Today, bitch is one of the handiest words in the English language. It’s used to express a multitude of emotions – anger, horror, fear, frustration, despair, envy, resentment, shock, surprise, pain, and pity. But on the other hand, it can also express happiness, excitement, and endearment. Bitch is invoked to offend people, but also to compliment them, to complain, or to show camaraderie. Bitch is complicated. It can mean so many things at once, and yet, it has still retained its original humble meaning. It’s been quite a journey for “bitch.” But one thing’s for sure – bitch is still on its journey.

This chapter revisits the Expert Transition Cycle presented in Chapter 3 from the perspective of how identity changes. Five stages of the Expert Transition Cycle operate during transition. Intention orients and clarifies choices and provides drive. Inquiry holds open the transition process with criteria for choice and discrimination based upon intention. Exploration actively investigates the familiar and the new elements of identity, roles, social situations, work opportunities, beliefs, and performance. Commitment narrows and targets the choices made regarding those elements. Integration modifies and adapts the identity to include new elements, knowledge, experience, and beliefs. Each stage of the Expert Transition Cycle is reviewed in light of the operation of the transition experiences, such as cognitive flexibility and purpose. This is discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

This chapter reports on a study that examines the cultivation of values in teaching ancient history in an Australian junior secondary school classroom. We focus on how the values of ‘democracy’ are discussed in learning about ‘city-states and governments in Ancient Greece’. Our analysis makes visible the language resources used to establish ‘democratic’ values and how these values are transmitted in the discourse of teaching and learning. We first identify three sources of evaluation – including the school’s history perspective, the teacher’s perspective, and the perspective of Australian citizens. We show that as the source of evaluation changes, different types of ‘democratic’ value are enacted. Democracy is formulated as a set of values enacted by clusters of evaluations, in opposition to what is evaluated as ‘non-democracy’. We also consider how the teacher confirms or rejects instances of evaluation as they work to form ‘bonds’, aligning students into a community of shared values. The chapter makes explicit the fact that in building knowledge of history, ‘what you know’ and ‘how you feel’ construct ‘who you are’.

The contributors to this book represent a wide breadth of scholarly approaches, including law, social and environmental science, and engineering, as well as from the arts and humanities. The chapters explore what environmental violence is and does, and the variety of ways in which it affects different communities. The authors draw on empirical data from countries and regions around the globe, including Ukraine, French Polynesia, Latin America, and the Arctic. The variety of responses to environmental violence by different communities, whether through active resistance or the creative arts, is also discussed, providing the foundation on which to build alternatives to the potentially damaging trajectory on which humans currently find themselves. This book is indispensable for researchers and policymakers in environmental policy and peacebuilding. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Community organizing within local faith-based institutions (churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) is now widespread in the US and has seen adoption in several other countries. As congregation-based organizing has grown and matured as a field over four decades, leaders have drawn strong connections between the social and political goals of community organizing and the religious traditions and values of the participating congregations. This blending of organizing practices and religious traditions has been crucial to the success of this approach. This chapter describes some of the practices that congregation-based community organizing initiatives employ to build power among residents who are actively participating in defining and deciding how to alter the systems that affect their lives. A statewide organizing federation (PICO California) and the reflections of influential organizer Jose Carrasco serve as a case example of the intertwining of interfaith values with a power-based organizing approach.

Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize when she was seventeen. In part, the world knows about her because when the Taliban prohibited girls from attending school in Afghanistan, she spoke up about it, writing articles and giving talks. As is clear by her writing, Malala has strong values that include justice and equality for women as well as a love of learning and education. She also values safety. In making her choice to speak up and criticize her government’s decision, Malala was aware that she was increasing risks to herself and her family. In response, the Taliban shot (then fifteen-year-old) Malala in the head while she was on a school bus. Thankfully, she survived and continues to advocate for a future where girls are free to learn and lead.

Malala made decisions based on trade-offs among her values, even when the priority she placed on equality and justice made her vulnerable to Taliban hostility and increased her own risk of death.

After earning a commerce degree, Will got a corporate job and wore a suit to work every day, then came home to a rental condo in the city he shared with his girlfriend. After about a year he started to wonder why he wasn’t happy. Maybe if he took more time off or got a dog? But after another year of his job, a bit of travelling with his girlfriend, and a year of going on jogs and throwing sticks for their puppy, he still felt miserable. Will realized he had been doing all the things that mattered to others without knowing what truly mattered to himself. In a flurry of decisions, Will quit his job, broke up with his girlfriend, and moved back in with his parents. That’s when he ran into an old family friend, Leah, and, in a rush of details, told her about his life since graduation.

Exploring Consequences, the fourth Decision-Maker Move, is about understanding what will happen as the result of selecting any of the various options. Or rather, what is most likely to happen. Keep in mind, both uncertainty (about what occurs) and luck (either good or bad) often play a part in how things actually turn out. Study and do well on the exam, knowing that spending the evening studying won’t be much fun. Don’t study and probably do poorly on the exam but have a good time for a few hours the night before. It’s all about the consequences. Eat the fruit salad or soup special for lunch, feel great in the afternoon and get a lot done. Choose the huge burger and a double order of fries, feel sleepy and get less done the rest of the day. Consequences follow from the choices we make.

Decisions are doors that provide people of all ages with opportunities to express who they are and to learn about who they want to become. Sometimes the young people in your life may choose the wrong door and, while that can make for a good learning experience, you probably want to help them make good decisions and avoid the bad ones. You did, after all, decide to open up this book. While we cannot program kids with the answers they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives, we can support kids in learning and using a common-sense approach to understanding and organizing their feelings and thoughts as they make their own decisions.

Creating options is an exciting and fun part of making decisions. It’s what changes “I have to do this” (reluctantly solving a problem) to “I get to do this” (enthusiastically creating an opportunity). People often excuse their decisions by saying, “I didn’t have a choice – it’s just something I had to do.” But that’s rarely true. Decision options are almost always available.

If one young person is about to make a decision, helping them construct options is relatively straightforward. Once they are clear about which values might be affected, they can generate different options likely to satisfy these qualities.

At times like this, when the way forward isn’t clear, framing the choice – a quick check into what the decision is all about – can be helpful. And important. Taking control over how we picture the decisions we face is part of transforming decision problems into decision opportunities. The decision frame determines how we bring who we are and what we care about into the decision-making picture.

Civil society has been lauded for its ability to act as a social glue that is critical to healthy and functioning democracies. Despite their centrality to US society, nonprofits have lacked legitimacy commensurate with the criticality of their civic purposes. Drawing upon the publicness debate in which government functions under a political authority and business operates within a market authority, Robichau and Fernandez propose a normative “Nonprofitness Framework” that accounts for the moral authority by which nonprofits operate, which is necessary for contributing to a vibrant democracy. A Nonprofitness Framework considers charitable and voluntary organizations in terms of degrees of moral authority and their expression of nonprofit ethos and missions in which some organizations move closer to public or private orientations. Understanding how nonprofits and their agents are conditioned by history and values in turn preserves and cultivates a thriving sector, generating the flexibility to enhance society and provide balance among a dominant private sector and an influential public sector.

Chapter 5 asks why the public continues to support restrictive policies given their considerable economic and rights costs. It identifies the predominant values informing and facilitating the liberal state’s governance of contemporary immigration and its implications for restricting human mobility by focusing on the effects of a threat environment in sustaining the onerous policies of the migration policy playing field. It argues that the persistence of these policies can largely be explained by the continued negative framing of these events by political elites and the mass media. In particular, their conflation of public safety and national security with immigration makes the issue more salient for the public, and the popular legitimacy of restrictive policies is sustained and endorsed by center and extreme Right politicians and political parties. The chapter concludes that the predominance of a security paradigm has shifted the baseline of values salience and realigned popular values and attitudes regarding immigration.

The Conclusions summarize the book’s findings and revisits the question of whether contemporary liberal states can manage immigration and human mobility in a new security environment. Based on the evidence, we conclude that liberal states in the post-Cold War era are empowered to implement restrictive and illiberal policies by enlisting the cooperation of non-central state gatekeepers and the support of their publics. The chapter then considers the implications of the contemporary migration policy playing field for the civil liberties of citizens and migrants. It also surveys the effects of the 2019-22 Covid-19 pandemic on the course of human mobility worldwide and assesses whether they resonate with the assumptions of the book’s immigration threat politics paradigm. Several emergent inter-generational and values patterns around human mobility and immigration are then identified. We conclude with muted optimism about the liberal compromise elicited by the paradigm shift to embedded securitism. Despite its affront to the core values and principles upon which liberal democracies were founded, the expansion of the migration regulatory field reflects the consent of the governed.

Chapter 4 investigates whether the public endorses the institutional and policy developments described in the previous chapter. It considers the ‘soft’ norms that legitimize the liberal state’s exclusionary immigration and human mobility policies. Utilizing public opinion data derived from the Gallup, Pew, European Social, Eurobarometer, European Value, and World Value Surveys, it finds that the expansive migration policy playing field and its restrictive immigration measures are endorsed by most Europeans and Americans, that is, the public prioritizes the strict regulation of immigration strictly even when, in the process, its civil liberties and those of migrants are contravened. It argues that the success of the liberal state’s immigration and human mobility policies not only depends upon the compliance and active cooperation of non-central state actors, but also derives from the public’s trust that the state and its surrogate immigration gatekeepers are acting on its behalf and in its interests.