This article examines how popular Hindi cinema has become integral to the political aesthetics of Narendra Modi’s India. Focusing on Modi’s strategic proximity to Bollywood through celebrity interviews, public endorsements of controversial films, election-timed hagiographies, and militarized spectacles, it argues that cinema now growingly operates as an infrastructure of governance rather than a cultural expression. Tracing a trajectory from ostensibly “apolitical” media performances such as the Modi–Akshay Kumar interview to films like The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story, and Uri: The Surgical Strike, the article shows how cinematic narratives are mobilized to manufacture affect, stabilize nationalist truth claims, and pre-empt journalistic or historical scrutiny. Particular attention is paid to the feedback loop between cinematic representation and political rhetoric, wherein slogans, war-room imaginaries, and heroic masculinities migrate seamlessly from screen to statecraft. Situating these developments within the broader “saffronization” of public knowledge, the article contends that Bollywood is increasingly training audiences to recognize enemies, rehearse outrage, and internalize a grammar of permanent retaliation. What emerges is not merely propaganda cinema but a mode of rule in which spectacle substitutes deliberation and representation collapses into authority.

It is possible that the traditional linear format of the novel is no longer sufficient to tell more-than-human stories about global energy use and Anthropogenic thinking. How can academic and research findings be brought into public consciousness to challenge damaging fossil fuel ideologies? These notions reference deep-time: the fossil part of fuel. Telling stories, suggests Anthony Nanson, possesses an important “consciousness-enhancing function…and has a part to play in public debates on the environment and energy.” Erin James asks whether the Anthropocene calls for new narratives that “can help bridge imaginative gaps” and consequently “have important real-world consequences.” What if the written text were fragmentary or digital or accessed randomly; if words ran a different way on the page; if fiction were mixed with fact, or illustration with poetry? I examine the approach of a graphic novel (Here, McGuire 2014), film-poem (The Green Hollow, Sheers 2018) and eco-biographical memoir (The Outrun, Liptrot 2016) in referencing more-than-human timescales. I consider whether a geological imaginary provokes reading and writing of fossils, landforms, literary forms, structures, traces, and futures in a manner that, Marco Caracciolo suggests, ruptures the linearity of protagonists’ experience of reality and their sense of demarcation between human and nonhuman.

This article examines the roles of nonhumans in the development, testing, and administration of COVID-19 vaccines. I show how specific groups of nonhumans, particularly primates, were strategically made visible and invisible to American publics, and how some groups were rendered more valuable than others. By studying the narratives of science that circulated during the pandemic, I argue that COVID-19, and the US response to it, illustrate a central facet of modern crisis, namely, that the current moment is marked by a growing awareness of human exposure to and vulnerability with nonhuman beings, coupled with an active and persistent denial of togetherness. To be a human subject in the twenty-first century involves acknowledging the interconnectedness that constitutes everyday life, while living in ways that openly reject this reality.

This article outlines the way in which the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest Laboratory in Oregon has nurtured a conversation between writers, artists, and scientists. The Andrews was the birthplace of New Forestry, a concept and philosophy that has impacted writing on (and in) old-growth forests. In this article, I also introduce some of the key themes and core concerns of a literature connected to New Forestry and produced at this experimental forest laboratory.

Writing from Australia, where acute climate crisis intersects with enduring colonial legacies, in this article we present our ongoing investigation into how environmental changes reshape scientific, literary-cultural, and philosophical discourses, while foregrounding the underutilized potential of humanities. We argue that humanities frameworks provide essential tools to address the current climate inaction by deconstructing the foundational discourses of Western culture that reinforce that inaction. Among the interrelated discourses we consider under our model, this article focuses on the relationship between the “invulnerable” body and human and non-human bodies made vulnerable by the power dynamics and material conditions of climate crisis. Through case studies of Noongar artist-writer Claire Coleman’s science fiction novel, Terra Nullius (2017) and Ellen van Neerven’s narrative “Water” (from Heat and Light, 2014), we demonstrate how literary narratives dismantle dominant symbolic regimes to foster more effective engagements with climate crisis. Our analysis ultimately gestures towards the urgent and growing corpus of Australian speculative fiction that explores these critical themes.

While Jamaican émigré, New Negro author Claude McKay’s desired reading public by the mid-1920s became and remained the general American readership, at various moments during the (Long) Harlem Renaissance he enjoyed a diverse if limited reception. After early attention in Jamaica as the British Crown Colony’s first Black poet to publish a collection of verse, McKay eventually gained a measure of notice among North American politically progressive poetry enthusiasts, and then at various stages of his career gathered interest among British, French, Pan-African, and even Russian readerships. In the late 1920s, when McKay’s novel Home to Harlem became a bestseller, the New Negro author believed his star was finally rising with the broad spectrum of US readers, but the novel’s popularity was momentary, and the author’s glory transpired to be fleeting. In his lifetime, McKay never again realized the level of popular American readership he sought. During the early 1920s, the concept of an emergent, transnational American identity forged McKay’s aesthetic and accordingly his ambition to reach a US public. By the late 1930s, however, McKay rejected the idea that organized leftist politics was invested in aiding the struggling Black masses. Around the same period, he abandoned his former unique vision of a transnational America.

The term Anthropocene needs a re-evaluation for recognising and encompassing gendered factors that propelled Earth to transition into the current geological epoch. An exploration of the triad theoretical framework of phallocentrism, phallosphere, and phallocene unveils the gendered power structures behind environmental collapse. While phallocentrism is the philosophical foundation that maintains the masculine domination over nature, phallosphere represents an interconnected system of male-dominated and extractive machinery governed by phallocentric ideologies. These two concepts together necessitate a reconfiguration of “Anthropocene” as “phallocene,” that is, an epoch shaped by the phallosphere’s stratigraphic imprint on Earth. Therefore, (re)naming of the “Anthropocene” as “phallocene” addresses the gendered blind spot in geohumanities, simultaneously offering an alternative lens to diagnose the phallic roots of ecological crisis.

Political philosophy is often said to stand at an uneasy distance from everyday politics. On one side lie the often-abstract normative arguments of philosophers; on the other, the messy, power-saturated realities of political life; and in between, what seems to be a sizable gulf in aims, topics, and practices that limits their mutual relevance. Taking that gap as both a diagnosis and a provocation, this issue draws together a diverse group of political philosophers to explore why it persists, why it matters, and how it might be reduced. This introduction sets the stage for that discussion in three ways. First, it advances a principled argument for the inescapability of public political philosophising. Beyond familiar pragmatic pressures to demonstrate relevance or impact, it argues that political philosophy is intrinsically bound to public life, and that both philosophers and public actors have good principled reasons to engage with one another. Second, it offers a conceptual map of the contributions organised around three themes: the varied ways political philosophers have engaged with the public, the growing integration of public voices and empirical methods into philosophical reasoning, and the experimental and innovative practices through which public political philosophy is reshaping the boundaries of the discipline itself. Third, it reflects on our own experience guest editing the collection, highlighting how the somewhat serendipitous discovery of a hugely varied and inventive field of contemporary public political philosophising—far exceeding anything we had anticipated—pushed us to rethink some of our own assumptions and preconceptions.

This essay takes as its starting point the experience of designing and teaching the extension course “Regenerative Ecologies: Imagining Sustainable Futures through Science Fiction,” offered at the Federal University of Pelotas in late 2024 as part of Brazil’s triadic model of teaching, research, and extension in higher education. Bringing together participants from the humanities, natural sciences, health sciences, and environmental studies, the course created a space where speculative narratives could be read alongside diverse forms of expertise and lived experience, fostering ecological awareness, critical engagement with science and technology, and the exercise of accountability and collective responsibility. From this context, I explore the role of science fiction as a critical and imaginative tool for public engagement with science and draw upon philosophy of science to argue that science fiction supports ethical reflection, strengthens scientific communication, and cultivates the “moral imagination” essential to responsible science, enabling readers to anticipate the social and environmental consequences of scientific and technological advancements. Through this case study, I highlight how speculative narratives can bridge the gap between scientific practice and public participation in the co-creation of sustainable futures, while also showcasing the affordances of public higher education outreach initiatives in Brazil.

Richard Powers’ latest novel, Playground (2024), foregrounds two realms of scientific issues in the public sphere—the oceans and AI. In that sense, it looks in large part like a follow-up to two of his previous works: The Overstory (2018), an analogous treatment of the environment as represented by forests, and Galatea 2.2 (1995), which describes the creation of a very early version of an AI. Here, the focus appears to be an elaborate scheme to fill the South Pacific with floating cities, to allow wealthy people to escape the tribulations of the real world, with the development of a Facebook-like app as a secondary theme. The exposition proceeds via three narrative streams: the stories of a software engineer, a pioneering deep ocean explorer, and a tiny Polynesian island designated as the home base for the floating cities project. As the plotlines evolve, the reader is led to anticipate how the pieces will connect up—until a totally unexpected plot reversal near the end forces a drastic reappraisal of what the book is primarily about, suggesting that despite the elaborate portrayal of risks to the oceans, AI may, in fact, well prove to be the greater threat.

This article investigates the 2025 U.S. bombing campaign in the Southern Caribbean and the contested identity of its victims. Situated between Washington’s “narcoterrorist” branding and Caracas’s “humble fisherman” idealisation, the study employs a long-term archaeological and historical perspective to critique these binary tropes. By using digital ethnography to synthesise social media discourse and combining it with heritage research, we demonstrate how the manipulation of fishermen’s identities served to legitimise a military intervention primarily driven by oil interests, and we propose the idea of “Schrödinger’s Fishermen” to illustrate both the agency of local fishermen and the propensity of the fishermen’s identity for use by both political narratives. The analysis reveals that these identity politics obscured regional agency and facilitated extrajudicial violence, resulting in 51 fatalities across the region.

This roundtable contribution considers methodologies for expanding Shakespeare’s heritage reach beyond England, through the framework of the “Birnam’s Oak // Scotland’s Shakespeare” project, a community-based project in Perthshire designed to create an expanded model for Shakespeare heritage by cohering a more interdisciplinary range of heritage narratives (local, global, literary, ecological). This piece outlines the project’s narrative strands in relation to co-curricular educational programming: a four-session programme designed for year 5 and year 7 pupils.

Archaeology is not new to public education. However, scholars of archaeology education have noted the lack of a systematic approach to the field in the last two decades. In our case study of the Trowels to Teaching Workshop, a five-day professional development program for Maryland K-12 educators conducted in 2025 through the Baltimore Community Archaeology Lab at Towson University, we offer a model for embedding archaeology education in existing applied archaeology programs in the academy. The workshop combined hands-on field and laboratory training, collaboration with Indigenous representatives from the Piscataway Conoy Tribe and the Pocomoke Indian Nation, and active participation by undergraduate student employees who both learned and taught archaeological skills. Formal pre- and post-assessments demonstrated significant learning gains among participating teachers, including increases in archaeological knowledge, confidence in lesson design, and awareness of descendant perspectives. The outcomes highlight how applied archaeology programs in universities can integrate teacher professional development into existing research, provide undergraduates with transformative teaching experiences, and deepen collaborations with descendant communities.

Democracy is anchored by communication, grounded in a commitment to factual truth. This is an ideal historically captured by the ancient Athenian concept of parrhesia (frankness) and, in contemporary deliberative theory, by sincerity. This essay argues that the US far right has hijacked this democratic ideal, weaponizing it to create a post-truth environment and fuel a form of demagogic propaganda. The essay traces the historical evolution of the truth-telling ideal, noting how sincerity can morph into an antirhetorical style of “hyper-sincerity,” which performs shamelessness for a citizenry sidelined by massive economic inequality and corporate power. Drawing on Jason Stanley’s work, the essay then argues that this rhetorical style has become a form of fascist demagoguery, a rhetorical style that poses a threat to the very possibility of democratic politics. The final section explores the possibilities for irony as an antidote to hyper-sincerity. It reveals that the far right has also hijacked irony to create a mode of “fascist irony.” The paper concludes by calling for a “civic irony” rooted in a commitment to democratic values.

What does the academic boycott of Israel and the larger BDS movement look like from the perspective of a liberated Levant and dismantled Israeli state, where a new land and system of governance is formed? What sort of lessons can we learn by speaking to someone in the future about the process of liberation and the role of the BDS movement? In this article, I answer these questions by recounting my conversations with one interlocutor that I met while doing research around 10 years after the liberation of Palestine and the Levant. I begin with a brief history of the BDS movement and then show how present ideas are mobilized successfully in the future and current debates are resolved to achieve liberation.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is among the most urgent global health challenges of our time. However, it is also a human rights and environmental crisis deeply entwined with climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. Historically, AMR was framed as a public health challenge, with little consideration given to its environmental factors and human rights implications. In this article, we examine AMR through the lens of the right to a healthy environment, exploring whether a normative human rights framework could open up new avenues to seek justice and accountability for the environmental drivers of AMR. Drawing on recent developments in international law, we suggest that this newly recognized right widens the narrative of AMR, drawing attention to the role of microbial environments in the global ecosystem and compelling more holistic responses that extend beyond public health interventions to address the underlying structural inequalities and environmental drivers of AMR.

This article explores how ancient Greek choral practices—collective singing and dancing called choreia—offer unexpected solutions to contemporary civic challenges. Drawing on interdisciplinary research with Australian military veterans and students, combining cognitive science, performance studies, and classics, we demonstrate how synchronized group performance generates measurable and lasting improvements in empathy, social cohesion, and democratic participation. Using motion capture technology and psychological assessments, we reveal the neurological and social mechanisms underlying these transformations and the means to reactivate them even after profound disagreements. The research suggests that ancient Greek democracy’s emphasis on embodied, collective practices provides valuable insights for addressing modern crises of political polarization and civic disengagement, demonstrating how democracy can be literally danced into being.

This paper analyzes the 2024 Mellichamp Mind and Machine Initiative at UCSB, a pioneering AI-inclusive literary competition accepting human, AI, and hybrid works. As Head Judge, I explore key questions confronting the panel: Will AI render human writing obsolete? Can machine-generated literature exhibit creativity or remain mechanical? Are AI and human writing distinguishable? What does authorship mean in an era of AI collaboration? The paper examines judges’ interpretive frameworks, biases, and expectations, contrasting them with outcomes observed in submissions. It also considers how AI challenges traditional notions of the author and fosters new creative possibilities.

This essay takes up the question of how literature can help us adapt to a world in which climate change is an ongoing reality. Climate literature offers a promising realm in which scholars are reckoning with the central humanistic problem of how we make sense of a world undergoing the chaos of climate change. This essay explores the climate literature anthology Tales of Two Planets for how its stories and essays model a practice of narrative agency—the ability to consciously identify, dispense with, and create the tales we tell ourselves about climate change. The narrative agency that climate literature like Tales of Two Planets promotes has the potential to widen its readers’ locus of control in environments where there is very little to begin with.

Metaphors abound for mycorrhiza in both science and fiction. From the “wood wide web” to “mother trees,” “social networks” to “neurological networks,” analogies expand and transform public understanding of the complex and elusive interactions between plants and fungi occurring under our feet in forest ecosystems. However, the line between metaphor and the more-than-metaphorical, fact and fiction, is not always clear, causing heated debates about the role of metaphor in the scientific imagination and science communication. As a mycologist and literary scholar, we enact an interdisciplinary symbiosis inspired by mycorrhiza themselves to explore the mycorrhizal metaphors in the past decade, which are entangling and enriching both science and fiction, from Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (2016) to Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (2020), Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) to Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree (2021). We reaffirm the fundamental value of metaphors in how scientists and nonscientists alike seek to understand fungi in a world increasingly fascinated by and dependent upon them.