Mr Reid died in March 2023. He had been an avowed atheist all his life and was resolutely opposed to the practice of burial; but because he had lost touch with his family, those responsible for his funeral mistakenly arranged for him to be buried in the area of Bognor Regis Town Cemetery consecrated for the rites of the Church of England. When his family learned what had happened, they petitioned for a faculty for his exhumation.

In May 2021, Jesus College Cambridge submitted to the Diocese of Ely a ‘faculty petition’ – that is, a formal request to alter the fabric of an ecclesiastical building – asking for permission to remove from the west wall of the college chapel a large memorial to Tobias Rustat, ‘because of Rustat's known involvement in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans’. On 23 March 2022, following hearings the month before, Hodge Dep Ch provided a written judgment in which he denied the application. The college, he said, had not provided a convincing case that the removal of the monument was ‘necessary to enable the Chapel to play its proper role in providing a credible Christian ministry and witness to the College community’, and such a case was needed to outweigh the ‘considerable, or notable, harm’ that would result from the removal ‘to the significance of the Chapel as a building of special architectural or historic interest’.

In this article, Sinéad Curtin, Legal Knowledge Manager in the Chief State Solicitor's Office, provides a guide to the free and subscription sources for researching Irish legislation. She explains how legislation is enacted, how to determine if it's in force and whether it's been amended. She also looks at tracking legislation, the transposition of EU directives and statutory interpretation in general. The article concludes with a list of sources for Irish legislation.

Since the American Deaf community’s formation in the early nineteenth century, ‘Deaf utopias’ have emerged across a wide range of tangible and fictional manifestations. These utopias have presented, on the one hand, as a fully accessible world in which deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals are integrated into the mainstream and, on the other, as a Deaf-centric world in which all or most inhabitants are Deaf and deafness constitutes the norm. These varied integrationist and separatist orientations have become spatially manifest, most notably, in the cultural narratives of ‘Eyeth’, John Jacobus Flournoy’s 1850s ‘Scheme for a Deaf Commonwealth’, Douglas Bullard’s 1986 novel Islay, and the signing community in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

This article investigates the ‘up-island’ town of Chilmark as a site of cultural fantasy within the American Deaf community, positing its history as spatially expressive of enduring political ambivalences within American Deaf culture - namely, internal debates about the community’s desired cultural position relative to the mainstream. Chilmark’s most definitive spatial artefacts, including buildings in its town center, its transportation infrastructure, rural character, and isolated geography, are here analysed and subsequently compared with parallel Deaf utopias, aiming to situate Chilmark within a broader Deaf-utopian legacy.

Building on existing accounts of Chilmark’s signing community (Nora Ellen Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language, 1985) and literary analyses of ‘Deaf utopia’ (Kristen Harmon, ‘Beyond Islay: A Brief Literary History of Deaf Utopia and Dystopia’, 2023), as well as the architectural scholarship of Jeffrey Mansfield (‘The Architecture of Deafness’, 2017) and Hansel Bauman (‘DEAFSPACE: An Architecture Towards a More Livable and Sustainable World’, 2014), this article further elaborates on the politically ambiguous meaning of ‘Deaf space’ and ‘Deaf utopia’ by critically examining some of the Deaf community’s most prominent spatial artefacts.

Lloyd Daniel Barba, assistant professor of religion at Amherst College, and Jonathan H. Ebel, professor and head of Religion at the University of Illinois, have written a pair of books that reframe the study of sacred space and the nature of religious communities while advancing the study of religion in the U.S. West. Each book does important theoretical and interpretive work on its own. Together, the books offer a rich picture of California’s Central Valley, a subregion that Kori Walker-Price notes has been “dismissed as a site of serious study” because of its factory farms, its mobile labor force, and its distance from the more iconic scenery of California and the west. But they do more than that. Both use their subjects to make larger arguments and claims about religion, methodology, power, race, and gender in the United States.

This article develops within the ‘design model’ of neurodiversity that explores how the creative professions have aligned their work with and in contrast to the established ‘medical’ and ‘social models’ in critical disability scholarship. Architects have frequently encountered the limits of dementia-friendly design principles when engaging with them in practice. Buro Kade Architects’ De Hogeweyk project in Weesp, the Netherlands (2008-09), which falsifies everyday life in a small-town environment that masks the mechanisms of surveillance of its older residents, has also raised ethical questions. Such precedents have driven architects such as Níall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou to explore ways of working directly with people living with the condition in the Alzheimer’s Respite Centre in Dublin, Ireland (2009). This experience has also inspired Manolopoulou and McLaughlin to develop collaborative practices of drawing towards more inclusive design processes in co-producing architecture, which have so far been shared only with a limited number of neurotypical peers. Even in such creative approaches, however, the pervasive perception of dementia as a form of deficit frequently persists. This seems to be challenged by the way that architecture is deployed in Florian Zeller’s The Father, performed on stage (2012) and turned into a feature film (2020). Despite being a different form of creative output, Zeller’s staging can expand the imagination of professional architects regarding their creative engagement with dementia. Through its cultural agency, the affective porosity of architecture in The Father plays a positive role in foregrounding and validating the lived experience of people living with this condition by rendering it relatable to neurotypical audiences. If relatability is a first step towards empathy, then architecture can also drive the allyship that counters othering. In so doing, it also aids in expanding difficult discussions around questions of citizenship and political representation of neurodiverse constituencies.

The article pioneers the examination of “hustle kingdoms”: illegal cybercrime training academies in West Africa. It explores these entities as innovative and adaptive institutions that emerge in response to systemic socio-economic strain. This article provides a unique analysis of hustle kingdoms by situating their emergence within the region’s socio-economic, cultural and technological trajectories. It does so by assessing the contemporary manifestation of these cybercrime academies with history in mind to understand the past that created them. It highlights how these cybercrime training academies have evolved from earlier forms, thereby showcasing a unique form of deviant innovation. It contributes to existing literature by addressing the critical gap in the scholarly discourse surrounding these entities and their historical evolution. Drawing on Merton’s strain theory, this historical scholarly endeavour examines how systemic barriers to education and employment have fostered deviant innovation, transforming hustle kingdoms from early fraud enterprises into sophisticated, global cybercrime networks. The analysis highlights the structural disparities that sustain their operations by juxtaposing these academies with conventional educational frameworks. The findings offer novel insights into the intersection of inequality, cultural narratives and technological adaptation, positioning hustle kingdoms as both products and catalysts of systemic strain.