In this article, we identify the comics of the Real Cost of Prisons Project as graphic memory work that denaturalises ‘penal common sense’ and engages in graphic witnessing. To show how the United States’ ‘crime problem’ established a seemingly natural link between crime and incarceration, we first review the criminological aspects of American comics memory. Then, we demonstrate how The Real Cost of Prisons Comix reworks the historical and social dynamics of the American carceral regime through its abolitionist framework. We discuss the importance of the image–text form for abolitionist pedagogy by reflecting on the position of comics in carceral textual cultures and the use of these comics in activist education. Finally, we emphasise that the comics created by the Real Cost of Prisons Project should be understood as pedagogical tools in a broader abolitionist movement whereby the historical and social education initiated by memory work aims to ignite collaborative praxis. In this sense, we show that their activist memory work is a means to demystify the historical processes of carceral expansion, enabling its audience to develop historical consciousness.

This article maps how cultural heritage has been securitized in international discourse by analyzing seven key United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and UN Security Council (UNSC) documents (2003–2017). Drawing on the Copenhagen School’s framework and its distinction between identification and mobilization, the study reveals a two-stage process. Initially, heritage destruction was framed as a human rights violation, later escalating into a global security threat linked to terrorism and conflict financing. Through a sectoral and scalar typology of referent objects, the analysis highlights divergent framings by UNESCO (societal, normative) and the UNSC (military, strategic). Despite strong discursive alignment—culminating in UNSC Resolution 2347—the mobilization of extraordinary measures remained limited. The article concludes that heritage securitization is discursively robust but operationally incomplete, shaped by institutional capacities, leadership shifts, and evolving geopolitical contexts. These findings contribute to the broader literature on security politics, norm diffusion, and the symbolic power of heritage in global governance.

Discussions of the Gallo-Roman dodecahedron often note the significance of the dodecahedron in Platonic and Pythagorean philosophy, but they tend not to relate the archaeology to the textual evidence in any detail. We attempt to do that in this paper. We argue that, whilst it remains the case that there is no contemporaneous description of the Gallo-Roman dodecahedron, there are several texts – including an overlooked passage in Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life – that point to its possible inspiration. We relate these texts to the location of dodecahedra in Gaul and Britain and to the interest of the Druids in Pythagoras, which was frequently remarked upon by Roman commentators.

This article examines how “human affect” (renqing) – the interplay of affect, moral obligation and social legitimacy – operates as both a mechanism of governance and a site of contestation in police mediation in contemporary China. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in two police stations in Zhejiang province, I conceptualize renqing as an affective grammar: a system of emotional expression and recognition that structures interaction across interpersonal and institutional settings. The party-state’s revival of the Fengqiao model has transformed renqing from a micro-political norm into an institutionalized instrument of affective governance. Mediation formalizes affect through contracts, scripted performances and service quotas, stratifying emotional legitimacy along lines of class, gender and migration. The article theorizes affective autonomy as participants’ resistance through silence, withdrawal or alternative alignments. It complicates portrayals of policing as purely coercive, highlighting the emotional labour and limits of grassroots governance.

This article analyses the contribution of Mīrzā Āqāsī (1197–1265/1783–1849) to the political theology literature of the Qajar period and, consequently, to the dynamics and tensions between Sufism and power in Iranian Shi‘i society. Āqāsī was the first minister of the Qajar king Muḥammad Shāh (r. 1250–1264/1834–1848) and the author of an important political treatise titled Chahār-i faṣl-i sulṭānī va shīam-i farūkhī (The Four Royal Discourses and the Nobles’ Principles of Conduct). This treatise presents several original features, particularly regarding the classical views on the spiritual and political hierarchy in Islam, as well as within the context of the culture of authority in a Shi‘i setting. These views are expressed by Āqāsī in a partially initiatory mode, which renders their interpretation complex and open.

This article traces the figure of the lūṭī in the writings of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (d. 1350) and Ibn Kathīr (d. 1373). These two fourteenth-century scholars adopted a harsh and uncompromising view of the lūṭī as a sexual actor, repeatedly depicting the horrific afterlife punishments awaiting him in Hell. As part of their hyperbolic and extreme depiction of the lūṭī as a damned sexual figure, they imagine him through his communal relationship to his forebears, both among the Qur’anic People of Lūṭ and those like him in his present day. They thereby construct a sexual community of sorts, framing the lūṭī through a parodic repurposing of a strikingly Islamic idiom of belonging and community-building. In doing so, I argue, these texts open up broad possibilities for us to rethink how medieval authors theorised what we might call ‘sexual identity’ and understood sex to construct ways of being in the world around them.