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There is abundant scholarship on the role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in promoting community and social development in the low-income countries in general, and Zambia in particular. However, there is limited scholarship on the role of CSOs in higher education institutions (HEIs), and vice versa, and how the two have become key partners in corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Historically, CSOs were preoccupied with community work partly because of their mandate to help vulnerable people access resources for meeting basic needs, and at times actual provision of these resources. Lately however, these organizations have taken keen interest in generating learning materials and assistance in designing curricula for some HEIs. This has been partly because of their practical experiences in policy and intervention implementation among other issues which position them well to inform curriculum development.

HEIs too, have over time, changed their approach to pedagogical issues from perceiving themselves as the sole generators of knowledge to appreciating partnerships and reflecting on their relationship and contribution to society. The focus of this chapter is on analyzing the relationship between CSOs and HEIs and how these complement each other in CSR.

Trans students at New College of Florida provide overwhelmingly positive assessments of their campus culture as related to issues of gender identity, a stark contrast to existing literature on gender-nonconforming collegians. This chapter examines the interactional processes that create a context supportive of all genders – the ways students are expected to act toward one another and how they hold each other accountable to these norms. I draw on interviews with 24 students with diverse identities to argue: (1) there is a trans-inclusive understanding of gender that is dominant on campus, (2) the students have norms that reflect the inclusive understanding and provide direction for when and how gender should enter interactions, and (3) swift responses to breaches of interactional norms serve to support gender-nonconforming students and affirm the identity of the community as unwilling to tolerate transphobia. This analysis demonstrates an alternative cultural context, one in which community members are held not to conventional expectations associated with assumed sex category, but to an understanding of gender that does not take identity for granted. In so doing, it highlights how shifts in shared understanding can create more inclusive interactional practices. Additionally, the focus on the meaning underlying social processes suggests that shifts in how people think about gender could similarly lead to alteration of organizational structures that would help trans students thrive.

Legislative action was historically the means by which U.S. states abolished capital punishment, but such action ceased for decades following the Supreme Court's 1976 Gregg decision that reaffirmed the constitutionality of the death penalty. Despite the fact that several legislatures have considered abolition bills in the modern era, only three states successfully enacted such legislation. It is my purpose in this study to analyze why states are currently struggling to pass abolition legislation and to determine which factors contribute to success. I conduct a comparative, qualitative case study of New Jersey, the first state to legislatively abolish since 1976, and Maryland, a similar state whose abolition effort recently failed. I analyze the content of legislators’ debates about the abolition bills in committee and on the legislature floor, as well as news coverage of the abolition efforts in each state's largest newspapers. I reach two primary conclusions. First, an abolition bill is more likely to be passed by Democrats than Republicans, but unified Democratic control of the government is not a sufficient condition for abolition. Second, arguments about the risk of wrongful executions and the deleterious collateral consequences of the death penalty process on the family members of murder victims are powerful sources of political support for abolition, especially where doubts about the deterrent effect of the death penalty are widespread. This study reaffirms the central importance of the innocence frame in the modern death penalty debate, and it presents the first scholarly analysis of the collateral consequences frame. These findings may help activists in the abolition movement more effectively frame their arguments to appeal to legislators.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

The current security trade settlement life cycle presents several inefficiencies derived from intermediaries involved in the transaction between buyers and sellers. This chapter examines distributed ledger technology (DLT), the underlying technology of all blockchain applications, including trade settlements. It also reviews the implications of using blockchain in trade settlements for cryptoassets. Emerging blockchain technology provides investors, exchanges, regulators, and countless potential intermediaries with the most up-to-date technology with the highest efficiency, transparency, credibility, and automation enabled by smart contracts. Smart contracts allow an ecosystem to manage the process of trade settlements starting from execution to clearing and then settlement. These contracts reduce reconciliation and recordkeeping costs and streamline repetitive processes present in today’s trade settlement system. The chapter highlights the benefits of implementing DLT in financial markets globally in all trading aspects, including cryptoassets.

This chapter asks: How do COVID-19 conspiracy theories about Bill Gates work? In order to provide an answer, it analyses social media artefacts that make conspiratorial claims about Bill Gates such as the ones that he manufactured the virus, makes money from COVID-19 vaccines, plans to dominate the world and erect a dictatorship, and implants surveillance microchips into humans via COVID-19 vaccinations. The focus is on artefacts that have massively spread and have reached high visibility on social media and the Internet. A critical discourse analysis was conducted of this material.

The findings show that and how COVID-19 conspiracy theories construct the existence of a secret elite that dominates the world, use ideological strategies such as the personalisation of domination, the friend/enemy scheme, rational irrationality and logical determinism. COVID-19 conspiracy theories are a necrophilic ideology, an ideology of death that advances death and increases the number of deaths. This pandemic ideology tries to convince humans that vaccines are harmful and that COVID-19 is a hoax, whereby human misery is advanced. COVID-19 conspiracy theories are to a large degree a right-wing ideology.