Serena Williams splayed on a throne for Sports Illustrated, Ashley Harkleroad bending over on Playboy, and Anna Kournikova gazing sultrily on Penthouse, Maxim, and FHM—these are just a few examples of women tennis players showing copious amounts of glistening skin on newsstands since the early 2000s. Since the emergence of the Virginia Slims Tour and its provocative slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” in 1970, it has been clear that sex and women’s tennis are a tight match. But the shared cultural history of sex and tennis precedes the 1970s and the Sexual Revolution. Focused on the period of 1874 to 1960, this article, a prehistory, follows the progression of the intimate and sexy imagery of women tennis players by examining everyday objects and occurrences—parties, paintings, postcards, photography, news and lifestyle magazine covers, pin-up art, film art, victory celebrations, exhibition tours, and panties—to reveal the sometimes shocking yet common and open ways in which women’s participation in tennis was sexualized. Women tennis players carried out their careers in a culture whose paradoxical exaltation and sexualization of their sport brought visibility and opportunities unheard of for women in less expensive and contact sports. Whether embracing, accepting, or recoiling at the situation, all navigated sexualized events, innuendos, and expectations. Part of “the golden age of American sports,” World War II, Wimbledon, and the battle over civil rights, this history casts light and shadow on tennis’s reputation and status as a space of sophistication and liberation for women.

This paper examines the educational experience in Sudan from 2023 until the present. In 2023, with the outbreak of the civil war, the Sudanese universities completely ceased operations. Since late 2025, there has been highly limited in-person teaching when safe in some universities, but this is not widespread or comprehensive due to the destruction of infrastructure. Under these circumstances, some professors and students resorted to developing alternative solutions, the most prominent of which was the use of WhatsApp as an educational platform for communication, lectures, discussions, and exams. The research presents my experience as a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Khartoum, where lectures were prepared in small PDF files, audio recordings of the explanations were sent, and then discussed within WhatsApp groups. The university also organized exams through multiple centers to overcome transportation difficulties and later launched an official electronic platform for distance learning, reflecting a significant digital transformation despite the war. The research concludes that this experience is unique globally and confirms the importance of innovation and flexibility in continuing the educational process during crises. WhatsApp is no longer just a means of social communication or family chatting. In Sudan, it has become an effective educational tool that has proven its worth across multiple universities. In the absence of official online platforms and the difficulty of accessing high-speed internet, WhatsApp provided a reliable alternative, especially since it requires little data and allows for the direct and rapid sending of audio, text, and video files.

Livelihood diversification is widely viewed as a key pathway for enhancing rural resilience in contexts marked by environmental stress and agrarian uncertainty. This paper examines whether India’s National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM), the world’s largest poverty-alleviation program, contributes to livelihood diversification among rural households in Assam, a flood-prone and agriculture-dependent state in Northeast India. Drawing on primary household survey data from three districts representing upper, middle, and lower Assam, the study compares livelihood portfolios of NRLM participants and nonparticipants. The results show that program participation is positively associated with greater diversification into nonfarm wage employment, self-employment, and service activities alongside agriculture. Education, skill training, proximity to urban centers, and engagement in nonfarm occupations significantly shape diversification outcomes. Women’s participation through Self-Help Groups emerges as a critical institutional mechanism facilitating access to skills, credit, and collective learning. The findings suggest that NRLM contributes to rural resilience primarily by strengthening institutional and human capital rather than through income effects alone. The paper highlights the importance of place-specific infrastructure and skill investments for enhancing the diversification impacts of large-scale livelihood programs in environmentally vulnerable regions.

It is a pleasure to introduce this roundtable‚ based on papers from the International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science held at the University of Birmingham in 2024 under the auspices of “Health Humanities,” a variant term for Medical Humanities.1 It is a century since “Medical” and “Humanities” first came together in this singular expression that initially referred to scholarly work spanning the borderlands between medicine, medical history, literature, art, and philosophy.2

In times of crisis, such as pandemics or social injustice, people often talk about the importance of solidarity, standing together for a common cause. However, this term, while powerful, can sometimes leave people out, especially those who do not fit neatly into shared identities or experiences. Our paper examines how the concept of solidarity can unintentionally exclude individuals, obscure power disparities, or even be exploited by political or corporate interests. Rather than abandoning the concept, we suggest adding a new term: convergence. This word captures the idea of people coming together from different backgrounds to work towards shared goals, without needing to be the same or agree on everything. By combining solidarity with convergence, we can build more inclusive, transparent, and dynamic ways of working together in today’s complex world. This shift in language may help us navigate global challenges more fairly and collaboratively.

A newcomer to Madrid, I currently teach Latin American history and literature to undergraduates from my university spending their academic year abroad. Even as the Trump administration deports undocumented and legal residents from Latin America in record numbers, Spain is witnessing a surge of arrivals from the region. In stark contrast to the United States, the Sánchez government has made Spain an alternative destination for migrants from Latin America and other regions. The Trump administration recently abducted and extradited the president of Venezuela, threatened to annex Greenland, cut off oil and energy supplies to Cuba and launched an unprovoked war against Iran. While I lie in bed awake at night thinking about these alarming developments from a city replete with nostalgic reminders of the Spanish empire, I struggle to reconcile Madrid’s imperial past with its multicultural present. What can the twilight of past empires and dictatorships teach us about their present juncture and future direction? How do their monuments at once reveal and conceal their violent histories? What can the struggles against empire and fascism of previous centuries teach us about their re-emergence in new forms today?

This paper draws on feminist disability scholarship on care to examine the figure of a sacrificial mother located within the moral unit of family, which is identified as central to the public discourse of disability around the Kasargod-endosulfan episode. It is an instance of pesticide poisoning that resulted in the acquisition of disabilities by the populations living in the region. The paper argues that the figure of the sacrificial mother who forsakes her job and social life is discursively constructed by feminised notions of care, absence of formal care structures, and the state’s imagination of care as a packageable/givable product. Caregiving has often been thought of as a linear process or mobilised as a moral force to organise familial structures or care containments. By reflecting on the ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews with mothers of endosulfan-affected people at a private care home in the Indian state of Kerala, the study attempts to locate ways in which disability-care destabilises these containments. It also deliberates on the possibilities of socialities and solidarities enabled by disability-care, forming newer spatialities.

This article examines how Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) political actors in India have strategically co-opted the language of decolonization to advance a majoritarian ethno-religious agenda—one that, paradoxically, reproduces the exclusionary dynamics that postcolonial theory was originally developed to critique. The article identifies three core rhetorical vectors: a “double colonialism” thesis that frames Muslim rule as equivalent to British colonialism; curriculum reform that erases Muslim contributions to Indian history while privileging a mythologized Hindu past; and the reframing of caste discrimination as itself a colonial invention, undermining the legitimacy of affirmative action. Beyond rhetoric, the article traces how decolonization has been operationalized as state policy—through legal reform, changes in the military, urban renaming, and education reforms—to systematically Hinduize public institutions. This article further argues that this recent semantic appropriation of decolonial vocabulary is deployed to legitimize the implementation of old Hindu nationalist ideas.

As museums confront the virtualization of cultural life, institutional discourse often succumbs to “virtual panic,” framing the future primarily around technological adaptation. Rather than treating this digital turn as a threat or a trend, this essay argues that the crisis presents an opportunity for the museum to reclaim its vital humanistic function as a counter-environment to the frictionless speed of contemporary life. Drawing on Hartmut Rosa’s critiques of societal acceleration, I theorize virtual panic as a misguided effort to render the gallery as seamless as a digital feed, which risks reproducing conditions of alienation. Grounded in my personal experience revisiting Picasso’s ‘Girl Before a Mirror’ (1932) across decades, I examine how the gallery acts as an attentional sanctuary, where artworks invite modes of attention that counter habits of distraction. The museum’s power lies in its productive friction: its ability to sustain slowness, ambiguity, and perceptual depth. Conceived as a sphere of resonance, in Rosa’s sense of the term, the museum emerges as a site for scaffolding self-reflective engagement with the past, present, and possible futures through meaningful encounters with works of art. In an age of simulation, museums remain indispensable by offering a rare space to encounter resistance and resonance.

Museums often speak with a single, confident voice, but this authority was built by many hands. In this article, I show how natural history museums in India and China relied on wide networks of collectors, hunters, taxidermists, and local intermediaries to build and sustain their collections, even though credit and curatorial power were far from being equally shared. In British India, museum collecting grew alongside the infrastructure of East India Company rule. In China, early museums developed in urban, treaty-port settings, where Chinese assistants to foreign missionaries collected, prepared, and exhibited specimens. I call this dynamic asymmetric co-curation—the making of museum knowledge through shared and often cross-cultural labor, while the authority to classify, display, publish, and claim that knowledge remained unevenly held. By tracing this process across India and China, the article offers asymmetric co-curation as a way to understand how museums transform unequal labor into public authority.

This essay examines media bias, U.S. foreign policy, and the selective application of international law in the context of the Gaza Genocide. The author argues that Western governments and mainstream media outlets have consistently misrepresented Israel’s actions, framing them as defensive while erasing a history of Palestinian suffering and rights. Headlines, reporting practices, and editorial decisions shape public perception, creating a persistent disconnect between what occurs on the ground and what is widely understood in the West. Drawing on media analysis, the author highlights how firsthand reporting, social media, and grassroots activism have challenged entrenched narratives. Ultimately, the Gaza Genocide exposes the hypocrisy of the so-called rules-based international order and the notion of a free press, and underscores the need for an accountable media in confronting atrocities.

This article reexamines the Harlem Renaissance by emphasizing Florida’s crucial yet often overlooked contribution to its development. Focusing on influential figures like Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Augusta Savage—whose lives and work exemplify Florida’s impact—the study explores how Florida’s Black communities served as both catalysts and sustainers of the movement’s creative and cultural legacy. Using a multidisciplinary approach that combines archival research, visual art analysis, and regional cultural history, the narrative demonstrates that Florida was more than a peripheral region; it was a vibrant hub for artistic innovation and intellectual exchange. Through the recounting of two curated exhibits, the authors highlight Florida’s rich cultural landscape by showcasing artworks, manuscripts, and oral histories that emphasize regional storytelling’s influence on national and global Black cultural movements. By tracing migration patterns, community resilience, and artistic networks, this work reveals how Florida’s Black towns fostered resilience amid systemic oppression, producing key figures who shaped Harlem’s legacy while cultivating a distinctive regional identity. This investigation underscores the importance of reclaiming regional histories to deepen the broader story of Black art and culture. It also highlights implications for contemporary efforts in cultural preservation, community empowerment, and representation. Ultimately, this article affirms Florida’s integral role in the ongoing narrative of Black cultural renaissance and innovation.

This article analyzes the geopolitical and cultural implications of a U.S. military bombardment of Caracas in January 2026. It argues that the second Trump administration has redefined hegemony through “technical supremacy,” shifting the Make America Great Again (MAGA) narrative from industrial nostalgia to high-tech dominance. The text explores how this technological asymmetry renders Venezuelan sovereignty “unthinkable.” Through an analysis of social media reactions, particularly on TikTok, the article identifies a process of “digital myth-making.” Overwhelmed by the “surgical” nature of the attack, Venezuelan users resort to sci-fi tropes—such as cyborgs or aliens—to explain U.S. capabilities. The article concludes that this disparity leads to a collapse of political meaning, where local populations reinterpret imperial intervention not as aggression, but as a form of “technical justice” and spectacle that invalidates their own national agency.

This article explores Guerrilla Public History as an alternative methodology to reclaim historical narratives of the oppressed, whose history has been stripped away by violence. The author draws on regional guerrilla combat methods, Paulo Freire’s emancipatory action research and Frantz Fanon’s liberatory violence to frame this new methodology of doing public history. Based on previous examples of public history projects that the author carried within academic institutions in the global North, the article proposes this new radical methodology, applicable on the margins of the institutional framework where research is conducted within a university and/or a museum, in order to reclaim the land, call for reparation, and address injustice. At a time when funding has been grotesquely exposing its power over academic integrity, artistic expression, and freedom of speech in anything related to Palestine, this article calls on institutionally affiliated researchers to be honest about the limits of their work’s impact, and for those who wish to show their true support, to be “Muchtabek” and to act as allies of the people who will lead the revolution, rather than commodifying their struggle.

Animator Sydney Padua’s interaction with 19th-century science includes an obsession with Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the Analytical Engine that led to some of the first visualisations and animations of the machine. Most recently she teamed up with the Constructing Scientific Communities project, and their work on Science Gossip, animating illustrations from the 19th-century nature periodicals into shareable gifs. In this paper she shares some of her inspirations and processes for making creative projects from historical archives.

This essay explores the work of artist and activist Fredi Washington during the New Negro Renaissance. It frames Washington as an unconventional “Triple Threat,” not as an artist who dances and sings and acts, but as a performing artist, a writer, and a civil and human rights activist. It focuses upon Washington’s most direct engagement with the failures of American democracy—her writings for the progressive Black newspaper The People’s Voice from 1942 to 1947. A fierce advocate for Black people in the United States and around the world, Washington offers a model of resiliency and resistance in the face of white supremacy, misogyny, and the contemporary collapse of democratic institutions across the globe.

Much of Western philosophy has treated the ability to reason as both the defining feature of human nature and also the condition of knowledge. Even when philosophers attempt to expose reason’s finitude, the very form of argument simply bolsters the authority it seeks to constrain. Philosophy cannot fully displace rationality when it presupposes rigid standards of justification. But literature works differently: because it does not need to defend itself through argument, it can effectively reveal the limits of rationality. By examining the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Cavell together with the literary works Goethe’s Faust and Shelley’s Frankenstein, this article argues that literary work critiques rationality in ways philosophical discourse cannot.

Water insecurity is a persistent challenge in many American Indian and Alaska Native communities, where access to safe, reliable, and culturally relevant water sources is shaped by historical displacement, infrastructure neglect, and environmental degradation. Addressing these longstanding inequalities calls for more equitable, relationship-based, and decolonial approaches to community engagement and collaboration. Our reflexive essay examines how collaborative, Indigenous-centered research practices can strengthen water security efforts in Tribal communities. Using a reflexive qualitative approach grounded in Indigenous Research Methodologies, we analyzed how relationality, ethical engagement, and attention to Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) shaped our team’s research practices and partnerships with Tribal communities. Reflexive and culturally grounded approaches strengthened trust, collaboration, and accountability between researchers and community partners. Integrating IKS with western science research and water justice approaches improved the cultural relevance of the work and supported community-driven, sustainable outcomes. Our experience suggests that water security research is strengthened when it is grounded in relationality, deep listening, and respect for Tribal sovereignty. These findings support the development of ethical, collaborative, and culturally responsive research and policy approaches to water security in Tribal communities.