Becoming a subject to oneself is a challenge. To make the task somewhat more meaningful, I have presented a narrative that builds on experiences that are likely to resonate with other scholars from the Global South. In the academic journey from separation to synthesis, I have had the good fortune of collaborating with scientists from young students to renowned scholars, to whom I owe immense gratitude. I chose to modify the given metaphor of a pillar to better suit my orientation both to my inner self and to the outside world.

Readers are presented with achievable reforms of laws and policies discussed in earlier chapters.

This chapter presents themes that appear in earlier chapters and makes the case for legal reform to create an agricultural framework that represents the “real” west, rather than John Dutton’s west.

Social justice, human rights, and equality are norms based on the Holy Qur’an’s perspective. They are profoundly rooted in Islam’s teachings and promote the construction of a strong, interdependent, and healthy community. It emphasizes practicing them not only on Muslims but on every human being regardless of their religion or beliefs. The superiority of any individual is defined strictly on their piety and righteousness and not on skin color, race, biological sex, nationality, or social position. Allah has required justice to be an essential part of the behavior of every Muslim covering all aspects of life as well as all people.

This chapter focuses on the barriers that LGBTIQ people continue to experience across a range of sectors, including the workplace, schools, healthcare and social care provision, and counselling and psychological services. Whilst some positive changes have occurred, this chapter highlights the ongoing (and renewed) resistance to the inclusion of LGBTIQ people. An overview of research on resistance to the inclusion of LGBTIQ people within foster care services and sports and resistance to the inclusion of certain LGBTIQ people (e.g., LGBTIQ refugees, disabled LGBTIQ people) within services is also provided. The chapter highlights the importance of both equity and liberatory practices in the removal of barriers to inclusion.

This chapter summarizes lessons learned across the exemplary models presented in this book, providing a path forward in furthering prevention science and in charting a course for future directions in the specialty of prevention. A blueprint is offered for training, interdisciplinary community collaborations, program evaluation, and dissemination of evidence. Concrete steps that are necessary to foster a prevention mindset in the field of mental health are outlined. The first step is generating the “will” to reorient our psychological practice, policies, and research to a prevention focus. A second step is to position the training environment to be supportive of and to value prevention, health promotion, and social justice. A third step is to orient our healthcare systems and funding resources to include support for and to engage in prevention work. It is clear that prevention has utility in the current mental health landscape. A genuine prevention outlook is necessary to move from a reactionary approach based on illness to a proactive approach rooted in fostering strengths and wellness and aimed at averting and reducing human suffering. Ultimately, readers are invited to be leaders in translating the vision presented in this book into intentional prevention practice, research, and training.

An orientation to prevention is critical to abate the existing mental health crisis, with one in five US adults presently having a mental illness. The unmet need for mental health services is grounded in tenacious health, social, racial, and economic disparities, exacerbated by the pandemics of COVID-19 and racism. These realities present an unremitting threat to people’s lives, their physical welfare, and their psychological and social well-being. Despite a dearth of prevention training, psychologists and counselors may be best positioned to engage in prevention work. As professionals, we often feel powerless to prevent human suffering, and yet, we yearn, deep in our hearts, for a way to intervene earlier so as to prevent pain in our communities, intuitively aware that a way exists to make people’s lives easier and our work more impactful. This chapter introduces the approach of the book, which is to provide mental health professionals with the knowledge, resources, and tools to engage in “before-the-fact” intervention, to apply an ounce of prevention to the work we do, and to utilize a strength-based, culturally focused framework. In addition, this chapter provides a rationale and definition of prevention and an overview of the model prevention programs presented in this book.

Thriving families and friendships are close interpersonal relationships with significant impact on experiences of mattering and well-being across the lifespan. This chapter explores the social ecology of thriving through interpersonal relationships with family and friends. The focus is on how relationships are shaped by their types of constellations as well as interdependent processual, contextual, and political drivers. The chapter concludes that valuing families and friends as the basic units of thriving ultimately might have ripple effects on intergenerational solidarity and promote social cohesion and reciprocal support in the wider society.

Art music in Australia has always reflected the dominant social and cultural values of its time. As with all forms of art, the context of music making significantly influences the evolution of musical practice, from concept and narrative through to techniques and performance. In the twenty-first century, the zeitgeist of ‘our time and place’ is dominated by two global issues: the climate crisis and social justice. Both issues are strongly influencing the evolution of art music in Australia, shaping new directions in creative practice, informing conceptual frameworks, and guiding curatorial and collaborative approaches to programming and mentorship. This chapter will focus on how these issues are influencing curatorial and creative practices in Australian art music today, using works, projects and programs from the 2010s and early 2020s as examples.

The All-Affected Principle (AAP) expresses a basic intuition about what democracy is good for: I should want to have a say in decisions that significantly affect my life. Here I sketch an approach to the AAP that responds to this normative ideal, as well as to the issues of organizing these ideals into institutions and practices beyond state-based constituencies. First, I interpret the AAP a normative specification of social justice as it relates to democratic inclusion. Second, I comment on the most three common objections to the AAP principle. Third, I contrast the AAP to a common alternative, the All-Subjected Principle. Fourth, I argue that the normative force of the AAP should be derived from social justice. Fifth, specifying the AAP in this way produces a distinction between democratic equalities and democratic equities. Sixth, this approach to the AAP helps to identify constituencies—actual or latent—defined by essential interests, challenging use to find new ways and means of democratic inclusion for essential interests. Finally, I look at the question as to whether the AAP is workable in practice, noting that we already use the AAP extensively but implicitly and unevenly.

This chapter considers whether and how the All-Affected Principle (AAP) ought to be extended to large-scale, Western-based INGOs such as Oxfam and Care. These INGOs are frequently criticized for being undemocratic. Would more compliance with the AAP make them more democratic? I consider two possible ways of extending the APP to INGOs. The AAP’s “inclusive face” analogizes INGOs to governments and suggests that they should be more inclusive. It thus offers only a limited basis for critique. The AAP’s “exclusive face” points out that INGOs are unaffected, and tells us that they should therefore be excluded. The AAP’s exclusive face therefore offers a more radical basis for critiquing INGOs than its inclusive face. However, even the AAP’s exclusive face has serious limitations in the context of INGOs. This is because INGOs face the involvement/influence dilemma: they can be involved in addressing social problems or they can avoid undue influence, but it is difficult for them to do both simultaneously. I therefore turn to three organizations that directly and intentionally address this dilemma: SURJ, Thousand Currents, and the Solidaire Network. I show that these organizations reinterpret the AAP in ways that are relevant to, and generative for, other similarly-situated entities, such as INGOs.

Comparative measures of educational achievement (e.g. PISA, TIMSS, NAPLAN) demonstrate that although Australia is broadly understood to offer quality education, this masks stark and persistent inequalities. Wider disparities are evident between students from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds than in many other OECD countries. These inequities start before children enter schools. Children experiencing economic and social adversity are underrepresented in preschool and overrepresented in population level measures of ‘developmental vulnerability’ prior to school commencement. Young people from Indigenous backgrounds, rural/remote areas, and lower socio-economic backgrounds suffer significant achievement gaps across all measures, and the gap widens as they progress through their education. Some young people are being left behind as their more advantaged peers outpace them, with life-long consequences. Although public discourse encourages us to see educational failure as the fault of individuals, there is wide agreement that these inequities result from policy failures in Australian education.

In this chapter we will explore historical and current advocacy efforts, societal issues, and polices that impact LGBTQ+ population. This chapter begins by providing a brief overview of important historical LGBTQ+ movements such as how factors like colonization impacted the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals and communities and how the community engaged in revolution and action. This chapter will also explore how counselors can best advocate for LGBTQ+ individuals and populations. Current issues and trends will also be presented. The chapter will finish with a case study and a sample letter to policymakers supporting the rights of LGBTQ+ people.

Communicating research findings is a storytelling practice. The stories we tell as researchers are important to how the publics understand research findings and how research circulates in society. This is especially true for fields that have important social, political, or policy implications, such as the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). In this chapter, we introduce the term ‘narrative choreographies’ to describe how researchers, clinicians, science journalists, and other actors embed DOHaD knowledge claims as part of larger scientific, social, and political narratives. Using examples from our own research, we show how DOHaD narratives can inadvertently pathologise and stigmatise marginalised people, such as low-income mothers and obese mothers. In order to combat this potentiality, we advocate for deliberately choreographing DOHaD narratives to address structural inequality and advocate for social justice and health equity. At the end of the chapter, we offer concrete recommendations for DOHaD researchers who are interested in reflecting on and workshopping their own narrative choreographies to better support the healthy development of parents, children, and communities.