This paper addresses the archaeological contexts of the clay moulds used to produce copies of Roman coins in third-century Britain. Previous research has focused primarily upon the technology and chronology of the use of moulds to produce coins with the discarded remains of the used moulds considered as ‘waste’ items from an industrial process. This paper focuses attention on the deposition of the moulds. Using the best-recorded finds, it builds upon earlier suggestions that disused moulds were regularly discarded in boundary locations (settlement boundaries, field boundaries, drainage features, shafts/wells, coastal locations and disused structures). It proposes that the magical and ritual associations of production meant that the clay moulds, in addition to the coins that were produced, required careful handling.

Last year saw yet another year of weather extremes. The Copernicus Climate Change Service run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission (Copernicus, 2024) measured 2023 as being globally the warmest year since records began in 1850. This was by a large margin (0.17 per cent) over the previous record in 2016, with global surface air temperature at nearly 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. While last year’s observations embodied an El Niño effect, which every few years sees temperatures affected by warmer waters coming to the surface of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean, changes and anomalies consistently observed over the last few years across the globe are becoming more pronounced. What is commonly labelled “climate change” is turning into a global climate emergency. No economy or society are immune to its effects. Today, we see the global average temperature at over 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, a rise that has been extraordinarily rapid on a planetary timescale, and one that has been primarily caused through our (humans) burning fossil fuels. Nearly a decade has passed since the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in 2015, COP21, where 196 nations adopted The Paris Agreement – a legally binding international treaty on climate change. Its goal was to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts “to limit the increase to 1.5°C”.

This paper presents the findings from a survey conducted in Norway to study the process of recovering from temporary disorientation in outdoor environments. The survey, with 693 respondents, investigated how individuals navigate and regain their bearings after getting disoriented for a short period of time. By collecting data on duration of disorientation and descriptions of participants' recovery experiences, we conducted both qualitative and quantitative analyses to establish a typology of spatial problem-solving [Downs, R. M. and Stea, D. (1977). Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping. New York: Harper & Row, p. 55] approaches employed in wayfinding after becoming temporarily lost in outdoor settings. The research systematically explores the use of materials and approaches described by respondents when re-establishing their bearings. The existing research literature lacks comprehensive reporting on people's strategies for solving the problem of being disoriented in the outdoors, which motivated us to conduct this study. The resulting typology gives an overview of approaches employed to solve the problem of being lost in the outdoors and contribute additional details and insights to the understanding of individuals' wayfinding behaviours and reorientation processes.

Burgeoning narratives of neurodivergence increase representation in media, producing an unprecedented visibility and awareness of what it means to be neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. In this article I examine the ways in which a neurodivergent subject position can provide liberatory insights into oppressive patriarchal gender structures, while exploring productive tensions of the histories and lineages of neurodivergence marked by inequities, erasure, and epistemic injustice (Catala et al. 2021). Although self-diagnosis is often accepted among communities, individuals without diagnosis face delegitimization in navigating institutions, accentuating race, class, and gender disparities. How do we honor a lineage of stories of neurodivergent individuals who could not claim this identity, and what does it mean to celebrate neurodiversity and simultaneously hold space and honor the absences marked by intersecting oppressions? Using Maria Lugones's world-traveling as a method, I reflect on these tensions via narratives of my own discovery of neurodivergence and diagnosis, contextualizing it within a larger lineage of neurodivergent family who do not identify as such, as well as my encounters with varying levels of access, privilege, and understanding. I position my autoethnographic analysis against anecdotes and discursive media of the neurodiversity movement, finding that an autistic subject position complicates both femininity and gender.

In 1923, Los Angeles teachers protested the state’s biennial budget, a controversial document from newly elected governor Friend Richardson that significantly cut funding to government agencies. The budget was the culmination of more than a decade of fiscal policy reform that reflected a significant shift in anti-tax sentiment. The expansion of state governance in the early twentieth century required the development of fiscal policies to meet the needs of the modern state, and public debates about taxation reflected deep ideological differences about the structure and scope of government and implicated public schooling. This analysis demonstrates two features of fiscal policy reform in California. First, tax reform shaped and was shaped by the political context, demonstrating the dynamic relationship between fiscal policy and state formation. Second, debates about tax reform were ultimately about the scope of government. Anti-tax campaigns that sought a more limited government implicated schooling, the largest item in the state budget, and undermined efforts to achieve educational equity.

Climate change is a complex global issue that requires widespread understanding, support and collaboration for effective solutions. This research delves into the crucial role of communication in tackling climate change and reaching net-zero goals. Leveraging advanced machine learning techniques, we focus on 10 core climate change topics derived from social media conversations over time. This analysis underscores the importance of a holistic and interconnected approach, involving a diverse array of policies at local, national and global levels to combat climate change effectively and attain net-zero objectives. We offer key policy suggestions that can significantly contribute to this vital cause.

Indigenous language activists talk about incommensurability all the time—in interesting ways that link language and knowledge as components of Indigenous lifeways that can't be disentangled. According to many of these scholar-activists, what is untranslatable about Indigenous languages is often what is incommensurate about Indigenous worlds. Drawing upon resources from Indigenous language-reclamation work, I outline here a nonexhaustive taxonomy of incommensurability in the literature about Indigenous philosophy of language, and gesture at the ways coalitional relationships might be built that hold space for these different varieties of incommensurability. For ease of explication and to honor Indigenous ways of knowing, I employ here an organizational metaphor rooted in my own communities’ traditions of canoe-voyaging to organize three forms of incommensurability that emerge from Indigenous philosophies of language: impassable incommensurability and strategic impassable incommensurability (big water through a rock garden), as well as incommensurability with technical passage: (heavy water through a rock garden). These forms of incommensurability, as they spring from Indigenous philosophies of language, lend themselves toward nuanced insights for careful and considerate world-traveling (à la Lugones) that holds space for epistemic and linguistic sovereignty.

Descriptive research—work aimed at answering “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “how” questions—is vital at every stage of social scientific inquiry. The creative and analytic process of description—through concepts, measures, or cases, whether in numeric or narrative form—is crucial for conducting research aimed at understanding politics in action. Yet, our field tends to devalue such work as “merely descriptive” (Gerring 2012), subsidiary to or less valuable than hypothesis-drive causal inference. This article posits four key areas in which description contributes to political science: in conceptualization, in policy relevance, in the management and leveraging of data, and in challenging entrenched biases and diversifying our field.