Throughout jazz history, improvisation has been central to the music’s aesthetic and social force. From the polyphonic group extemporizations of early styles, through the featured solos within Swing Era arrangements, to bebop’s harmonic steeplechase or the open form experiments that followed, jazz musicians have privileged departures from through-composed scores and fixed musical texts. This essay considers the social, ideological, and aesthetic stakes of these departures, exploring how the music’s emphasis on improvisation constitutes both an ongoing impetus for artistic innovation and a vital challenge to the American status quo. By opening up a cultural space for validating otherwise marginalized Black innovators, improvisation has offered resources for hope, social transformation, and Black mobility. It has also enabled an ongoing critique of existing discourses, subjecting the rigidity of white supremacy, Eurocentrism, or sexism, for instance, to reformulation through an articulation of other possible futures.

We need theories that help us join the struggle for alternative futures. Cultural-historical approaches frame agency as something people do rather than something they have or sense. Building on this, I conceptualise agency in terms of the direction and reach of actions. Direction concerns movement from distinctive subject positionings towards desired endpoints. Reach concerns the extent of this movement. Direction and reach can be both outward (transforming the world) and inward (transforming the self). This acknowledges individuals’ contributions to changing their own lives and those of others without evacuating actions from the activities in which they are embedded. Motive, mediation, and motion are key to this. I illustrate these ideas in relation to existing research on young people’s environmental activism, a Latino boy in foster care, and a mother struggling to care for her infant child, as well as examples from prior research and other chapters in this volume.

Most crisis studies assume that crisis response should end disruption and restore order. This approach effectively upholds the status quo and tends to neglect structural inequalities in society. In particular, gender, race, and class inequalities render some groups more vulnerable than others. Response operations may even further discriminate against marginalized groups. Such discrimination can go unnoticed, since crisis organizations are often characterized by internal discrimination against members of these social groups as well. Alternatively, by explicitly recognizing the political nature of crisis response, frontline personnel can also try to reform society and correct structural inequalities through social transformation, although this is very challenging in practice. The goal of crisis response, therefore, constitutes a dilemma. At the very least, frontline response should avoid reinforcing discrimination and commit to social equity. Striving for more diverse and inclusive organizations would mean a step toward more equitable crisis responses. Even though our expectations should be modest, crisis response operations can and should contribute to fairness and justice.

Piotr Olkusz and Dobrochna Ratajczakowa’s Polish Enlightenment constellation not only discloses the processes contributing to the construction of modern Poland, but also how, in the atmosphere of postwar hopes, many Polish scholars focused on the eighteenth century, visibly expressing animosity towards the Romantic paradigm dominant in prewar Polish culture; it was much easier to set functionalism and political involvement against traditionalism and nineteenth-century realism in an atmosphere backed up by declarations of objectives shared by authorities. Ratajczakowa links the theatre and the press as crucial processes of social transformation from the broader public sphere to ‘concrete audiences present in physical places’, and shows how Wojciech Bogusławski and dynamic forms of audience reception in the late eighteenth century paved the way for a highly politicized and engaged forms of spectatorships in the twentieth century. Olkusz charts the clash between public and national theatre, articulated in the dialectical tensions between the Enlightenment outlook and the Romantic paradigm.

Why do some rebel groups undertake costly, burdensome governing projects that undermine their legitimacy, and even trigger resistance and violence that could put their own combatants at risk, while other rebel groups do not? The introductory chapter uses the contemporary cases of three rebel groups’ control of the city Raqqa in Syria to illustrate the empirical puzzle that motivates the book. The chapter then outlines existing works related to rebel governance and details why these approaches cannot explain rebel governance in Raqqa. Specifically, research generally assumes that rebel governance is popular and desirable in ways that confer material and organizational benefits to rebel groups. This chapter then puts forth an alternative conceptualization of rebel governance as varied in terms of its costs and benefits such that rebel leaders make decisions about whether to introduce more or less burdensome governance institutions during war. The chapter then outlines the central argument of the text: that rebel groups’ goals determine their governance strategy. It then describes how the book empirically tests this argument before concluding with a discussion of the importance of the topic.

We find ourselves in a paradigmatic transition which we may designate as a postmodern transition, and to account for its emancipatory potential adequately we need an appropriate postmodern theory that I call theory of oppositional postmodernism. According to this theory, it is possible and necessary to think of social regulation and emancipation beyond the limits imposed by the paradigm of modernity. To accomplish it, an oppositional postmodern theory of science and an oppositional postmodern theory of law are called for. This stance takes the promises of modernity very seriously, be they liberty, equality and fraternity. It submits them to a radical critique that allows us to understand the perversities concerning the fulfillment of some of the promises and the impossibility of fulfilling others and it allows us to identify the emancipatory potential that the promises keep intact but that can only be realized within postmodern social, cultural, political, epistemological, and theoretical boundaries. The promises of modernity have become problems for which there seems to be no solution at all. In the meantime, the conditions that brought about the crisis of modernity have not yet become the conditions to overcome the crisis beyond modernity. Hence the complexity of our transitional period: we are facing modern problems for which there are no modern solutions. The search for a postmodern solution is what I call oppositional postmodernism.

This chapter provides a sense of the rupture that characterised the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focusing on a series of political, technological and scholarly developments which contributed to creating a widespread atmosphere and experience of fundamental social change. I argue that crowds were seen as embodiments of these broader social transformations. Focusing on Gustave Le Bon’s crowd psychology, I discuss how theorisation on crowds was analytically indebted to late-nineteenth-century debates about hypnotic suggestion as these played out within psychotherapy. I argue that fin-de-siècle discussions of hypnotic suggestion did not simply propose that individuals are completely plastic creatures, always malleable in the hands of a powerful hypnotist. Rather, at the heart of the psychotherapy discussions at this time was the proposition that suggestion need not entail de-individualisation: the mimesis generated through suggestion may well depend on anti-mimetic individuals who must voluntarily let go of themselves in order for the mimetic suggestion to work. I discuss this in terms of tensional individuality.

The dominant accounts of the Indian Supreme Court’s capacity for social transformation place considerable emphasis on the exceptional public trust and confidence in the Indian judiciary. Using National Election Studies post election survey data collected following the 1996 and 2009 Parliamentary elections, this is the first study to evaluate and assess the nature and extent of trust in Indian courts using public opinion data. We find that Indians have remarkably high levels of trust and confidence in the Indian judiciary across socio-demographic factors and consistently across the two time periods examined in this study. Secondly, we find that standard explanations based on caste and religious identity do not find purchase when explaining trust in the judiciary. Nor does class status. Finally, we find that trust in elected institutions is positively associated with trust in the judiciary providing preliminary support for the institutional legitimacy or a diffuse support hypothesis. We conclude that the Indian judiciary enjoys significant public trust and confidence, that provides the institutional legitimacy for an innovative and radical approach to constitutional adjudication.

The Indian Supreme Court sits in panels and can have up to 31 judges. This chapter explores how the Indian Supreme Court developed its current structure and the impact of this structure on its functioning. It argues that the Supreme Court’s structure has a range of inter-related effects that includes increasing access to the Court, producing a “polyvocal” jurisprudence that destabilizes stare decisis, spurring experimentation among judges, fostering a “Chief Justice dominant” Court, and reducing the perceived partisanship of judges. Mapping the structure of the Court, as well as the Court’s relationship with the rest of the judiciary, helps us appreciate how judges ultimately interpret the law and the Constitution not in isolation, but within a larger judicial architecture.