This article traces the transnational circulation of socialist reforms in the field of sex education through the work of Monika Krause, a citizen of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) who migrated to Cuba and became the “Cuban Queen of Condoms.” For Krause, the overarching goal of sex education was to “teach tenderness” to the people. The socialist state’s mission to prepare the population for love, marriage, partnership, and family in Cuba and the GDR involved using complex measures. This paper describes these, contextualizes them in transnational debates, and explains some of the internal reasoning behind their institutionalization. It also explains why looking at state-level efforts to “teach tenderness to the people” matters for a transnational history of sex education.

The Ohio-based Black songwriter, Joshua Simpson, published two books of antislavery songs in the mid-nineteenth century, Original Anti-Slavery Songs in 1852 and Emancipation Car in 1854. Unlike most other known songsters, which were compilations of poetry from several authors, Simpson authored original lyrics for borrowed melodies, and he did so with extraordinary care, engaging the original song to enhance his activist messages. Employing the rhetorical practice of signification, his linkage of new lyrics with preexisting songs sometimes builds upon meaning from the original text, reusing it to add weight to the moral and political arguments against slavery. He also extends nature imagery and lyrics about the comforts of home and family in traditional ballads and contemporary sentimental songs to his new lyrics, but more often his signifying practice is ironic. He inverts the original song's sentimentality in deliberately discomforting ways that could persuade Americans to assist self-emancipating people and work toward wholescale abolition of slavery. Simpson's most radical songs talk back irreverently to the originals, especially minstrel tunes containing degrading caricatures and proslavery propaganda as well as patriotic anthems proclaiming hypocritical platitudes. Simpson did not simply write new songs; he transformed some of the most popular and beloved songs of his era, harnessing their renown to sharpen his activist messages.

Since the late nineteenth century, the “Indian” as symbol has been a recurring trope in the art music of Mexico and the United States. Composers in both countries have often turned to representations of Indigenous Peoples as symbolic of nature, spirituality, and/or aspects of the national Self. This article seeks to place James DeMars's opera Guadalupe, Our Lady of the Roses (2008) in the context of two major cultural trends: Indianism in the U.S., and the representation of Mexico by U.S. composers. DeMars's use of Indigenous instruments in Guadalupe, including Mexican pre-Hispanic percussion, and flutes performed by famed Navajo-Ute flutist R. Carlos Nakai, continues the Indianist tradition of associating the Indigenous cultures of both countries with nature, spirituality, and authenticity. Similar associations emerge in the development and reception of both “world music” and the Native American recording industry since the 1980s, as exemplified by Nakai's career. DeMars uses these instruments in combination with Plains Native American features and generic exoticisms to represent both the Mexican Indigenous Peoples and the spiritual message of the opera. The sympathetic treatment of Indigenous cultures in Guadalupe nevertheless exists in tension with their exoticism and Otherness; in this the work is representative of U.S. cultural responses to Mexico stretching back throughout the long twentieth century.

This article argues for an as-yet-undiscovered double allusion to Aratus’ Phaenomena (1–5 and 100–7) embedded in Cicero's De diuinatione (1.79). This intertextual link sheds light on a now-lost passage of Cicero's Aratea and raises some questions about the relationship between Cicero's dialogue and Catullus 64.

Safe and effective navigation of the world's oceans and waterways relies on maritime education and training. This involves the learning of motor, procedural and verbal components of complex skills. Motor learning theory evaluates training variables, such as instructions, feedback and scheduling, to determine best practices for long-term retention of such skills. Motor learning theory has come a long way from focusing primarily on underlying cognitive processes to now including individual and contextual characteristics in making predictions about instructional strategies and their role in performance and learning. A remaining challenge in applying recent motor learning theory to maritime education and training is a lack of empirical testing of complex vocational skills, such as simulation scenarios, with delayed retention and transfer tests. Incorporating theory-based understanding of beneficial instructional practices, through both cognitive approaches and those considering context and environment, task complexity and learner characteristics is a fruitful way forward in advancing maritime education and training.

This article deals with the fight between the river Trebia and Scipio the Elder in Silius Italicus’ Punica (4.525–703), notoriously based on the Homeric battle between Achilles and Scamander (Il. 21.1–382). By means of a close reading of the geographical details of Silius’ account, this article aims at highlighting the peculiar role given to the landscape in this episode. By intertwining well-established epic topoi and historiographical reflections, the poet imbues Italy's landscape with a profound ideological meaning. His depiction of the natural environment thematizes key issues relating to the Second Punic War, such as the disruptive effects of Hannibal's invasion on the bond between Italian communities, the problematic nature of shared Italian identity, and the contagious nature of rebellion.

Before International Studies can confront the future, it needs to get a better grip on its past and present. The discipline lacks agreement on both its own name and the name of its object of study. More importantly, key concepts used to describe phenomena have changed continuously: no concept emerging in the 19th century has remained untouched, no envisioned future of the past could have prepared us for the present. Old concepts have been discarded, new ones adopted, and existing ones modified. This implies that any exercise in ‘futurology’ must necessarily come with an openness towards conceptual change, and that a key challenge for International Studies going forward will consist in matching our conceptual toolbox to an ever-changing world. The importance of conceptual change has until recently been neglected in the study of global politics. Thus, in this paper we start by presenting the empirical case for incorporating conceptual change by laying out key past and present conceptual changes in the international realm. We then move on to a presentation of conceptual history and the tools it provides us for grasping conceptual change, before discussing how to tackle conceptual developments when thinking about the future of global politics.

The convent in Early Modern Italy functioned as a uniquely queer space, denying women heteronormative lives while producing homosocial, virginal communities. As nuns wove together the dual acts of listening and vocalizing, they built queer sonic environments that were the site of massive power struggles between male church officials, the bodies of women religious, and the wealthy families of Italy. Connecting voice studies, feminist and queer musicology, sound studies, and nun studies to explore new ways of approaching convent musicking, the author examines Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana’s ‘O magnum mysterium’ to illuminate the possibilities of women’s agency and queerly inflected performance.

Book banning is a topic covered in many US history classrooms. Students learn that in the first decades of the twentieth century, fights over the teaching of evolution led to restrictions on science texts. Meanwhile, fears about the spread of communism sparked campaigns to limit access to “subversive” ideas. Well into the 1960s, textbooks usually explain, Americans remained at odds about what schools should be free to teach.

What’s old is new, it seems. And tomorrow’s textbooks will have to be updated with stories from the present. As this issue goes to press, conservative groups across the United States have sought to remove hundreds of titles from schools and libraries. Such attempts range from challenges filed by individual parents—often inspired by the list curated on BookLooks.org—to statewide legislative efforts to recall books from schools. Thousands of books have been removed from libraries and classrooms, and the chilling effect has led cautious educators to self-censor even further.

For this policy dialogue, the HEQ editors asked Adam Laats and Kasey Meehan to discuss book banning in the US, focusing particularly on the motivations of groups seeking to limit what young people can read. Adam Laats is a professor of education and history at SUNY Binghamton. A leading scholar of conservative activism in education, he is the author of several books including The Other School Reformers (Harvard University Press, 2015) and Fundamentalist U (Oxford University Press, 2018). Kasey Meehan is the director of the Freedom to Read program at PEN America, where she leads initiatives to protect the right of students to freely access literature in schools. Founded in 1922, PEN America is the largest of the more than one hundred centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network. PEN America works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others.

HEQ policy dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

A debate has raged for decades over legal pluralism and its value for the study of law. Much of this back and forth has resolved to a fight over what law “is” and push-and-pull between legal centrists and pluralists. This introductory essay proposes a new framework for thinking about legal pluralism. Turning away from the centrist/pluralist binary, we instead ask what work legal pluralism as a category of analysis can do. The debate, we suggest, is a fundamental methodological disagreement about the normative work that categories of analysis do and the costs that historians should be willing to pay to reap the benefits of theoretically sophisticated frameworks of analysis which are interoperable between times and places. The debate about legal pluralism, we argue, can be productively reframed as a question about the benefits and drawbacks of the legal pluralist framework.

Confronting the coming five decades from our present conjuncture demands – to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci’s famous mantra – both critical pessimism and a wilful politics of hope. In this article, we engage with the politics of climate breakdown and the responses to wider socio-ecological crises with a necessary critical pessimism. Specifically, we confront the capture of green transition imperatives by finance capital, as well as the troubling orientation of transition towards building new structures of accumulation around the vision of an electrified consumer society. We also see the coming decades being marked by the ever-increasing wealth of global asset-owning classes – who, by definition, enclose the atmospheric commons faster than any other community. Against this dystopian picture of increasingly concentrated wealth, corporate excess, and terrestrial crisis, we focus on the stubborn reproduction of socio-ecological life through various grounded projects across the world. We engage with communities who work against structural constraints to reproduce life from below through urban commoning, food sovereignty, Indigenous organising, and caretaking economies – all of which are scaling out their visions through alternative internationals. All of these projects, we argue, present a planetary and multiscalar political economy in practice, which connects grounded experience with resistance to the dynamics of capitalism at the state, corporate, and transnational levels. With lessons from these communities in mind, we call for a ‘planetary political economy of the global majority’, which prioritises the reproduction of socio-ecological life according to the visions of grounded anti-systemic projects.