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Precarity is at the heart of human experience. In every period of life, all people would seem to face some minimal types and levels of precarity simply in being alive and in having to navigate an ever-changing world. At the same time, precarity is particularistic: some kinds of precarity may be unique in different periods of life, and some people and groups have more of it, or more serious types, than others. To understand the sources and consequences of precarity in later life, it is important to understand the life course: how individuals’ past experiences affect later ones, and how social forces open and close opportunities and structure pathways through life. A life course perspective helps reveal where, when, how, and for whom precarity occurs, and what legacies it carries in the lives of individuals, families, and societies. The chapter covers 12 key lessons about how life course dynamics matter in creating, minimizing, or eliminating the precarity of ageing.

This chapter continues to treat Şaban Ali Düzgün’s work, exploring his take on human agency and moving from an abstract sense of communal responsibility towards more concrete and constructive Muslim responses to the trauma of Western colonialism. By highlighting his understanding of human agency, it explores Düzgün’s theological and conceptual toolbox, showing how he draws confidently on Enlightenment and classical Islamic resources to produce a holistic vision of the individual in positive relationship with God. Specifically, this chapter shows how Düzgün finesses conceptions of human knowledge and affirms human plurality—a plurality facilitated by divine unity that does not stand in antagonistic relationship to individual agency. For Düzgün, tawḥīd, or God’s utter oneness, stands in positive and open relation to an empowered individual piously conscious of her responsibility to society and those around her.

This chapter provides an overview of theoretical process models for the explanation of crime in developmental context. It introduces key propositions from leading developmental and life-course theories of offending, including the dual taxonomy of antisocial behavior, coercion theory, interactional theory, and age-graded theory of informal social control, and stresses the need for further elaboration of the role of human agency in criminal trajectories across the life span. The chapter also describes the core tenets of the relational developmental systems framework, which serves as a major metamodel that undergirds contemporary developmental science. It is argued that developmental science theories of intentional self-regulation across the life span hold great promise to enrich criminological theorizing on human agency.

Julieanna Preston and Jen Archer-Martin attempt to reveal the agential voices of the assemblages of human and nonhuman agents. Such are the human embodiment in the form of performance as yet another self-organising pile, an assemblage of events operating across scales of temporality, materiality and affectivity and bitumen, a vital and vibrant surface of our living. A language shift away from clichés and stereotypes resets a new ecology of human and nonhuman materiality at work. Impressively vivid, live instances, captured in words, describe the malleability of all agents entangled in the same ecology. Bitumen is introduced through a coagulated dialogue between a poetic and philosophical voice. The labourer is replaced with that of a caretaker, informed by an ethic of care. This call for care is woven as a secondary thread into the context as both a disruptive and a reparative act, much as the roadworker’s high-visibility tribal garbs both screams ‘Take care!’ and reassures ‘I’ll take care of it’.

Prior reviews of the criminal trajectory literature mostly excluded findings on the relation of criminal trajectory groups to later life outcomes, turning points, and desistance. To set the stage for the review of this literature, the chapter first draws on the broader literature to define key terms, such as desistance and turning points, and to describe influential theories of desistance from crime and empirical findings. It is argued that criminal trajectory research needs to better integrate with these independent strands of research to advance the understanding of desisting offender trajectory groups. The chapter also details how emerging, innovative methodological approaches for the examination of turning point effects can help strengthen future criminal trajectory research on these issues. Next, the findings of criminal trajectory studies on later life outcomes and desistance are reviewed. Future research needs are identified to move the field forward. Last, the chapter seeks to make the case for a programmatic agenda that ties criminal trajectory research to developmental science models of intentional self-regulation across the life span, such as tripartite Selection, Optimization, and Compensation theory from Paul Baltes, to help explore the role of human agency in the development of crime.

This chapter explores how findings from criminal trajectory research might be used to inform the development of policies and programs both within the criminal justice system (e.g., for assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation of offenders) and outside the criminal justice system (e.g., for early intervention and prevention). Although some scholars may be sceptical of the applied relevance of criminal trajectory research, given the controversies discussed in Chapter 3, we hold a more optimistic position. We argue that trajectory research has applied relevance if viewed broadly, from the developmental systems, developmental and life course criminology, and criminal career perspectives. When viewed from these frameworks, trajectory research reminds us that a person-centered, developmentally informed approach to working with individuals involved in the justice system, as well as young people at risk for contact with the justice system, yields positive outcomes. Understanding the developmental processes (e.g., role of developmental tasks and adaptive functioning), developmental risk factors, and later life outcomes for different trajectory groups may help identify areas to target for prevention, early intervention, treatment, and rehabilitation.

Building on the historical perspective of the previous chapter, this chapter begins by posing the basic questions ‘what is theory for?’. It argues that in the present case it is to situate the events under scrutiny within a hierarchy of more proximate and more general causes impinging on those events. Towards this end it first surveys a range of explanations that have been brought to bear on the post-2008 crisis, and then surveys a range more general theories of the long-term trajectory of capitalism. In both cases it suggests which theories and explanations are probably the most significant. It concludes by reflecting on the challenge of situating relatively small-scale ethnographic data within large historical explanations that seem to dwarf human agency.

This chapter explores what it means for al-Jāḥẓ’s readers to appreciate design according to the theories he presents in The Book of Living. The chapter does this by reverting to a consideration of al-Jāḥẓ’s dispute with the Addressee which was explored in Chapters 3 and 4. A translation of the debate that rounds off the Introduction to The Book of Living is provided, with commentary and analysis of the principal arguments involved. Chapter 6 unearths one of the fundamental features of the disagreement — the tendency of some Kalām Masters to debate the principal topics of theology by means of subjects which seem at first sight to have nothing to do with these topics. It emerges from this argument that the maligned Debate of the Dog and the Cock that so upset the Addressee and that dominates the first two volumes of The Book of Living was really a debate about human responsibility and capacity for action.

Animating an object (enhancing the power of something one already values or finding a thing one can connect to in such a way) requires patience, imagination, persistence, and commitment. This chapter employs everyday and ubiquitous things (instead of attachment to other places, pastimes, or exotic peoples) to invite readers to consider how value is created locally. Property commonly refers to things that are owned or can be possessed by individuals or groups of people. At the same time, any definition of property is easily challenged when cultural prejudices are transcended and things are thought of as extensions of the self. This book attempts to demonstrate how different views of property are dependent on the diverse ways cultures separate people from things. In many societies the distinction between people and things is not hard and fast. To embrace other ways of understanding property it is necessary to experiment with various techniques for relating to objects.

The enchanted and prosperity forms of Pentecostalism often overlap and have much in common, although the possible variety is considerable. Many scholars claim that Pentecostalism is a force for development and modernity in Africa. This chapter challenges that view, arguing that to the extent that a church understands spirits as principal causes it diminishes human agency, undermines social capital by encouraging fear and distrust, and militates against the scientific rationality that underpins the modern world. The faith gospel or gospel of prosperity is not a new form of Weber’s Protestant Ethic, and to the extent that a Pentecostal church preaches prophetic wealth it perpetuates Big Man Syndrome, one of the blights of Africa.