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This chapter bridges cultural and political approaches to determine why elite support for movement claims may be inconsistent across the policy process. I analyze this question empirically through 16 in-depth interviews with government officials in two regions of Peru: Arequipa and Cusco. Regional officials appraised feminist advocacy in two opposing ways. First, they valued feminist advocates’ contributions to policy processes, which enabled them to advance reproductive rights and gender equity initiatives. They also perceived women as a group deserving of these initiatives and framed gender policies in terms of rights and equality. Second, they were critical of feminist advocates’ weaknesses in mobilizing support, which hindered the officials’ own ability to advance reproductive rights and gender equity initiatives. Furthermore, regional officials understood reproductive rights and gender equality to be thwarted by the State’s economic instrumentalism and by Catholic Church’s ultra-conservatism. This research shows how a cultural approach to policy elites’ support for movement claims goes beyond their individual attitudes and calculations to capture their perceptions, frames, and understandings tied to the broader cultural context. This wider conceptualization in turn helps clarify inconsistencies in policy elites’ support for movement claims across the policy process.

This chapter narratively examines the value of scholarship grants to seven underrepresented science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students who attended the same research comprehensive university. The scholarships that the students in our convenience sample received were awarded by six National Science Foundation grant programs in the United States. A literature review tracing the effects of scholarships, instrumentalism, and the core purpose of education sets the context for this narrative investigation. The four pillars comprising the theoretical framework are value, experience, story, and identity. The seven stories of impact that emerged from the narrative inquiry reveal multiperspectival insights into the value of scholarships to students' lives, careers, and selves. Moreover, we also explore how scholarship recipients established their sense of value in autonomous and committed ways while promoting their personal welfare and seeking the common good of others. All of these important considerations contribute to the national and international literature relating to diversity, higher education, STEM careers, and the power of scholarship grants to transcend instrumentalism privileging workforce demands.

In 1982 my book Beyond Positivism: Economic Methodology in the Twentieth Century was published. At the 2017 History of Economics Society meeting, a session was held to mark the 35th anniversary of that event. Papers by Wade Hands, Kevin Hoover, Tony Lawson, and the trio Peter Boettke, Solomon Stein, and Virgil Storr were prepared. In this paper, I respond by reflecting on how I came to write Beyond Positivism and on the state of the field of economic methodology at the time, and then commenting briefly on each of the papers noted above.

This chapter addresses commentary about constitutional law and politics in this current era of a conservative domination of the judiciary.¹ Its primary concern is the different ways in which a working majority on the Court and its judiciary of appointees by Presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush might be conservative,² and the different ways in which domination might take place.³ The frame for the chapter is what I call an “indifference thesis” for analyzing constitutional law and politics. Stated boldly, the thesis is that there should be a commentary distinguished by an interpretive attitude that distrusts, and intentionally resists, analysis based on preconceived notions about the strengths and weaknesses of any constitutional law and politics, be it conservative or left-liberal.⁴ Perhaps, to many readers, an indifference thesis for commentary appears methodologically odd, if not politically perverse. Therefore, the first order of business is to try to make the thesis less odd and perverse by explaining its provenance and attributes.⁵

Behavioral economics poses a challenge for the welfare evaluation of choices, particularly those that involve risk. It demands that we recognize that the descriptive account of behavior toward those choices might not be the ones we were all taught, and still teach, and that subjective risk perceptions might not accord with expert assessments of probabilities. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the need to jettison naive notions of revealed preferences, according to which every choice by a subject expresses her objective function, as behavioral evidence forces us to confront pervasive inconsistencies and noise in a typical individual’s choice data. A principled account of errant choice must be built into models used for identification and estimation. These challenges demand close attention to the methodological claims often used to justify policy interventions. They also require, we argue, closer attention by economists to relevant contributions from cognitive science. We propose that a quantitative application of the “intentional stance” of Dennett provides a coherent, attractive and general approach to behavioral welfare economics.

Dewey, through his contributions to pragmatism (America’s sole original philosophy), has long been considered relative to symbolic interactionism (SI), which emerged from that philosophy. His impact on SI, while falling short of those of Mead and Cooley, has mainly come from (and has been limited to) concepts and insights developed in Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (1922/1957) and his earlier, seminal, article, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” published in 1896 during his tenure at the University of Chicago (1894–1904). SI, however, has wrongly ignored Dewey’s political theory, especially his concept of domination. In order to rectify this inattention, I summarize the social and historical contexts that motivated Dewey’s turn toward domination; outline the radical nature of his political theory; illustrate similarities of his political theory with Marx’s; expatiate on his concept of domination, including his argument for social practices to reduce surplus domination; and explicate the theoretical and political implications of taking his political theory seriously.

This chapter explores what video games can teach us in light of the ongoing sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet, allegedly caused by global warming and the over-consumption of vital resources. Games made and played by nonhuman actors can shed light on the situatedness and partiality of our knowledge regarding the boundaries that separate and differentiate human and nonhuman, interactivity and passivity, entertainment and boredom, and life and death. Nonhuman games help us to articulate the space and time in-between these dualisms and have the potential to re-route gaming (and game studies) from false myths of agency, interactivity, and instrumentalism, and the masculinism inherent in these notions. Nonhuman games are companions for earthly survival, and as such they can be taken as useful references when considering a more ethical approach to the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene. The chapter investigates notions of posthumanism, interpassivity, and contemporary critiques of the early assumptions of game studies on the agency of human players. It looks at video games that play by themselves, idle and incremental games, and the emergence of nonplaying characters in ludic and open-world simulations. It explores forms of automatic play and the use of bots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in online role-playing games, procedurally generated virtual environments, and games that far exceed the lifespan of their players.