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.

This article by Susan Brodigan at McCann FitzGerald LLP provides an overview of Irish case law, outlining the methods used for researching Irish cases while also giving tips to those new to the profession, or to the Irish jurisdiction.

Poetry has proven a productive aesthetic discourse for those working in Russian and in Ukrainian, documented by a huge outpouring of verse and by both the articles in this forum. This viewpoint piece zeroes in on the ways in which poems have become a means of resistance, particularly for those writing in Russian, and on the roles played by translation as its own ethical act and as a form of further resistance. It ends with the example of Igor’ Bulatovskii's poetry and his broader actions as translator and editor.

Concerning the “ungrammatical” interrogative form aren't I, many scholars have made their points. However, these scholars’ arguments are based on their personal observations and few studies have examined this phenomenon against large corpora. This study aimed at investigating the widespread usage of “ungrammatical” contraction form aren't I in question tags from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Based on large corpora, this study showed a clear picture of the current frequency of use of the question tags aren't I and other alternatives (amn't I, ain't I, am I not and an't I) in modern English. From a qualitative perspective, this study found that the reason why aren't I has taken hold as a recognized standard form around the globe lies in that the use of aren't I appears to be a smart coincidence to imply the potential double roles of “I” as both the addresser and the addressee in a monologue. In addition, the fact of the matter that amn't I is difficult to pronounce, am I not is bookish, an't I is old-fashioned and ain't I can only be used in informal situations, increases the popularity of aren't I. The findings of this study can justify the usage of “ungrammatical” aren't I as a natural norm in both British English and American English. These findings open new research avenues alongside pedagogical and sociolinguistic implications for other similar “ungrammatical” language phenomenon.

We classify hyperbolic polynomials in two real variables that admit a transitive action on some component of their hyperbolic level sets. Such surfaces are called special homogeneous surfaces, and they are equipped with a natural Riemannian metric obtained by restricting the negative Hessian of their defining polynomial. Independent of the degree of the polynomials, there exist a finite number of special homogeneous surfaces. They are either flat, or have constant negative curvature.

Nepal is classified as a low-middle income country (World Bank, 2023), and like other such countries, it is under international pressure to attain gender equality targets in order to receive international aid. However, Nepal is also permeated by widespread perceptions that girls are subordinate to boys, which influences girls’ access to education, information, health and the labour market (Upadhaya & Sah, 2019). Women face restrictions in terms of their basic ability to ‘independently venture outside the household, maintain the privacy of their bank accounts, use mobile phones, or become employed’ (Karki & Mix, 2022: 413). Illiteracy disproportionately affects females, with 58.95% of illiterates being women and girls (UNESCO, 2021). Notwithstanding this, recent years have seen some progress in enhancing gender equality in Nepal, and females currently enjoy higher enrolment rates than males across secondary education (UNESCO, 2023). This article, however, provides evidence that the recent trend to offer English-medium education risks setting back progress made by creating a gender-differentiated system that could yield different outcomes for boys and girls and potentially restrict girls’ future trajectories post school and contribute to broader gender inequality in society.

This article explores how time-related metaphors frame advanced cryopreservation technologies in environmental conservation. Cryopreservation “stops” or “freezes” biological time and “buys time” desperately needed to preserve species and ecosystems. We advance a framing of these technologies as logistical, highlighting how they create opportunities to shift materials, knowledge, and decision-making power through space and time. As logistical technologies, advanced cryopreservation techniques require active planning in the present rather than deferring responsibility and accountability to the future.