Chapter 5 explores the logic of UN mediation as an ‘art’, which emphasises the fluid, contingent nature of mediation and prioritises relationships with negotiating parties. This chapter examines two core practices: emotional labour and discretion. The first section describes how UN mediators engage in emotional regulation to facilitate negotiations. The creation of emotional ties relies upon empathy and bonding in informal settings, which creates masculinised spaces that women have trouble accessing. In this case, the practice of empathy can be exclusionary. The second section examines how discretion – the choices mediators make about how to implement their mandates – is a key practice in UN mediation. How a mediator exercises their discretion is tied to their sense of political judgement. As such, using discretion unwisely can affect others' perceptions of a UN mediator's judgement. As WPS, especially the participation of local women, is often framed as showing partiality to one party over others, mediators are reluctant to use their discretion to advance the WPS Agenda. Instead, it is framed as a risk to the mediator's reputation for good political judgement and impartiality.

Chapter 4 examines how the logic of UN mediation as a science produces and disseminates technical knowledge. It focuses on the practices of conflict analysis and the circulation of ‘best practices’ in implementing the WPS Agenda in Syria and Yemen. The beginning sections argue that conflict analysis produces instrumental knowledge about conflict by fixing actors and issues in a schema that is legible to interveners. It emerges from colonial schemes of knowledge production that diagnose the local sphere as lacking in capacity. As such, ‘gender-sensitive conflict analysis’ – a common tool for implementing the WPS Agenda in UN mediation – is subject to many of the same problems. The remainder of the chapter analyses the UN's institutional learning practices, arguing that its ‘best practice’ case studies of WPS in mediation depoliticise knowledge about gender, position the UN as the protagonist of women’s participation by erasing its own resistance to WPS, and diminish local women’s agency. Crucially, these best practice cases also elide ‘participation’ with ‘consultation’, undermining the WPS Agenda’s call for the meaningful participation of local women in UN mediation.

Making collections of conversational/interactional phenomena is a cornerstone of CA’s methodology. Our aim in CA research is to identify the practices through which speakers of a natural language conduct action in inter-action, the practices that enable speakers to engage in conduct that is meaningful to one another (the accountability-as-intelligibility of social conduct). The practices for talk-in-interaction are recurrent phenomena; they are to be found in recurrent patterns of talk – in recurrent sequential positions or environments, in recurrent sequence patterns, and in recurrent features of turn design such as linguistic format including morphosyntactic constructions. Whilst recurrence may not by itself be a sufficient condition for determining that an object or pattern constitutes a practice, it is a necessary condition. It is necessary to show that an object, pattern etc. works in a particular way systematically – and ‘systematically’ requires recurrence. Thus, the identification, the discovery or uncovering of practices in talk-in-interaction rests on building collections of cases of a phenomenon in order to find whether it is systematically associated with some recurrent pattern. In this chapter I describe the history of one such collection assembled by Gail Jefferson, a collection of apologies that served as the basis for several analyses and publications.

One of the ways in which artificial intelligence can be a useful tool in the scientific study of religion is in developing a computational model of how the human mind is deployed in spiritual practices. It is a helpful first step to develop a precise cognitive model using a well-specified cognitive architecture. So far, the most promising architecture for this purpose is the Interacting Cognitive Subsystems of Philip Barnard, which distinguishes between two modes of central cognition: intuitive and conceptual. Cognitive modelling of practices such as mindfulness and the Jesus Prayer involves a shift in central cognition from the latter to the former, though that is achieved in slightly different ways in different spiritual practices. The strategy here is to develop modelling at a purely cognitive level before attempting full computational implementation. There are also neuropsychological models of spiritual practices which could be developed into computational models.

This and the following chapters offer substantive applications of a relational/systemic understanding of international systems. This chapter looks at how international actors are differently placed (and shaped) by their authority, status, and roles; by the principles, norms, and rules that govern their actions; and by the institutions and practices in which they participate. The chapter offers three illustrations. First, I suggest that international systems can profitably be understood as having constitutional structures composed of principles and practices of international legitimacy, principles and practices of domestic legitimacy, foundational functional practices, and hegemonic cultural values. Second, I look at the great variety of types of security systems, including (various types of) systems organized around unit autonomy, systems of hierarchical subordination, and transnational security communities. Finally, I look at the transformation of post-World War II international society through norm-driven processes that abolished aggressive territorial war and overseas colonial empires.

The large-scale implementation of remote work appears as a fundamental shift into the traditional understanding of the relationship between time and work. Drawing on sociomateriality literature and more especially on the concept of temporal structuring, this chapter suggests that remote workers ‘work the time’ by different practices, to (re)create adequate temporalities to work. The analysis results from an exploratory qualitative study conducted between May 2020 and April 2021 in Montreal with 17 remote workers who were already working remotely before the Covid-19 pandemic. It gives an overview of the temporal practices of remote workers, who are mainly blocking time (i), navigating between temporalities (ii) ritualizing them (iii) or an interwoven of all of them to try to create time to work (and thus, for non-work as well). It appears that remote workers work the time to be flexible. However, they still do it in the clock time of organizational life. They also experiment with temporal tensions, which leads them to exercise a fourth practice that is indispensable to the other three, that of labeling times.

This chapter proposes a way of thinking about virtue theory that draws from Aristotle and Alasdair MacIntyre, but also moves beyond them. The central question is what a virtue theory might look like which is not universalistic, but rather culturally inclusive, pragmatic, and situational. A theme throughout is the importance of thinking about education as the process through which virtues are formed, sustained, and improved over time.

This chapter explores the concept of global policymaking from a variety of angles. We begin by reviewing the development of global policymaking as a distinct field of research. We then define the concept of global policy as world-spanning courses of action over issues of common concern, and tease out its methodological and epistemological implications. The third part contrasts two approaches to global policymaking – that of global public goods, inherited from economics, and that of bricolage, which takes its cue from sociology and anthropology. We side in favor of the latter, as we believe that it better captures the processual and political nature of global governance. We emphasize the “making of” global policy and global governance in order to answer a fundamental question: How are world-spanning collective courses of action over issues of common concern actually generated? By paying closer attention to political processes, we show that the key challenges of global governance do not primarily consist in the search for more efficient solutions to technical problems.

The best way to grasp the politics of global governance is by understanding the making of global policies, that is, global policymaking. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which conceives of this process as the rational production of global public goods, we emphasize the patchwork nature of global policymaking. Our perspective analyzes the bricolage of universal values and political practices that structure global governance. This perspective not only builds on but also transcends existing literature studies on regime complexes and fragmentation, orchestration, informal governance, and experimentation, as well as legitimation and contestation. The United Nations forms a great empirical site for the study of global policymaking, sitting at the apex of major international dynamics. Our three case studies – the making of the Sustainable Development Goals, of the Human Rights Council, and of the Protection of Civilians doctrine – span the key subfields of development, human rights, and security.

Chapter 4 examines the historical trends of how the three health issues of obesity, opioid use disorder, and depression in older adults have increased in prevalence over the last several decades. The chapter describes the current guidelines and practices for how health care is delivered for these patient populations and draws from perspectives and stories from health care settings.