The latest books by Martha Nussbaum and Peter Franklin, on the music and life of Benjamin Britten, both come from positions notionally outside music studies. Nussbaum – the liberal philosopher, as close to an academic celebrity as one can find nowadays – writes about the War Requiem (1962) as a (mostly) appreciative visitor to the discipline. Franklin, by contrast, is well known in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music studies. Britten Experienced nevertheless adopts the institutionally detached, less inhibited perspective of the emeritus. It would not be too far from the truth to call Franklin’s book a career retrospective. Crucially, though, it takes in not only the things that he has taught and published over the years, but also the personal encounters and enthusiasms that have (often invisibly) shaped this teaching and scholarship – the very things, in other words, that typically lie outside the professional purview of music studies.

This study offers a phenomenological exploration of unchosen pregnancy as a distinct temporal experience. By bracketing the traditionally dominant concept of pregnancy as culminating in birth, this study unveils the unique temporal contours of early pregnancy, particularly when it is not chosen. Through a critical phenomenology analysis, this study demonstrates how unchosen pregnancy is characterized by extreme temporal disorientation, a heightened experience of multiple temporal layers, and a profound loss of temporal grounding. This description of unchosen pregnancy is intended to open new pathways of thought on the ethical issue of abortions and expand the phenomenological understanding of pregnancy.

The Sundarbans in the short stories by Dalit writer Shyamal Kumar Pramanik is not some geographical setting but is instead a living environmental being that reinvents the relationship between man and the nonhuman world. Dalit, a word translating to “oppressed” and applied to groups that were traditionally marginalised by the caste system of India, becomes a key category through which Pramanik explores the ethics of survival, belonging and ecological resistance. This paper argues that the mangrove forest in Pramanik’s narratives such as “Life in the Forest” and “In Dakshin Rai’s Land” operates as a responsive vegetal agent that shapes the social, ethical and ontological dynamics of forest life for marginalised communities. Drawing on Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking (2013), J. C. Ryan’s (2018) botanical imagination, Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Plant Theory (2015) and Matthew Hall’s (2011) articulation of vegetal life as a moral force – this paper develops the concept of “Dalit Botanics” – a term for a theoretical framework that understands forest life as a pedagogical and ethical system in which trees act as epistemic agents, to theorise the Sundarbans as a sentient pedagogical ecology and to examine how caste and plant life co-constitute each other in Dalit experience.

Hate speech is widely seen as a significant obstacle to constructive online discourse, but the most effective strategies to mitigate its effects remain unclear. We claim that understanding its distribution across users is key to developing and evaluating effective content moderation strategies. We address this missing link by first examining the distribution of hate speech in five original datasets that collect user-generated posts across multiple platforms (social media and online newspapers) and countries (Switzerland and the United States). Across these diverse samples, the vast majority of hate speech is produced by a small fraction of users. Second, results from a pre-registered field experiment on Twitter indicate that counterspeech strategies obtain only small reductions of future hate speech, mainly because this approach proves ineffective against the most prolific contributors of hate. These findings suggest that complementary content moderation strategies may be necessary to effectively address the problem.

Sarcopenia, the age-related decline in muscle mass and strength, is a contributor to frailty and reduced quality of life. Emerging evidence suggests an emerging role of the gut microbiome in modulating skeletal muscle through microbial species and metabolites, such as short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), potentially influencing inflammation, nutrient absorption, and glucose and protein metabolism. This review considers the potential of probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics as interventions to mitigate sarcopenia based on animal and human studies, while providing a critique of present barriers that need to be addressed. Preclinical models, including germ-free mice and faecal microbiota transplantation, demonstrate that gut microbiota from healthy or young donors may enhance overall muscle health via reductions in inflammatory and muscle atrophy markers. Limited human studies show that probiotics such as Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium could improve branched-chain amino acid (BCAA) bioavailability and potentially sarcopenia indices, although findings have been inconsistent. Particularly, challenges including inconsistent microbial assessments, lack of dietary control and interindividual variability due to diet, age, genetics, comorbidities and medications may hinder progress in this field. Delivery methods (e.g. capsules, fermented foods or fortified products) could further complicate efficacy through probiotic stability and dietary restrictions in older adults. Standardised protocols [e.g. Strengthening The Organisation and Reporting of Microbiome Studies (STORMS) checklist] and multi-omics approaches may be critical to address these limitations and identify microbial signatures linked to sarcopenia outcomes. While preclinical evidence highlights mechanistic pathways pertinent to amino acid metabolism, translating findings to humans requires rigorous experimental trials.

This article examines the national and international context within which Colombian immigration policy developed in the mid-twentieth century. Focussing on Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War, it traces how and why policymakers and public opinion began to see these groups as potentially harmful to society. It argues that Colombian immigration policy emerged at the intersection of multiple, evolving discourses of race which both helped frame and were shaped by anxieties over a mass influx from Spain. By exploring the stories of several Republicans who tried to come to Colombia, the article also reveals how they helped shape immigration policy.

Humans possess the capacity to make sense of stories unfolding across different and difficult times with nuanced understanding and to unlearn and relearn what once seemed familiar. All human beings are storytellers, and the narratives of minorities deserve recognition and value within Westernised contexts. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives and employing a narrative inquiry approach, I share stories from my lived experiences as a former graduate student and current educator. These stories focus on pedagogical practices, dynamic identity formation and reflective engagements with place as valid and vital ways of knowing, doing, being and becoming. I highlight how choice often entails challenge, how agency and struggle can be intertwined with empowerment, and how marginalisation can coexist with celebration. This inquiry aims to reveal the layered complexity and sometimes paradoxical dimensions of learner and teacher identities within the assemblage of learning and teaching in higher education.

This study examines the interplay between welfare stigma and need in the decision to claim social welfare benefits in Hong Kong, a liberal welfare city where self-reliance and family obligations are highly valued. Our interviews with seventeen low-income parents, suggest that first, their availability and ability to work influence their self-perceived ‘deservingness’ of aid. This, in turn, affects their anticipated self-stigma and their assessment of needs. Second, having children influences parents’ decisions to claim social welfare benefits through both anticipated stigma and childcare needs. Finally, low-income parents are trapped in an impossible triangle of being a ‘good’ parent, caught between fulfilling parental responsibilities, providing for their children financially, and modeling self-reliance to protect them from welfare stigma. Claiming benefits fulfills the first two but sacrifices self-reliance, while choosing not to claim fulfills the latter two but sacrifices parental responsibilities. Both choices carry emotional consequences that can undermine parent-child relationships.

Dr Paola Forgione describes some of the reflections undertaken by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the links between traditions, cultures, religions and international humanitarian law (IHL), which resulted in a colloquium held on 29 May 2024. The colloquium report is reproduced below.

The Taiwan Incident of 1874 – a prolonged Sino-Japanese confrontation over the killing of Ryukyu castaways, whom Japan claimed as its subjects – marked the full maturation of a new mode of Qing war preparation. This mode was characterized by global coordination, domestic and international competition, and the swift mobilization of personal connections to secure foreign weapons and loans – resources that were often interconnected. Facilitated by the efforts of various actors, this internationalized approach became a standard practice during the empire’s final decades. As the empire could no longer rely on domestic self-sufficiency in arms and funding, Qing military operations came to reflect the broader influence of global military and financial resources. The Qing empire’s capacity to mobilize global resources in pursuit of national objectives helps explain its resilience in an era dominated by imperial powers.