An introduction to attachment theory while completing an undergraduate degree in South Africa opened an opportunity to study at Johns Hopkins University with the recognized mother of attachment theory, Mary Ainsworth. My tenure with her was intensive but short, as she decided to leave Hopkins for Virginia, leading me to head further north to Yale, though not until Ainsworth had introduced me to both Melvin Konner (a distinguished anthropologist) and Urie Bronfenbrenner, a doyen of developmental psychology then determined to radically transform stuffy developmental psychology into a contextually sensitive sub-discipline. With Ainsworth and Bronfenbrenner as off-site mentors, William Kessen introduced sophisticated developmental theory while Edward Zigler expounded the importance of using research to inform social policy in pursuit of a better world for children.

My understanding of children’s cognitive development involved a series of progressive shifts in my understanding of what is involved in learning a language. Rather than language serving as a means of expressing and sharing existing thoughts, I came to see language as the exclusive means of creating thought itself. To my surprise I have become a sort of “Nominalist”; the view that language is the vehicle of thought itself.

This chapter explores ecoviolence along the Sea of Cortez, and Mexican cartels’ decades-long monopoly of the illegal drug market. Through this illicit economy, we unpack the convergence of illegal waste dumping, the illegal wildlife trade, money laundering, and human smuggling, and the role that Mexican, Chinese, and Fujian criminal organizations play in regional, interregional, and transnational exchanges to further criminal activities. The Sea of Cortez is a fascinating case study due to its geographic location as a historical hub for smuggling multiple commodities such as totoaba bladders, shark fins, drugs, diamonds, and precious metals. But the smuggling of immigrants has now come under the purview of these criminal networks. The chapter concludes with proposing a new analytical framework for studying ecoviolence, building expert capacity for undertaking research and analysis of policy development and enforcement.

The transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) across various sectors, with recent advancements, such as the release of the generative AI model GPT-4, raises critical legal and policy concerns. These concerns include important societal and potentially existential impacts: Threats to democracy, workforce displacement, copyright challenges, environmental effects, new and more lethal cybersecurity threat vectors, and the potential for AI advanced to become uncontrollable or be used for malicious purposes if it falls into the wrong hands. Human rights concerns are also implicated, including the potential for biased and discriminatory decision-making, unreasonable privacy impacts, inaccurate and unfair outcomes, and lack of transparency and due process. The unveiling of GPT-4 emphasizes the need for legislation to address these issues. The European Union (EU) has taken a global lead by enacting the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) to regulate AI development, placement, and use, and by proposing the AI Liability Directive (AILD), which aims to facilitate civil claims for damages arising from AI products and services. The AIA takes a comprehensive, risk-based approach to regulating AI across sectors. Significant differences had to be negotiated among the EU co-legislators to reach a consensus on the final text of the AIA, such as defining AI systems, regulating foundation models, determining bans on specific AI systems, and establishing redress rights for consumers and fundamental rights violations. The chapter explores the global context, the EU legislative approach, the key issues that had to be resolved, and the interaction of the AIA with other EU laws, particularly with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

From a distance, smart contracts seem exciting: Unlike humans, who might opportunistically decide to deviate from the agreed terms, their code will execute “no-matter-what,” ensuring the terms are adhered to and the contract is performed. Smart contracts would thus seem like a valuable addition to conventional contracts. A perfect transaction technology, indeed! A closer analysis of the smart contract narrative and the relevant technical scholarship reveals a peculiar dissonance between how smart contracts are described and what smart contracts really are. Taking the unfortunate terminology at face value and analyzing smart contracts as if they were contracts in the legal sense might constitute a waste of academic time. Even if they constituted an improvement over existing transacting practices, would – or could – smart contracts still be contracts? Would they even belong to the same category of legal phenomena? Maybe the fundamental question is: what are smart contracts? To many, these questions may seem like unnecessary hairsplitting, typical of haughty academics. In practice, however, how something is defined and categorized has immediate practical implications. Sidestepping the overly optimistic narrative of “unstoppable legal innovation,” this chapter deconstructs the concept of smart contracts and aims to provide a more commonsensical and factual grounding for future legal analyses of this phenomenon.

Alain Badiou points out that subjects become political when they create events – events as trans beings (see Hallward 2003; Badiou 2005, 2009) – even without the mediation of an agency. Badiou (see Hallward 2004) would also constantly remind us that what is important is post-eventual declaration: to quote Lisy Sunny, one of the Dalit woman leaders of Pombilai Orumai in Munnar, ‘[A]t least now we have a union of our own.’

The protests that rocked the Kanan Devan tea plantations, formerly Scottish James Finlay, in Kerala in 2015, led by the historic Pombilai Orumai – the women's unity – and later a parallel state-wide struggle spearheaded by the mainstream trade unions had been called off following what could best be described as mixed outcomes. While the plantation management has had to shift its position with regard to its decision not to increase the bonus or wages, the workers had to content themselves with a 30 per cent hike in wages as against their original demand for a 100 per cent increase. Yet the struggle has been path-breaking as it helped bring to light the harsh living and working conditions on the colonially evolved plantations. The company's claim that it ‘ranked No. 1 in the category [of] best company for employees’ involvement and participation in India’ and ‘featured among the 100 best companies to work [as per] its employees in India’ was exposed as an untruth. In fact, the observations made at the second All Kerala Thozhilali Sammelanam (All Kerala Workers’ Meet) held at Trichur in 1937 under the leadership of veteran communists including P. Krishna Pillai, N.C. Sekhar, R. Sugathan, and A.K. Gopalan, that of all the workers it was the plantation workers who suffered the most (see Raman 2010), remains true to this day – after nearly seven decades of Indian independence – with hardly a change in the historically evolved plantation-based patriarchal forms of exploitation/oppression.

An ethnographic approach comparing how the festival of Dasaĩ unfolds in various ancient kingdoms of western Nepal reveals the unique elements particular to each site. It also reveals the way in which violence, order and disorder are combined in singular arrangements, like the various elements of a sort of transformative group which we can observe changing as we move across the country. The festival of Dasaĩ (The Ten Days) otherwise known as the Durgā pūjā (Worship of the Warrior Goddess) is an annual celebration which takes place during the first ten days of the clear fortnight of the month of Asoj (September–October). It is a combination of family celebration, a gathering of the bloodline and/or village, and a royal ceremony, so that the practices associated with each collective intertwine at different levels. The ten days of the ritual are divided into a preliminary phase lasting seven days dedicated to the worship of the Goddess and the reading of her Celebration, followed by two days of sacrifices, first of goats, in private houses and clan temples, and then buffaloes, which take place in ancient palaces and the great temples dedicated to the Goddess. The tenth day closes the rite, and is an occasion for the renewal of positions of power and hierarchical relationships, as a prelude to the final warlike rejoicings.

The reclusion of the first days

From its very beginning, the ritual suspends the ordinary passage of time. Throughout the country, all activities grind to a halt, with schools, universities, administrations, banks and most businesses closing for the duration of the festivities. Even the farmers interrupt their work in the fields, the only time they do so all year. The days before the ritual trigger a vast migration within the country, marked by the departure of three million people from the Kathmandu Valley alone.2 All over Nepal people huddle together in crowded buses, hoping to get back to their villages in time. The rite is a symbol of prosperity and abundance, marked by the distribution of the Dasaĩ kharca, the equivalent of a thirteenth month of pay for civil servants and to a ‘New Year's bonus’ for private employees. It

This chapter describes challenges of proposing a different understanding of a well-known phenomenon, imitation (and its development in young children). The first challenge was to study imitation as a shared motor activity in a two-person perspective, instead of as a solitary tool for learning or forming mental images. A related challenge was to analyse imitation as a multifaceted phenomenon involving a hierarchy of mechanisms according to what, when, and how you imitate. This led to challenging the assumption that people with autism spectrum disorder cannot imitate and claiming, “Yes, they can!” Finally, hyperscanning two brains during synchronic imitation allows assessment of interbrain synchronization. From this an ultimate challenge emerges: to see imitation in its substitutive role as a multiplier of symbolic creations in a two-person generative mind. More generally, I explain how such a perspective builds on the philosophical framework of Henri Wallon that I encountered early in my career and that stood in opposition to the then-prevailing Piagetian paradigm.

I focus on how, for me, big questions such as, “How can we tell whether something is true?” were funneled by haphazard influences into specific interests. Classes on logic got me interested in the origins of concepts. Contact with Piaget’s theory of concept acquisition added a developmental dimension. Wondering about the meaning of words led to the problems of opaque contexts like belief reports. A brush with artificial intelligence made me focus on the distinction between implicit and explicit mental representations and consciousness. My thesis supervisor’s expertise in game theory led me to explore children’s perspective-taking. Work with Heinz Wimmer on the false belief task got me firmly entrenched in theory of mind research, focusing on simulation theory as its main opponent. And to get beyond documenting children’s flourishing achievements I turned to mental files theory to understand how perspectival thinking grows from our basic ability to think about objects.

Credit card processing relies deeply on technology, so it is no surprise that technological forces are responsible for some of the problems with opaque pricing in this market. Technology made modern credit card processing possible by speeding up the transactions and making transactions less expensive. But this same technology made pricing harder for merchants to understand and compare among different credit card processors. Academic scholarship has failed to address nontransparent pricing for merchant card processing, and laws in various countries are focused on interchange fees, not merchant fees. This chapter argues that legal academics should study credit card processing fees and that regulators should use Canadian laws as an example of how to foster transparency.

As a field of knowledge History is exceptionally interested in the particular and specific rather than the universal and general – it is primarily idiographic rather than nomothetic. It is also centrally concerned with change over time. These two characteristics make History fundamentally a storytelling discipline. Its findings are most often presented in narrative form. Of course, many books do not follow one narrative from cover to cover. But research findings are most often presented as stories – not as reports of particular key results (as, for example, in a scientific lab report) or as the results of statistical analysis. Nomothetic disciplines tend toward examining a relatively narrow set of features of multiple cases in order to create generalizing theories and establish laws of regularity that define what will happen under a given set of circumstances at any and all times and places. History instead usually aims to organize into a coherent interpretation many features of a single case, exploring in detail what happened at a particular time, in a particular place. It often also aims to give us a complex, multifactor causal explanation of why it happened as it did, but usually that causal explanation is embedded in the narrative.