This chapter lays out the epistemological, methodological and ethical considerations in answering the book’s core question. Legitimation requires a considerable amount of work and indeed creativity, rendered invisible by some methodologies to date. A practice-based approach, here bolstered by the use of critical ethnography, places the agential, iterative and relational aspects of legitimation centre frame. Such an approach benefits from late modern writers in the West but also crucially insights from anti/postcolonial scholars, including on the African continent. The chapter sets out a moral concern regarding the location of the always assumed, never seen, legitimation ‘subject’, obscured by the shadow of theory-making or developmental problem-solving. It argues that interpretive praxeology speaks to both methodological and ethical concerns, aiding the move to deverticalize research. The chapter also sets out the particular value of the Tanzanian case in the wake of its rapid liberalization, both in its specificities but also its broader resonance as a microcosm of the reconstituting public, with the global inserted into the local in new and illuminating ways.

A brief intellectual autobiography of the authors and reflections on the path that led them to this dialog.

Part I is about the social origins of people who became fixers in 2010s Turkey and Syria. Some were refugees from Syria’s civil war or journalists ousted from Turkey’s domestic press as the Turkish state successively captured opposition outlets; these prospective fixers turned to work with the international media for the promise of stability. Others came from non-journalism backgrounds but, inspired by developments such as Turkey’s “Kurdish Opening” or the 2013 Gezi Park protest movement, found in fixing the opportunity to pursue adventurous and idealistic aspirations. Fixers of different backgrounds help foreign reporters in different ways: some provide insider access to local events and people, while others help their clients to make sense of phenomena from an outsider perspective.

In Chapter 7, I describe a committed research praxis where scientists strive to articulate the community-level value commitments that define good science, and to evaluate the degree to which particular scientific activities and products reflect those commitments. I argue that one primary way for psychologists to engage in this sort of committed praxis is by asking questions together in a place. That is, we can subject our work to insistent moral attention through collective and locally situated forms of reflection and responsibility. I suggest that these forms could include reflexivity, transparency, participatory and community-oriented research practices, political, historical, and material analyses of our research traditions and products, resistance to overgeneralized and “scaled” forms of neo-liberal management, and other practices that help anchor research work to the local and communal commitments that justify it.

While community psychologists show commitment to social justice concerns, there has been a long-standing neglect of critical social scholarship in knowledge produced in the field. It is useful to see power as an organizing principle in community psychology, to further critical reflection about the theories and methods adopted in community research and their implications for transformative practice. We present the findings of an empirical study of trends in community psychology journals, showing that community psychologists study a wide range of topics, with emergent interests in children, youth and families, and difference and exclusion. However, there remains a preference for preventionist theory and likewise a stronger focus on social epidemiology and a paucity of empirical research employing critical and participatory methods. Thus, community psychologists still rely too heavily on individualist and biomedically oriented epistemological foundations and methods. We argue the dominant epistemological positions can be shifted through enhancing criticality and understandings of power, to address gaps in theory and method. We advocate for the importance of fostering reflexivity; critical consciousness and critical action; developing a sense of historicity in understanding communities; strengthening interdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity; and endorsing methodological pluralism, innovation, and concern for the social impact of knowledge.

We now turn to an utter rejection of structure. Two figures are prominent: Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard and Clifford Geertz. Evans-Pritchard maintained an approach that saw anthropology as akin to history. He rejected anthropology as a science. A better analogy saw anthropology as an exercise in translation. Geertz built on the idea of complex nuance in the study of culture. In other words, he favoured a quest for ‘thick description’.

This chapter outlines the remaining constitutive elements of the ecological security discourse, noting what means it encourages in responding to the threat climate change poses to ecosystem resilience and developing an account of which actors have responsibility for the preservation or advancement of security in this discourse. On the question of means, the chapter argues that an ecological security discourse encourages a focus on significant mitigation action, while also noting a potential role for adaptation to inevitable effects and even controversial practices associated with geoengineering. It notes in the process what sets of principles should inform how we approach such practices, emphasizing the importance of dialogue, reflexivity and humility in ensuring that practices carried out in the name of ecological security serve to minimize harm to the most vulnerable. The chapter then defines responsibility for addressing ecological security in terms of capacity, noting a potential role for a wide range of actors – from states to intergovernmental organizations, private corporations to individuals – in advancing ecological security in practice.

This brief concluding chapter summarizes the argument of the volume and draws attention to a chief outcome of the entire book, viz., pragmatic transcendental humanism. It is also briefly considered in what sense the discussion of the book is committed to (pragmatist) project of metaphysics and why exactly this pragmatist undertaking needs the kind of Kantian transcendental backing that the earlier chapters argue it does.

This chapter concludes the edited volume and its quest to harvest findings on the conceptual development of adaptiveness, as proposed by the Earth System Governance (ESG) Project. Adaptiveness is both a key attribute and goal of governance to anticipate, manage, and help steer complex societal, technological, and environmental changes towards more sustainable trajectories. Reiterating the main question of the book: How has adaptiveness, as an umbrella concept, been developed and applied in the context of earth system governance in the first decade after its inception, and what insights and practical solutions has it yielded? We have found that adaptiveness encompasses and relates to concepts including adaptive management and governance, adaptive capacity, vulnerability, resilience, robustness, and social learning. We elucidate how these concepts and further Harvesting Initiative findings relate to the 2018 Science and Implementation Plan of the ESG Project, in which adaptiveness is considered alongside the concept of reflexivity. We then look back on 10 years of progress to answer the so-called 'Utrecht Questions', exploring both the relevance of adaptiveness concepts in practice and their generalisability. Finally, we touch upon the 2009 ESG Science Plan and suggest how adaptiveness offers lessons for broader societal transformation and achieving global sustainability agendas.

The exercise of formative agency in global justice cannot be entrusted to any single category of agents exclusively, be it states, advocacy groups, or citizens. However, interactions across categories can compensate for the deficiencies of all of them. A systemic account of deliberative governance shows how formative agency can be distributed and cultivated across multiple sites, actors, and institutions. It is the deliberative capacity of the entire system that matters most. The process that yielded the Sustainable Development Goals implicitly recognized this by establishing multiple venues, decision-making groups, and negotiation tracks, infused with participatory norms. Yet there was no logic to their interaction – and links were often simply absent. This chapter supplies the logic and the links. Specific shortcomings can then be identified and corrected. For example, the absence of citizens in the interstate negotiations of the Open Working Group could be corrected by links with deliberative citizens’ assemblies. It is important to cultivate the agency of citizens and the global poor, in nodes, sites, and interactions in the system. Deliberative systems in global justice governance should develop reflexive capacity in order to reflect on and improve their own performance.

This chapter deals with the status of meaning-generating processes, taking place in language use, in relation to human cognition. A basic assumption is that reflexive or metalinguistic awareness is one of the original evolutionary prerequisites for the development of human language, and that it plays a central role in all instances of producing and interpreting utterances. The chapter reviews the ways in which metalinguistic activity types and indicators of reflexive awareness have been accounted for in the past. It explores the relevance of the topic for a pragmatic understanding of social interaction, with special attention for cross-linguistic variability (and hence with implications for intercultural communication). Finally, it reflects on methodological problems involved in the study of the phenomena at hand, and perspectives for future research are briefly sketched.

The success of the Anthropocene concept relies on the esthetic of the sublime. It rejuvenates old cultural tropes – the geological sublime, the sublime of the fall, technological sublime, and the sublime of the scientific discovery. What is the function of this anthropocenic sublime? As liberal intellectuals converted to environmental concerns and proclaimed the end of grand narratives, the Anthropocene provided a new grandiose narrative. Theorizing the movement of humanity as a telluric force seems much more exciting than reflecting on modes of production, energy transition, or degrowth. But for contemporary political ecology, the Anthropocene esthetic is problematic: It sublimates capitalism whose strength is now compared to geological forces; it tends to erase inequalities and the politics of environmental harm for a depoliticized fascination for planetary collapse; it fuels the dream of a conscious geological agent, gearing the destiny of the planet under the guidance of an international scientific elite. Geoengineering lurks behind the sublime of the Anthropocene.

Chapter 2 presents the key debates in the field of rapid ethnography and the assumptions associated with conventional ethnographic research. This chapter discusses the particular characteristics of rapid ethnographies. The chapter engages with discussions on epistemology, the role of theory and reflexivity in ethnographic research and the role these occupy in rapid ethnographies. These have been limitations identified by proponents of focused ethnographies (Knoblauch 2005) and short-term ethnographies (Pink and Morgan 2013), so this chapter seeks to provide evidence of how rapid ethnographies can also engage with theory and the reflective practice that characterises more 'traditional' forms of ethnography.

Chapter 3, “The Form of Reflexivity and the Expression of Self-Presence”, explores the role of transcendental apperception for inner experience according to the Transcendental Deduction (B) of the first Critique. By showing the insufficiencies of two alternative views defended in the literature, namely the psychological view and the logical view, the chapter argues that transcendental apperception is the capacity for reflexive consciousness in general. Its characteristic form, the general form of reflexivity, is the most general condition on any conscious representation and can be expressed by the phrase “I think”. The chapter concludes by arguing that the phrase “I think”, if in fact attached to a representation in thought, expresses self-reference to oneself as individual thinker, yet without determining oneself.

Chapter 1, “Inner Sense as the Faculty for Inner Receptivity”, sets the stage by introducing Kant’s basic model of representation and by defining two pairs of concepts that will guide my analysis: reflexivity and referentiality, on the one hand, and objective and subjective validity on the other. Through an examination of the historical context, the chapter develops an account of inner sense as a transcendental faculty of sensibility, and gives preliminary accounts of central concepts, including affection, sensation, appearance, intuition, perception, and experience. As a result, the chapter suggests that – by analogy with outer sense – inner sense receives inner appearances and yields distinctively inner intuition according to its specific form, i.e., time. The full argument for this claim will be put forward only in Chapter 2. Finally, by considering insights concerning the faculties for desire and feeling from the third Critique and the Anthropology, the chapter develops a broader notion of inner receptivity as susceptibility to all mind-internal causes.

Poststructuralism has brought social, cultural and political theories into a productive exchange with methods and tools for analyzing text and talk. My contribution outlines the contours of poststructuralist discourse studies (PDS), which is an interdisciplinary field of discourse research inspired by poststructuralism. It gives an overview of poststructuralism, tracing its evolution and identifying its key questions. I then spell out the consequences of poststructuralism for discourse studies, where it has given birth to the new field of PDS. PDS critically relates to the structuralist, top-down tendencies that have characterized some of the pioneering “French School” and “Critical” strands in discourse studies. It defends posthumanist and antiessentialist views on power and knowledge. Perceiving language as a socially constitutive practice, it places emphasis on the critical and reflexive dimensions of discourse research. Situated at the interdisciplinary intersection of language and society, PDS aims to bridge structure- and practice-oriented strands of discourse research and to overcome the divisions between linguistics and other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.

In any given interaction, what counts as smart or insightful or correct, can be produced through feedback loops: Face-to-face, nods of agreement suggest we have the right answer. Online, the “best answer” moves to the top of Yahoo Answers, the “top definition” is the first seen in Urban Dictionary, and the most-viewed hits for “succinct pronunciation?” moves to the top of a google search. All the other answers drift further down your screen. This chapter illustrates both the positive and negative effects of feedback loops on how we talk about language and how we function as citizens. We’ll look at how feedback loops have the potential both to create a reality through the senses of shared identity and positive affiliation they can create and to put up barriers that keep people isolated from others’ ideas. Then, we’ll look closely at one case at Duke University in which citizen sociolinguists were able to disrupt entrenched social norms by breaking down those feedback loops and exposing different assumptions behind the ways we use language.