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Since 1980s, institutional child sexual abuse has been ‘discovered’ as an internationally recognisable social problem. Public inquiries have become the most dominant mode of response to this, having been enacted throughout much of the western world. Driven by demands from victims/survivors for collective recognition, these have drawn on features of transitional justice as an important means of truth telling. While the role of survivors in precipitating the enactment of public inquiries has been well documented, less well understood is how social activism has been influenced in the aftermath of such inquiries. In this chapter, the authors explore a local phenomenon known as Loud Fence that arose in the Australian town of Ballarat as a case study to consider the relationship between activism and social change that can occur in the wake of official truth telling.

My encounter with ‘interculturality’ was partly occasioned by the fact of being born in Belgium at a period in time where growing up with multilinguality was a matter of normality and partly by then living and working in eight countries across all continents. Working in local communities and later in academic contexts sharpened my awareness about the importance of language in the transference of knowledge and interlinguistic exchanges of knowledges. Especially knowledges pertaining to the underlying ontological and epistemological differences and shadings of meanings and that require contextual understanding of these meanings are at the core of the chapter. The regular mistranslations occurring from social science texts originally written in other-than-English languages caused original meanings to get lost in translation. Some of the consequences of such mistranslations are examined, focussing on education and possible futures in our ‘pluriverse’, especially in the present epoch where global conversations are ever more important to address our predicaments, facing ecological disaster, extinction and the potential un-liveability for humans and so many other species of the earth. Including the non-human in our relational considerations for a possible future enlarges the need for new and interculturally understandable knowledge systems and the positivist and other epistemological inclinations in the dominant West will not make this any easier considering our rather sad record during the past four centuries.

A new database demonstrates that between 1600 and 1830, Parliament passed thousands of acts restructuring rights to real and equitable estates. These estate acts enabled individuals and families to sell, mortgage, lease, exchange, and improve land previously bound by landholding and inheritance laws. This essay provides a factual foundation for research on this important topic: the law and economics of property rights during the period preceding the Industrial Revolution. Tables present time-series, cross-sectional, and panel data that should serve as a foundation for empirical analysis. Preliminary analysis indicates ways in which this new evidence may shape our understanding of British economic and social history. The data demonstrate that Parliament facilitated the reallocation of resources to new and more productive uses by adapting property rights to modern economic conditions. Reallocation surged in the decades following the Glorious Revolution and was concentrated in areas undergoing urbanization and industrialization. The process was open to landowners of all classes, not just the privileged groups who sat in the Houses of Lords and Commons. Parliament's rhetoric about improving the realm appears to have been consistent with its actions concerning rights to land and resources.