The question of how should I live has special resonance in the Anthropocene, which threatens virtually everything we care about. This chapter answers this question by saying that I should live in a way that expresses my values, and that these values should be directed towards making the world better. In practice this means living car-free if possible, avoiding airplane travel, eating a plant-based diet, and having few, if any, children. In addition to living this way, we should try to change law and policy, and support individuals in their efforts to live in this way. Yet, no matter how much we may succeed, we will inevitably live with change and perhaps even disaster. These present threats to living a meaningful life, but they are also the elements from which meaning and joy must be forged.

How markets develop and change has been and continues to be a central theme in Market Studies. In this chapter I use theoretical ideas about change processes in general to elaborate on the markets as practice model and develop a conceptual vocabulary for analysing market change. Specifically, I combine three different theories of change (teleological, dialectical, and evolutionary) with findings from empirical studies of market change to identify six distinct, yet generic subprocesses of market change: market mimesis, market controversies, market management, market interferences, market change loops, and market development sequences. I elaborate on and illustrate each of these subprocesses and discuss how they interrelate to form ‘global’ market change processes.

The conclusion outlines continuity and change over the longue durée, whereby continuities outweigh changes.

Literary historians generally explain change by narrating it. Narrative history excels at identifying individual events, authors, and works that exemplify transformations of literary culture. On the other hand, narrative often struggles to represent continuous trends. Since numbers are designed to describe differences of magnitude, quantitative methods can trace a curve and give a more nuanced picture of gradual change. As quantitative methods have become more common in literary studies, it has become clear that many important aspects of literary history are in fact gradual processes extending over relatively long timelines. But there have also, certainly, been moments of rapid change – in some cases initiated by a single book or author. More crucially, readers seem to want the kind of meaning produced by narration. Thus, quantitative methods are never likely to entirely replace a periodized narrative; they merely provide an alternative mode of description.

Mersea Island is a small island off the coast of north-east Essex, UK, which has a rich history of contact, ranging from Viking and Roman settlements to more modern influxes of evacuees and military personnel during both World Wars. The island itself also has a history of isolation, due to its only access road being cut off regularly by lunar tides. However, this isolation has been challenged over more recent years by various building projects, resulting in a large influx of non-islanders moving and settling on the island. This overview will present a range of phonological features across both the consonantal and vocalic systems of Mersea Island English as evidence from both older and younger Islanders to highlight traditional features and the direction of change within the community as a whole. A selection of morphosyntactic features which highlight more salient structures of Mersea Island English is then presented before a discussion of how we may wish to evaluate paths of change moving forward in relation to both socio-cultural and linguistic factors.

This chapter presents on overview of present-day Welsh English(es) with a focus on regional variation and diachronic developments over the past fifty years. The Anglicisation of Wales has progressed in several phases over the centuries, which is why the accents and dialects of English in Wales are regionally distinctive, the Welsh language and neighbouring English English dialects impacting them to different degrees. The chapter takes the Survey of Anglo-Welsh dialects (Parry 1999) as a starting point and uses corpus and survey data compiled in the twenty-first century as well as recent research publications, thereby examining the main trends of development in the different domains of English. Phonological variation and change are described across a broad North–South continuum, whereas in morphosyntax the greatest differences can be found between the predominantly English-speaking Southeast and the bilingual, historically Welsh-dominant North and West Wales. In regional lexicon, sociolinguistically and nationally salient items are relatively few, originating from both Welsh and English. Finally, the chapter draws attention to recent research, and highlights some caveats and future directions for the study of English in Wales.

This chapter responds to the questions raised in Chapter 1. It reiterates the need for variationist sociolinguistic analysis of heritage languages to increase our understanding of linguistic structures, variation, and change in multilingual contexts. Each variable is considered through the lens of the profiles corresponding to different sources of change. This allows us to consider whether certain profiles are more common for certain types of variables and of language (types), and whether covariation is more prevalent among any subset of variables. We reiterate how these analyses, based on spontaneous speech in an ecologically valid environment, give a picture of heritage language speakers that contrasts with what we have learned from experimental/psycholinguistic studies, highlighting their stability and consistency with homeland varieties in most cases. Suggestions are made for how this approach can be extended to other under-documented, endangered, and smaller languages, along with discussion of benefits of the HLVC methodology to community members, educators and students, and the field of linguistics. The chapter concludes by reporting on students’ positive responses to engagement with the project.

Anthony Seldon introduces the concept of the Effect series, the key questions and the fourteen wasted years accusation. This Effect book will be the eighth in the long line of academic and historical analyses dating back over fifty years of history to 1970 – and it builds on the conclusions and methodology of previous works in the series. One of these, The Coalition Effect (Cambridge, 2015), encompassed five of the years in question – allowing reflections to be made on the authors’ arguments in that volume, and for the impact to be judged in a longer time frame of government.

Science and central, national political structures are the two greatest modern institutional forms of authority. They can sometimes align and sometimes clash. Science and technology policy has, in the UK, been seen since the twentieth century as an important lever to encourage innovation and ultimately economic growth. Some of the most challenging issues facing politicians depend, partly, on scientific understanding and advice. This chapter reviews and assesses the experience of policy-for-science and science-for-policy under the Coalition and Conservative administrations. It is a pattern of modified continuity and the articulation of the possibility of radical change. Ultimately both, in ways that will be described, were undermined by the tumultuous events of Brexit and Covid.

The NHS, the great survivor of the post-war consensus, faced a period of considerable uncertainty. This chapter will examine if, and how, the Conservatives have changed the NHS in the face of economic pressures, technological advances, demographic change, changing expectations and the pandemic. Any analysis of the health policy of a government is incomplete without examining the wider state of social care and its relation to healthcare policy.

How do children process language as they get older? Is there continuity in the functions assigned to specific structures? And what changes in their processing and their representations as they acquire more language? They appear to use bracketing (finding boundaries), reference (linking to meanings), and clustering (grouping units that belong together) as they analyze the speech stream and extract recurring units, word classes, and larger constructions. Comprehension precedes production. This allows children to monitor and repair production that doesn’t match the adult forms they have represented in memory. Children also track the frequency of types and tokens; they use types in setting up paradigms and identifying regular versus irregular forms. Amount of experience with language, (the diversity of settings) plus feedback and practice, also accounts for individual differences in the paths followed during acquisition. Ultimately, models of the process of acquisition need to incorporate all this to account for how acquisition takes place.

The constantly changing nature of digital technologies opens opportunities to improve established approaches and to seek out new approaches. And although these opportunities stem from new technologies, they are translated to action by innovative educators and leaders. Hence all educators need to be innovators.

This chapter begins by explaining why educators need to see themselves as learners and innovators. It then conceptualises the nature of change in education settings for the purpose of understanding how best to respond. After which, it explores a range of professional development and learning models, and then considers the nature of innovation. It provides insight and tips that you will be able use to enact your role as an innovator.

This book concludes by reiterating the importance of avoiding grand narratives in research on sustainable development in international law. While each chapter revolves around its unique theme, my adoption of TWAIL helped unite these separate parts to tell a single story on Africa’s intersection with sustainable development’s legal evolution, conceptualisation, and implementation. Even so, this book is more than just writing about sustainable development or Africa as it deeply explores how international law should evolve, going forward. Finally, I end this book by drawing on TWAIL’s hopeful agenda by foreshadowing my future research interests in re-reading the law and politics of ecological crises as everyday occurrences and not as episodic events in international law.

This chapter discusses the six standards of a good market theory. A good market theory must be able to explain how humanity can cooperate in the extended order based on division of labor. It must explain how the reputation mechanism works in promoting human cooperation. A good market theory should be a theory about how the economy develops and changes, not only a theory about how the market reaches equilibrium and stability. Entrepreneurship is the soul of the market economy. Without entrepreneurs, a true orderly market is not possible, and neither is true progress. A good market theory must be able to explain economic fluctuations and business cycles. Economic fluctuations and business cycles are related to entrepreneurial decisions and innovations. A good market theory should be of rights-priority (putting rights above interests) rather than utilitarian (putting interests above rights). In terms of all these standards, neoclassical economics is not a good theory of the market.

This full introduction compares geography today and in antiquity, and characterizes its place in modern Classical scholarship. It asks whether Greek geographical writings have been classified correctly, and offers new perspectives on the social context in which they were composed, emphasizing their grounding in lived experience. Concepts such as periplous are explained, but the use of ‘genre’ to account for the forms of prose writing that we possess is questioned. This leads to a discussion of the helpful notion of ‘common sense geography’. The characteristic topics covered by Greek geographers are surveyed, with a particular focus on change and instability. Discussion of techniques of distance measurement on land and at sea, the role of maps in antiquity, and ‘mental mapping’ is followed by a detailed survey of extant geographical writings and of geographical material within ancient philosophy, historiography, and poetry. I complete the chapter with a discussion of the texts selected for the volume, the fragile transmission process by which these mainly short or fragmentary texts have survived, the organization of the volume, and how the translation process has been managed.