BrANCH's Harriet Tubman essay prize seeks to reward the best undergraduate essay or research project by Black, Asian, or other minority ethnic students based in the UK. The prize is generously cosponsored by the Royal Historical Society.

This article asks whether and how gendered violence was part of the quotidian activity of state building in German South West Africa. Investigating the intimate space of a police compound, it gives a micro-historical account of how interracial sexual relations unfolded there, and how policemen’s private, intimate affairs were subject to close scrutiny by the colonial state. Rape – as distinctively masculine violence – posed a notably delicate problem to the legitimacy of the colonial state. The white masculine prerogative needed to be affirmed as the raison d’être of the colonial regime, but disorderly, unprofessional violence had to be controlled for the same reason. The case examined in this article was a rare moment in which an African woman attempted to take part in the discussion over the meaning of sex and violence. Ultimately, her articulation of what intimate, physical interactions meant to her was ignored. Instead, policemen articulated what masculine honour and comradeship meant to them. These discussions over what individual ‘honourable’ (including violent) behaviour implied were also always negotiations over the nature of colonial power and its programme.

This comparative study of Tristan Bernays’ Old Fools (2018) and Nick Payne’s Elegy (2016) concerns two contemporary plays in which love manifested in middle-age and older adulthood is a determinant factor in the reconceptualization of the ageing self, particularly when afflicted by memory loss or cognitive failure. Positioned within the framework of theatre and ageing studies, and drawing from their intersection with gender studies and disability theories, the study demonstrates that the narrative arc that both texts recreate is not free of overtones of decline. However, the manipulation of chronological time in both plays through different techniques, as well as the importance of their love story, one between a man and a woman in Old Fools, and the other between two women in Elegy, help disrupt the binary of young/old perpetuated by ageist cultures, and, ultimately, undermine rigid constructions of identity in old age. The article concludes that new theatrical representations of ageing that develop narratives of love not only enable richer debates on the construction of the self, but ultimately contribute to an all-inclusive stage and, with it, to an age-friendly society.

International relations theory tends to build on the conventional narrative of the Wars of Religion (WoR), which holds it was the irrationality of religious violence that generated the modern international system of pragmatic secular states—resulting in the presumed secularized, rational, and unemotive nature of politics. In contrast, this article reorients our focus to Durkheim's more social view of religion as a community of believers and to the continued role of the sacred and shared emotion/affect in social and political life. Specifically, it examines how modern communities (such as nations) remain constituted by a shared faith in conceptions of the sacred and how the corresponding sense of moral order is central to the enduring pursuit of ontological security. Therefore, it argues that international relations should focus on the perennial struggles over what communities hold sacred and that we can better understand the propensity for (“religious” or “secular”) violence by examining the continual interplay between the sacred, ontological security, and the hermeneutics of morality—with the so-called WoR being the locus classicus of this argument. Historical studies exploring how participants in the WoR navigated such struggles over the sacred thus allow us to explore these dynamics and further conceptualize our understanding of the sacred within modern “secular” politics. The article concludes by examining how the prospect for violence is interrelated with the perennial struggles over the sacred within, and between, political orders—a sentiment that brings into relief some of the hazards accompanying growing intrastate moral polarization and interstate ideological rivalry.

Non-aureus staphylococci (NAS) are gaining importance in mastitis and public health, and some NAS have been reclassified as mammaliicocci (NASM). Bovine milk production has a major influence on the world economy, being an essential source of income for small, medium and large producers, and bovine mastitis caused by NASM can cause an economic impact. Mastitis generates financial losses due to reduced revenue, increased veterinary costs and expenses associated with animal slaughter. However, it is also a public health issue involving animal health and welfare, human health and the ecosystem. Furthermore, it is an increasingly common infection caused by NASM, including antimicrobial-resistant strains. Despite all these adverse effects that NASM can cause, some studies also point to its protective role against mastitis. Therefore, this review article addresses the negative and positive aspects that NASM can cause in bovine mastitis, the virulence of the disease and resistance factors that make it difficult to treat and, through the One Health approach, presents a holistic view of how mastitis caused by NASM can affect both animal and human health at one and the same time.

This article argues that because a center–periphery model has dominated our understanding of postwar suburban growth we have failed to fully understand the rural dimensions of that growth. That misunderstanding resulted from the urban orientation of sociologists who studied the suburbs. As a consequence, we have also not appreciated the extent to which rural political outlooks shaped the postwar backlash against New Deal liberalism in the suburbs.

A collision-free path planning method is proposed based on learning from demonstration (LfD) to address the challenges of cumbersome manual teaching operations caused by complex action of yarn storage, variable mechanism positions, and limited workspace in preform weaving. First, by utilizing extreme learning machines (ELM) to autonomously learn the teaching data of yarn storage, the mapping relationship between the starting and ending points and the teaching path points is constructed to obtain the imitation path with similar storage actions under the starting and ending points of the new task. Second, an improved rapidly expanding random trees (IRRT) method with adaptive direction and step size is proposed to expand path points with high quality. Finally, taking the spatical guidance point of imitation path as the target direction of IRRT, the expansion direction is biased toward the imitation path to obtain a collision-free path that meets the action yarn storage. The results of different yarn storage examples show that the ELM-IRRT method can plan the yarn storage path within 2s–5s when the position of the mechanism changes in narrow spaces, avoiding tedious manual operations that program the robot movements, which is feasible and effective.