In the final decades of its existence, the Qing imperial state sought to unify and standardize policies of frontier management. In this context, mapping and surveying practices developed as socio-technological discourses that transformed how Qing authorities asserted their territorial claims in the Eastern Himalayas. Most scholarship on the history of Qing-era frontier management has tended to focus on Chinese nation-building practices. However, this article foregrounds the deconstruction of the epistemic regime governing the production of geo-knowledge about the Eastern Himalayas by investigating the appropriation and rejection of the interlocutors of local and indigenous knowledge, networks, and actors.

How did military surveyors establish authoritative ideas about their own expertise? This article focuses on the late-Qing surveys of the Dzayul river basin commissioned by Zhao Erfeng and carried out by his subordinate officials Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu. Between 1910 and 1911, Zhao Erfeng ordered new surveys of the regions located at the north-easternmost tip of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, to demarcate the Qing Tibetan dominions and Chinese territory from that of British India. The surveyors Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu, mapped the route of the Dzayul River which flowed into British Indian territory through the Mishmi hills into Assam as the Lohit. These surveys largely claimed that natural features marked the “natural” or “traditional” boundaries of the imperial state, against local knowledge productions that framed those same topographical features as connectors rather than dividers. By dissembling the various strands that informed this archive of Qing colonial knowledge, I investigate the processes by which state-produced narratives created new kinds of citational practices to designate who could be recognized as an “expert” of the mountainous geography of Tibet and the trans-Himalayan regions.

Excavations at the Iron Age site of Worlebury hillfort during the mid-late 19th century revealed a large number of human skeletal remains, interpreted as victims of a ‘massacre’. Reanalysis of these remains, combining AMS dating, osteological, aDNA, histotaphonomy, and isotope analysis, has enabled a re-evaluation of this hypothesis. AMS dating lends support to the notion that many of these individuals may have died during a single episode, while osteological analysis has identified significant evidence for perimortem trauma, and the histology supports a short period between death and deposition. The genetic data suggest that the human remains represent a group with biological links through the maternal line and connections to another nearby site, while the isotope values are consistent with a local population, consuming animals raised in a salt-marsh environment like the Severn Estuary. Our results demonstrate the value of returning to often unpromising antiquarian collections using an integrated suite of modern analytical approaches.

Medicaid serves vulnerable populations that experience deep health inequities and significant health-related social needs. In recent years, reforms to Medicaid have sought to respond to those needs, with mixed results. Value based payment methods, which in theory link payment to outcome metrics, are emerging in commercial insurance markets and can be adapted to the needs of Medicaid programs and their beneficiaries. These methods seek to tie payment for services to the forging of connections between medical and social care including housing supports and nutrition services for vulnerable populations. This paper describes the merits and some pitfalls of the attempt to turn Medicaid from its roots as a medical insurance program to a broader health insurance program. It describes the benefits of employing community care hubs – intermediaries between community-based organizations and large payers and hospital systems – as a way to spur the move to social care in Medicaid. It also addresses some of the barriers to this move, including the perceived danger of “medicalizing” society’s failures and the apparent turn by the current federal administration away from commitment to health equity.

The period between 450 and 350 BC is regarded as a time of significant social change during the European Iron Age, with numerous processes of transformation, instability, conflict, and mobility unfolding across the European continent. However, in contrast to other episodes of abrupt social transformation, this period has received considerably less attention: it has been understood as a starting point or a sudden change but not usually researched in its own right.

The present study begins by reviewing different European archaeological contexts, exploring how this century is usually interpreted as a significant break. Next, the focus will shift to a specific region, north-west Iberia, in order to identify changes in patterns of occupation and social dynamics. The primary objective is to examine the shift that occurred around 400 BC, identify any common pattern or trend across different regions, and assess long-term consequences. Finally, I propose a series of interpretations at different scales, aiming to raise some possible hypotheses for understanding the development of this brief yet eventful period.

Pope Francis’s “Pilgrims of Hope” and Pope Leo’s emphasis on listening and dialogue invite us to reflect on how communal action within the College Theology Society fosters hope in a period of destabilizing social and ecclesial challenges. Hope is both a gift and a task—it sustains action for justice while being nurtured by such action. The story of Joseph of Arimathea provides an example of small, faithful acts of resistance to injustice and dehumanization, taken in community, that can generate hope. Our work together as a theological society and our new CTS initiatives—our visioning process, decolonization efforts, and renewed international partnerships—are practices of intentional communion that embody resistance to polarizing forces and open pathways for theological engagement that promote solidarity, hope, and human flourishing.

Contemporary visual artist Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series stages and documents her reparative practice of taking self-portraits in sites around New York City where enslaved Africans lived, died, and are buried. Considering Faustine’s self-portrait series not only as photography but also as performance documentation invites theorizations of memorial practices (rather than monumental objects) and their affordances for liberatory aesthetic projects.

This article examines Teresa of Avila’s articulation of and response to spiritual suffering in the Interior Castle. It applies a feminist hermeneutic to the text in order to locate the resources that contribute to Teresa’s resiliency in the face of this suffering. This approach to the text reveals that Teresa’s use of contemplative prayer and interactions with her community facilitate a direct engagement with her suffering so as to make it manageable. Her successful navigation of the spiritual journey allows her the opportunity to share her insights toward resiliency with her community by speaking honestly about her experience in her writings. This article’s approach to reading the Interior Castle lifts up Teresa’s experience as a potential resource for women today who may have difficulty locating a sense of agency in their own experiences of suffering.

Worldwide, the legal profession is grappling with how deeply to embrace the datafication of law. Drawing on interviews and the public record, this article offers a case study of how France’s 2016 Law for a Digital Republic—which promised public release of all judicial decisions—exposed divisions within the French legal profession over technology, big data, and identity. A heated debate over “predictive justice” (justice prédictive) mobilized competing coalitions, ultimately resulting in France becoming the first country to ban data analytics that reveal the identity of individual judges in 2019. For scholars of the legal profession, this episode highlights how legal professionals serve as gatekeepers of technological change and, in the process, reshape law-related cultural scripts central to national identity. For scholars interested in big data, the French case reminds us that the datafication of law is not an inexorable force, but rather a contested political process. And for those interested in court administration, France’s experience offers insight into how one early-moving jurisdiction re-negotiated the boundaries of privacy and judicial transparency for the twenty-first century.