The media are often blamed for widespread perceptions that welfare benefit claimants are undeserving in Anglo-Saxon countries – yet people rarely justify their views through media stories, instead saying that they themselves know undeserving claimants. In this paper, I explain this contradiction by hypothesising that the media shapes how we interpret ambiguous interpersonal contact. I focus on disability benefit claimants, which is an ideal case given that disability is often externally unobservable, and test three hypotheses over three studies (all using a purpose-collected survey in the UK and Norway, n=3,836). In Study 1, I find strong evidence that a randomly-assigned ‘benefits cheat’ story leads respondents to interpret a hypothetical disability claimant as less deserving. Study 2 examines people’s judgements in everyday life, finding that readers of more negative newspapers in the UK are much more likely to judge neighbours as non-genuine – but with effectively no impact on judgements of close family claimants, where ambiguity is lower. However, contra my expectations, in Study 3 I find that Britons are no more likely than Norwegians to perceive known claimants as non-genuine (despite more negative welfare discourses), partly because of different conceptions of what ‘non-genuineness’ means in the two countries.

There are people who leave their mark in their field. Without doubt, Pier Luigi Nimis (for the registry office, Pierluigi; for friends, Pier; for family members, Pil; for me and a few colleagues, PL) is such a person. On the threshold of retirement but no less active than ever, Pier Luigi is about to begin a new phase of his life, a life dedicated entirely to science and, in particular, to lichenology.

This article does not attempt to paint a complete picture of Michael Wolters (b.1971) as composer, teacher or researcher. Rather, it is a collection of comments and reflections drawn from a number of recent conversations with him. In these conversations we considered the work he has produced across his career, with a particular focus on his ideas about conceptual working, his outsider position and the essential part that accessibility plays in his creative decision-making.

This article discusses the way textile metaphors can act as catalysts for reflection in my practice as a trumpet performer and composer. Metaphors such as ‘fibre’, ‘spin’, ‘yarn’, ‘ply’, ‘weave’, ‘loom’, ‘drape’ and ‘felt’ are engaged as lenses through which the dynamic, contingent and tailorable interactions are made between sonic and extra-sonic elements in my expanded practice. The metaphors are engaged to shape instrumental techniques, improvisation, form, audiovisual media, physicality and spatial design. In this article, I describe how I developed my own expanded sonic practice by using Tim Ingold's concept of ‘textility’, expressed as a Textile Sonic Method (TSM). I demonstrate the application of this method using a subset of textile metaphors as the basis for the development of new double-bell trumpet techniques and applications in a range of compositions: Gradient (2020–23), for double-bell trumpet, live video and sound processing, co-composed with Olivia Davies and Nick Roux; Untitled (2021), for double-bell trumpet, portative organ and electronics, co-composed with James Rushford; and my own work Charcoal VI (2017), for spatialised, amplified double-bell trumpet. This article outlines the potential for the application of metaphor as a creative catalyst in an expanded sonic practice.

Pope Francis's has described his vision for a synodal Church, not simply as a once off programme of renewal, but as God's desire for the Church of the third millennium. As such, it aims to concretise the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council, making the Church today more manifestly one of communion, participation, and mission. It differs from previous synods and Councils in history in that it more directly invites and involves all the baptised in a direct process of listening and discernment to the voice of the Holy Spirit. This paper aims to understand from a theological perspective how listening will work in a synodal Church, by exploring firstly what we mean by the ecclesiology of communion from the Council. Such an ecclesiology, manifesting the equal dignity of the faithful in Christ, will ground listening at the level of participation in God as well as acknowledging the gift of infallibility given to the whole Church. It means calling on the Holy Spirit to help discern how and where, the apostolic deposit of faith has been received by members of the body. It also explores what we mean by listening to the sensus fidei of the whole body and how the authority of laity and hierarchy operate both in united but distinct ways within a synodal process grounded in communion ecclesiology. Overall, such listening is to be done carefully for the sake of the Church's mission as the sacrament of salvation to the world.

The study of suicide is an emerging and important interdisciplinary field in central and east European Studies. The importance of the topic is self-evident. Suicide is literally a matter of life and death, important in its own right; but the study of suicide is also a means of addressing larger questions in the history, culture, and politics of the region. Suicide is almost always an object of grave concern whenever and wherever it occurs, thus prompting a wealth of statistical and discursive documentation and information. It is a supremely individual act—arguably the supreme individual act—but also one that implicates and involves the community or society in which it occurs. This is especially true during times of seeming or actual spikes in the occurrence of self-killing, so-called “suicide epidemics” that demand immediate attention and explanation. But the reasons for suicide are also often highly elusive, creating what Irina Paperno has termed a “black hole” into which is drawn the explanations, rationalizations, and justifications of all those proximate to the act. In this way, to study suicide in its social context is also to study the attitudes and the anxieties of the society in question. It is to look through a glass darkly: to see a reflection of contemporary concerns and attitudes that might otherwise have gone unseen.

We establish some properties of $\tau$-exceptional sequences for finite-dimensional algebras. In an earlier paper, we established a bijection between the set of ordered support $\tau$-tilting modules and the set of complete signed $\tau$-exceptional sequences. We describe the action of the symmetric group on the latter induced by its natural action on the former. Similarly, we describe the effect on a $\tau$-exceptional sequence obtained by mutating the corresponding ordered support $\tau$-tilting module via a construction of Adachi-Iyama-Reiten.