on Latinx immigrant romantic relationships, with a particular focus on Central American undocumented and mixed-status immigrant partners rearing children in the United States. We use a socioculturally-attuned lens to reflect on the ways in which the context of illegality shapes romantic relationships between partners, where at least one person is undocumented. As we discuss, illegality is a term used to refer to the US immigration laws, policies, and practices that expose immigrants and their families to discrimination, exploitation, victimization, criminalization, detainment, deportation, and family separation based on liminal legal statuses. We argue in this chapter that illegality is a powerful structural force that transcends cultural explanations of Latinx immigrant romantic relationships. We draw upon a recent study of Central American immigrant women in romantic relationships to apply our socioculturally-attuned lens and underscore how illegality conditions and constrains their relational experiences and opportunities while residing in the United States. We conclude with considerations for family and relationship scholars of immigrant family life seeking to advance immigrant justice.

Although there have been attempts to make relationship science more diverse and inclusive, as it stands, the external sociocultural forces that impact relationships have not been at the forefront of research. We argue that romantic relationships cannot be divorced from the sociocultural context in which they exist. This chapter reviews the literature to explain the “context problem” faced by relationship science, highlighting the importance of including intersectional, context-driven research in the field. We then provide an overview of each chapter in the volume.

Cultural groups address the initiation, development, and maintenance of romantic relationships and marriage in diverse ways. Western values, beliefs, and populations have dominated theory and research, which has led to a relatively monocultural science of relationships. This chapter explores the developing literature on East Asian ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to suggest avenues for further investigation of culturally-defined relationships. We first focus on relatively broad social, ideological, and institutional factors that shape the East Asian Confucian cultural model of marriage in comparison to Western models of relationships. Then we review research linking distinctive East Asian ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving to culturally valued practices, attitudes, and behaviors in romantic relationships and marriage.

Falling in love is free…or is it? Although our “heart” and emotions may be unconnected to how much money or education we have or where we live, the process of initiating and maintaining a romantic relationship is most definitely connected to socioeconomic status (SES) and place. This chapter reviews the literature from the past fifteen years on the role of social class in four stages of romantic relationships: dating, cohabitation, marriage, and divorce. The existing research reveals several patterns. First, social class impacts all stages of a relationship, which contributes to perpetuating social class inequities throughout generations. Second, heteronormative assumptions dominate the existing literature with little focus on LGBTQ+ relationships. Moreover, gender appears to overshadow any impact of social class – in other words, women and men are bound by gender role expectations in relationships regardless of SES. Finally, and most importantly, research shows that most individuals, regardless of social class, hope to find a life partner and start a family. What social class “buys” an individual in terms of romance is ease…ease to date, marry, and divorce.

Suicide has long been a topic of social discourse, with pendulating views of the phenomenon. This chapter highlights how social, cultural, and religious views on the morality of suicide shifted over time and discusses today’s current understanding of suicide as a public health crisis. Early documentations of suicide highlight it as a means by which to avoid becoming a spoil of war or avoiding dishonor. With the rise of Christianity, suicide came to be viewed as a mortal sin, one that could result in the punishment of surviving family members. Perspectives on the morality of suicide have vacillated over time, with current times viewing suicide not as an issue of morality but as a public health issue. Despite years of suicide prevention efforts, suicide rates in the United States have generally remained stubborn. Given the complex nature of suicide, it will likely require integrated interventions and resources that cross clinical and community realms.

Based on ethnographic encounters in India over three decades, the authors reflect on what it means to study gender and the sexual. They argue that knowledge of gender and the sexual is bound up with epistemological and historical legacies, political ruptures, and subjective estrangements. In particular, the chapter critically engages the trajectories through which ontological assumptions about gendered and sexual selves have been configured and reconfigured over time. Moving away from the assumptions of “interiority” as the space for articulating or experiencing subjectivity, and from notions of “authentic,” extant cultural “types,” they look at the shifting material conditions and multiple temporal trajectories of forms of identification and self-evincing. Gendering and evincing of sexual selves emerge as terrains of partial connectedness between people, concepts, and material “things” as opposed to wholly defining attributes of any given subject. Three categories of gendered and sexual selves (kothi, hijra, and transgender) emerge and disappear over time in relation to each other, and to registers and economies of signification of law, health policy, activism, religious nationalism, and anthropology. This took shape within and across intimate lifeworlds, state actions, and transnational (mis)connections, here apprehended ethnographically.

Harnessing the power of the presidency, Lyndon Baines Johnson required America to wrestle with its past. Together, the powerful social movements of the 1960s and his Great Society catalyzed a cycle of reckoning and discomfort that changed America until the war in Vietnam, and anger and angst about government, identity, and power brought it to an end. We’ve tried to forget LBJ and, in some cases, what his presidency achieved and helped unearth. But we ignore him at our peril. The Johnson years have much to teach us, as America in the 1960s and today’s America have much in common. America today, as in the 1960s, is tumultuous. Armed with our memories and different conceptions of how we got here, we’re struggling to define our problems and the answers appear unknowable and out of reach. But instead of actively looking away from the past, we can choose to learn from it. Remembering Lyndon Johnson and his presidency – the good and the bad – offers us the opportunity to reposition government as an ally, not an enemy, and to acknowledge and confront the historically toxic relationship that binds power, politics, and American identity so we can move closer to our democratic aspirations.

With its large distributional range across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and an ability to co-exist as a commensal with many human habitations, not surprisingly, the Little Owl has figured prominently in many cultural beliefs, and in a variety of ways. The common names given to this species across the countries are linked to its activity, to its voice, to its morphology, to its food, to beliefs, to its habitat, and to mythology. In Greek mythology, Athena was the daughter of Zeus and originally a Mycenaean palace goddess, guardian of cities, war goddess, patroness of arts and crafts, and promoter of wisdom. A particularly interesting example of the cultural use of Little Owls comes from Crespina, Italy, which was a center for the rearing of owls in captivity to be used for hunting small passerines. They were sold at the Little Owl market while tied up on a roost. The nobility (upper-class people) commonly hunted in the countryside using the Little Owls as bait. The history and traditions of the Little Owl are truly long, rich and varied, and grow with additional recoveries of artefacts from archaeological sites, as well as evolving cultural views. In closing this chapter, we urge reviewers of owl myths, traditions and lore to closely scrutinize the information they assemble, to determine whether the ideas and symbolism described in text and artefacts still apply in contemporary societies, or whether they are part of the colorful but quaint past.

While biology does play a significant role in the development of addiction, it is the environment in which we grow and develop as children and ultimately exist as adults that determines whether or not an at-risk individual will subsequently develop opioid use disorder. Race (the outward manifestation of genetics) ethnicity (cultural factors such as nationality, regional culture, ancestry, and language), religion, gender, access to economic resources, and geography all influence risk to varying degrees. Within each community different cultures have different levels of propensity for developing opioid use disorder, and, in areas where there is more mixing of different races and cultures, a person’s risk for developing opioid addiction more closely reflects the risk of the community at large and not the genetic risk of the individual. In the past, social factors such as access to economic resources and peer or family support were thought to be somewhat protective and that a biologically at-risk individual in this setting would be less likely to develop opioid use disorder, but this has not turned out to be the case.

This essay approaches David Tracy’s theme of conversation (‘which animates … the whole posture and method of Tracy’s career’) primarily as social and civil practice. Tracy’s Plurality and Ambiguity (1987) is brought into conversation with present-day cultural critic Sherry Turkle regarding how digitalised communications magnify the ‘interruptions’ of plurality and ambiguity that Tracy suggested mark all conversation. Some early critics suggested that Plurality and Ambiguity: (1) insufficiently considered the ambiguities of one’s interlocutors in conversation; and (2) ignored imperatives for some participants to resist powerful others’ framings of the rational task. Here, our digital situation can help highlight how deep down plurality and ambiguity stretch within any given conversation; as well as how socially fragile and crucial this phenomenon of conversation is. The world of deliberately designed digital platforms highlights how there is always some particular design to ‘the table’ at which conversation participants convene. Theology must learn the necessity of building a culture of genuine theological conversation by means of deliberate and detailed design decisions.