This article aims to analyse the historical, political, and socio-cultural significance of the Alash Orda movement in shaping Kazakh national identity and the quest for autonomy during the early 20th century. The research draws on a range of primary sources, including archival documents and speeches, as well as scholarly works by Kazakh and international historians. It analyses how Alash leaders developed a multifaceted political strategy to secure autonomy amidst the chaotic transition from imperial rule to revolutionary governance. Central to their approach was diplomacy: the Alash Orda government sought to establish ties with the Russian Provisional Government and A. Kolchak’s White Army, aiming to build alliances supportive of Kazakh autonomy. The movement also reached out to international organisations, seeking external recognition and assistance. Despite these efforts, the study demonstrates that Alash Orda ultimately failed to achieve lasting success in establishing a stable autonomous Kazakh state. Alongside this political narrative, the study highlights the cultural and educational initiatives of Alash Orda, particularly its promotion of the Kazakh language and national identity in the face of Russification policies.

London’s nineteenth-century sailortown – centred around Ratcliffe Highway and the surrounding docklands – was a vital hub of maritime activity. Yet much of what is known about this space derives from landsmen’s accounts: narratives by Victorian reformers, novelists and journalists who often portrayed the sailortown as a site of crime, vice and moral degeneration. In contrast, sea shanties, rooted in the lived experiences of sailors themselves, offer an alternative perspective, illuminating the values and self-perceptions of the maritime community. This article examines how London’s sailortown is represented in shanty repertoire, analysing the lyrics of shanties associated with the city to reveal recurring themes, such as encounters with women, financial exploitation, alcohol consumption and the dangers of the Highway. These songs provide insight not only into the everyday lives of sailors ashore but also into how they navigated and interpreted urban spaces. Furthermore, by considering the broader soundscapes of the docklands (including the influence of street performers, public houses and the music hall), this study explores how urban auditory culture shaped the content and form of shanties. By highlighting sailors’ voices through their songs, this article reconstructs a more nuanced and culturally embedded understanding of London’s sailortown and its place within the wider maritime world.

This article revisits the concept of the ‘Christian city’ in Late Antique North Africa by shifting the focus from topography to the lived and perceived urban experience. While earlier scholarship has emphasized the accumulation of Christian buildings, this study argues that religious transformation is equally, if not more, visible through the evolving practices of city inhabitants. By analysing both Christian and continuing pagan traditions between the fourth and seventh centuries, the article explores how monuments and public religious practices shaped the perception and function of the city. Special attention is given to the volumetric presence of sacred architecture and to the role of public spaces, particularly streets, in hosting religious acts. Ultimately, the study offers a more nuanced understanding of the Christian city: one defined not solely by the presence of basilicas, but by the rhythms, gestures, and visibility of religious life within the broader civic landscape.

This essay argues that the women, life, freedom movement should be understood as crucial site for the study of revolutionary praxis and feminist theory from which scholars and activists around the world can learn. While much attention has been given to efforts to co-opt the movement by monarchist and other “regime change” factions in diaspora, a lesser-known diasporic consequence has been the creation of Iranian feminist collectives oriented around intersectional and anti-colonial forms of transnational solidarity. By analyzing three such collectives that aimed to uplift critical feminist orientations emerging from the uprising in Iran, I chart shifts in ideas about organization, the meaning of revolution, and the contours of a “decolonial” feminist analysis in the Iranian context. I argue that these Iranian feminist collectives have built on the transnational feminist practice of making connections across differences, placing their critique of the Iranian state in relation to other iterations of patriarchal and militarized authoritarianism globally, including in the west.

This article explores biophilic (nature-centred) instrument design and its intersection with architecture and music. While the connection between these disciplines is often discussed figuratively, they are less often combined in practice. The Biophilic Instrument Pavilion (BIP), a site-responsive sound and light installation, serves as a model for such a collaboration using biophilic design as a unifying principle. This multidisciplinary project demonstrates spatialisation in ecological, sonic, visual and social contexts, offering insights into environmental instrument practices and collaborative creative processes.

In the last few years, Hindu nationalism’s effort to shape the Hindu identity of the nation has intensified. Apart from its move to assert cultural homogenisation over the diverse landscape, this ideology produces a newer understanding of spaces in the land. When it is read as a part of the broader Hindutva movement, the use of violence, bureaucratic overreach, or judicial intervention to rewrite the sacred topography of the land unmasks the territorial goal of Hindu Rashtra. The territorial manifestation of this ideology takes a strident effort inside the country to encroach and reclaim the spaces inhabited by the “other” as Hindu spaces in the name of the nation. This immediately establishes a clear and precise correlation between the spaces and the nature of the spaces. This territorialisation of the spaces indicates the spatial rearrangement of the public spaces to marginalise minorities, invisibilise Muslims, and push them into the “private” space.

The disciples of St Thomas Aquinas have organized their enquiries in diverse ways throughout the history of Thomism. The surge of reinvigorated interest in Thomas Aquinas following Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris inspired a wide variety of purported types of Thomism in the twentieth century. What should Thomists of the twenty-first century learn from their inheritance of past centuries of Thomism? How can they take up Leo XIII’s call vetera novis augere et perficere. I aim to address two issues in this essay. First, to identify a more principled demarcation of approaches to Thomistic enquiry, which eschews the commonplace but problematic and merely sociological classifications of the last century’s ‘schools’ of Thomism. I argue that a more principled and agenda-setting criteria distinguishes “defensive-constructive commentary Thomism” and “tradition-constituted-enquiry Thomism”. The first stresses fidelity to the conclusions found in careful readings of Aquinas’s texts. The second emphasizes fidelity to Aquinas’s systematic forms of enquiry directed to the truth. Second, I then probe the resources these two forms of Thomism have for addressing the epistemological crises facing Thomism, focusing on those concerning how to engage the nova of the sciences and rival philosophical traditions.

This paper examines clothing depicted in the portraits painted on the walls of the tombs of elites at various settlements in Campania and Lucania in southwest Italy in the fourth century BC, as it provides important information on sartorial appearances and self-perception, especially in view of the dearth of textiles and lack of textual sources. It investigates the interconnected relationship between dress behaviour, ethnic identity and social status among independent Italic groups in the region in this century, a time of political and cultural tensions triggered by Rome’s aggressive expansion of its territorial control. The images, as well as the material culture from grave assemblages, indicate that people expressed who they thought they were through clothing and dress accessories and that this happened on a local basis rather than on a large scale or ‘national’ level. It was predominantly women who were expressing group belonging through specific garments and styles, headdresses, colours and patterns. These images painted for perpetuity offer us a precious window on dress behaviour and they suggest that women were the primary bearers of small-scale community identities in funerary representation and in life in this period of political and social change.

Yogurt acid whey (YAW) contains significant amounts of calcium as well as small amounts of protein, thus the idea of its reintroduction, especially of its calcium content, to the food chain is attractive. Calcium in milk is mainly complexed with casein micelles, whereas YAW contains only small amounts of protein, with no caseins at all, differing substantially from milk in the form in which calcium occurs. Therefore, the objective of the present research paper was to evaluate whether calcium bioavailability differs between YAW and milk. Following the INFOGEST protocol for simulated digestion and by coupling it with the Caco-2 model for intestinal absorption, calcium in YAW had higher bioaccessibility than calcium in milk. However, there were no differences in calcium transport by the intestinal cells and the transcription level of calcium absorption-related genes (VDR, TRPV6, S100G and PMCA1). Lastly, there were no differences in calcium bioaccessibility and the transcription of the calcium absorption-related genes between YAW samples of bovine, ovine or caprine origin obtained from Greek dairy products enterprises. In conclusion, despite the major differences in the protein profile between YAW and milk, there were no differences in calcium transport by the cells, but YAW was associated with higher calcium bioaccessibility, which ultimately may result in higher amount of absorbed calcium.