Research on life stories has a short history but has emerged as a thriving field. While several key papers have spurred research (e.g., McAdams, 1985; Pasupathi, 2001) from a philosophy of science perspective, it is interesting how an individual paper helps a field to flourish. We traced the impact of one early theoretical paper, Habermas and Bluck (2000), using structural topic modeling. Grounded in classic lifespan theory (Baltes et al., 1998), this article bridged the gap between telling individual memories in childhood and narrating life stories in adulthood. The authors made the first formal argument for the emergence of the life story in adolescence. Since publication, the article has provided a reference for the study of life stories (> 2,000 citations; APA PsycNet, 2022) for authors in over forty countries. Structural topic modeling uses an unsupervised learning algorithm sensitive to temporal context. It was applied to the abstracts text of all articles ever citing Habermas and Bluck (2000). Modeling identified nine topic areas, showing their citation fluctuation. We report these historic trends, providing a lens for examining the evolution of the field of life stories over time.

Chapter 2 interrogates the development schemes between Ghana and the Soviet Union – notably the Cotton Textile Factory and the Soviet Geological Survey Team. These engagements were supposed to embody Ghana’s new postcolonial socialist modernity and highlight the benefits, opportunities, and possibilities of Soviet partnership. It demonstrates how pro-Soviet and Eastern bloc stories in the Ghanaian press were not simply intended to offer hagiographic praise or to support Nkrumah’s commitment to geopolitical nonalignment. Instead, they were part of a concentrated movement to dismantle and deconstruct the myth of Western scientific and cultural superiority and anti-Soviet bias, which were introduced and reinforced by Western colonial education and rule. In addition, Chapter 2 focuses on the relationships, expertise, livelihoods, and contestations of the technicians, bureaucrats, and local Ghanaian actors who were essential to overseeing the actual success of Ghana-Soviet relations in tangible ways for the Ghanaian people. It demonstrates how everyday Ghanaians employed Ghana–Soviet spaces to demand rights and protections against ethnic-discrimination and favoritism, and to make citizenship claims.

Whereas political and intellectual debates about the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights have received considerable scholarly attention, the intellectual history of international economic and social human rights in the 1950s remains an understudied topic. This chapter investigates this history, zooming in upon Ralph Bunche, Gunnar Myrdal, and Moses Moskowitz, and mapping their main arguments in favor of economic and social human rights. Within the domineering horizon of the global Cold War, they argued in favor of internationalizing economic and social human rights, even if their chances of success, admittedly, looked very slim. It was a human rights advocacy that included a criticism of material inequality. This advocacy flowed from several actors in various parts of the UN – from Bunche’s and Myrdal’s UN leadership positions preoccupied, respectively, with political conflicts and decolonization and economic development, to Moskowitz representing the Jewish minority at the UN and dedicated solely to human rights advocacy. Little noted in the scholarly literature, economic, and social human rights had some degree of salience within the burgeoning discourses on development too.

This chapter analyzes different methodologies for using the history of international development and economic growth to study US foreign relations. Early efforts to historicize development, driven largely by the scholarship of anthropologists, political theorists, and historical sociologists, focused on the intellectual origins and discursive effects of development and growth discourse. I show how, over the past two decades, historians have expanded upon this work in multiple ways. They have used governmental and nonstate archival collections to analyze the intellectual and political origins of ideas about development and growth in the United States. They have used documents in foreign languages from across the world to analyze how those receiving development assistance alternately resisted, challenged, accepted, adapted, and integrated US foreign aid into their domestic state-building and development initiatives. Historians have likewise integrated analytic frameworks from other subfields and disciplines – such as environmental history, science and technology studies (STS), and the history of economic thought – to assess the short- and long-term legacies of development initiatives. The chapter explores these approaches to analyzing development and growth as entry points to study how, why, and to what ends the United States exercised power in myriad ways across the world.

How we create believable characters. Resisting the urge to decide exactly who your character is before you know who your story needs them to be. The interdependence of character and plot and the emotional journey of the character. Moving beyond ‘show; don’t tell’: the interaction between characters allows the reader to get to know characters by observation rather than instruction. Managing minor characters. Conflict, consistency and contradiction all have a part to play in plausible characterisation. Characters come from you but they’re not you: the importance of freeing ourselves as writers from ourselves as people.

A thorough and detailed understanding of normal development in childhood provides a basis upon which we can build knowledge of children’s mental health difficulties. Development refers to expected patterns of change over time, beginning at conception and continuing throughout the lifespan. It is a lifelong process and encompasses different domains, including the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive.

Is the way my child plays with others suggestive of Autism? Could his bad dreams indicate anxiety? Does the fact she can’t sit through a whole film mean she has ADHD? Only with an in-depth knowledge of what is developmentally ‘normal’, can we begin to elicit whether behaviours that deviate from these norms might indicate disorder. This is the basis of the developmental psychopathology that underpins the practice of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. What is considered ‘normal’ development involves a complex and continuous interplay between genetic and environmental (including sociocultural) factors. Despite some variation, there is a consistency and reliability of functioning in children that remains steadfast from generation to generation.

In this chapter we will consider areas including the milestones of development in early childhood; attachment theory, temperament and personality; theories of emotional, cognitive and social development; and development in adolescence.

Chapter 3 examines the evolution of caste and democracy.In doing so, it focuses on three aspects – the relationship between caste and electoral politics, the trajectory of caste-based reservations (affirmative action), and the link between development indicators and caste in the contemporary period. Though caste mobilization has indeed pluralized representative politics in India, substantial economic and social gains by the lower castes have been limited.

Following from the overview of regional diversity in the previous chapter, Chapter 6 discusses economic development and political change in four Indian states in turn: Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Punjab.

This chapter will critically assess the role and the impact of corporate philanthropy in the UN development sector, with a specific focus on the activities of the UN Development Program (UNDP) as one of the most active UN bodies when it comes to private sector collaborations. In doing so, this contribution will first provide an overview of the evolution of corporate philanthropy in the UN system. This will be followed by exploration of different forms of corporate funding at the UN, including direct contributions to the organization; indirect contributions through the establishment of a charitable foundation; and public–private partnerships. The chapter will conclude with an assessment of the mechanisms that were put in place by the UN as a whole and the UNDP in particular to mitigate the reputational risks associated with the business sector cooperation.

The Nonet for Winds and Strings follows a four-movement “sonata cycle” design that had become standard in the Classical chamber music tradition by the 1840s: A sonata-form first movement in a fast tempo is followed by a slow movement and an upbeat Scherzo, then a sonata-form finale. Farrenc’s sonata forms demonstrate the influence of her teacher Anton Reicha, whose treatises provide a guide to the informed study of her works. Farrenc’s innovations include continuous development in these movements and colorful harmonic narratives that deviate from later “textbook” explanations of form. Her use of contrapuntal writing, learned variation techniques, and references to familiar pieces from the wind chamber repertoire (Septets by Beethoven and Hummel) demonstrate her compositional mastery. Throughout the Nonet, she writes expertly for the instruments and incorporates playful dialogue and brilliant-style writing for all nine players in every movement. The Nonet became her most popular work, in part, because it balances virtuosity with craftsmanship, and the fun interactions between friends within the ensemble create an atmosphere of learned play for listeners and performers alike.

The book concludes in Chapter 8 with a summary of the major theoretical and empirical findings on the clean energy regime complex’s emergence and effectiveness across Indonesia and the Philippines, and a discussion of the theory’s broader generalizability, further research opportunities, and policy implications and recommendations for fostering energy transitions in a world of complex governance.

Human facial movements transmit a wealth of dynamic signals that provide crucial information about people’s emotional states. The temporal dynamics of facial expressions of emotion are optimised to hierarchically transmit biologically rooted and socially adaptive signals over time. We begin this chapter by formally defining these signals and by offering an overview of recent advances in research methods that improving our understanding of them. We then describe how the ability to decode such biologically relevant social signals emerges early in life and evolves throughout adolescence. Next, we discuss how experience, culture, and individual differences shape the decoding of facial expressions of emotion, before moving towards differences in processing static and dynamic facial expressions of emotion. Finally, we elaborate on the use of more ecologically valid experimental designs, cross-cultural studies, and understanding the roots of individual differences in facial expression processing to improve future knowledge in the field.

When thinking about emotional expressions, most would probably envision facial expressions (e.g., smiling, scowling) or vocalizations (e.g., crying, laughter). Here we focus on the emotional postures and movements of the body – an important, but fairly understudied, signal for emotion perception. During emotional episodes, humans often position and move their bodies in consistent ways that may (or may not) signal their underlying feelings and future actions. We briefly review the historical antecedents of this literature, as well as current knowledge on the neural processing, developmental trajectory, and cultural differences in the emotional perception of body language. We continue by examining the role of the body as a contextualizing agent for disambiguating facial expressions, as well as their inverse relationship – from faces to bodies. Future directions and speculations about how this emerging field may evolve are discussed.

Chapter 5 provides an overview of the development of the International Council on Archives and its role mediating custodial disputes over colonial archives. This chapter, admittedly, interrupts the book’s narrative. Chronologically, it covers the late 1940s through the 1970s and largely examines the council’s main conferences during the period in order to trace the emergence of the notion of the “migrated archives” and debates over their custody. Like the role of international organizations themselves, this chapter is significant but somewhat detached from the realm of everyday activity surrounding Kenya’s “migrated archives.” However, as is demonstrated by the chapter, it provided important resources with which former colonies advocated the return of political documents as a matter of postcolonial sovereignty. These advocacy efforts were stalled by the reconfiguration of imperial hegemony upon which the International Council on Archives was based.