This article considers a curious document – Baker’s Australian County Atlas – which contains carefully illustrated maps of each of the 19 counties in the colony of New South Wales in the mid-1840s. The analysis seeks to bridge the gap between high-level geographical studies of the British invasion of New South Wales and historical analysis of settler colonial property formation. We argue that the Atlas reveals the mechanics of territorial accumulation and Aboriginal dispossession in nineteenth-century New South Wales in their historical and material specificity, locating instances of ‘improvement’ – clearing, fencing and the construction of temporary and permanent buildings – at the centre of settler colonial land administration and sovereignty. The article demonstrates that the legal obligation to improve ultimately regulated colonial urbanization, enacting a process in which buildings and other structures functioned less as ends in themselves than as discrete operations within a more pervasive and abiding process of dispossession.

The Katakomben-Stichting (Catacombs Foundation) is a private institution established in 1913 by the wealthy Dutch textile entrepreneur Jan F.M. Diepen and his family on the site of a ‘facsimile’ of the most famous sections of the Roman catacombs (today Museum Romeinse Katakomben), constructed between 1909 and 1913 in an abandoned quarry in Valkenburg aan de Geul, the Netherlands. The Foundation owns a collection of early Christian artifacts, watercolours and cartoons aimed at the creation of replicas of the catacomb paintings, as well as an archive, all of which await proper study and dissemination. A careful survey of the archive has added a new and valuable piece to the history of research involving the Crypt of Saint Cecilia in the Catacomb of Saint Callixtus. Diepen, together with the Trappist monk Eugenius van Doorn, coordinated between 1912 and 1916 a pioneering stratigraphic analysis of the decorations of the so-called ‘palimpsest wall’ of the Crypt, after they discovered a previously unknown fragment of an early medieval wall painting containing the bust of a Christ hovering in the sky, from that moment known as Salvatore Olandese. The analysis was supported by meticulous documentation of the decorations, which remains largely unpublished within the Foundation’s archive. The reasons for not publishing this comprehensive study remain uncertain. Examining Diepen’s notebook and correspondence with Rome-based archaeologists and art historians reveals a ‘harsh’ picture of the so-called ‘Roman school’ of Christian Archaeology, marked by rivalries and hostilities and lacking scientific collaboration with foreign scholars. It was precisely within this environment that a certain obstructionism appears to have emerged against the Dutch amateur and his circle’s efforts to study and publish the Salvatore Olandese, contributing to the ‘cancellation’ of this fresco from collective memory to this day.

Research has robustly demonstrated that children exposed to early ecological adversity are at risk for developing antisocial, externalizing behavior problems (rule breaking, aggression, disregard for others). Yet, studies have also demonstrated multifinality in developmental pathways unfolding in adversity’s aftermath, with many children showing remarkable resilience. Understanding sources of such resilience is critical, especially across different populations (Luthar et al., 2006, 2015). In Family Study (FS, 102 low-risk mothers, fathers, and infants) and Play Study (PS, 186 high-risk mother-toddler dyads), we test a model of parent–child attachment security, observed at 15 months in FS and 2.5 years in PS, as a moderator of effects of early family ecological adversity, assessed as a cumulative score of sociodemographic risks (graded for severity) at 7 months in FS and 2.5 years in PS, on children’s antisocial, externalizing problems, observed and parent-reported at 5.5 years in FS and 7 years in PS. We supported moderation for mother–child relationships in both studies: Higher early family adversity was associated with more antisocial outcomes five years later, but only for children with less secure attachments. We highlight the key role of early security as a protective factor and a source of resilience for children in families experiencing adversity.

This paper argues that debates concerning gender terms and context sensitivity should take into account retraction, i.e., the ability to take back a previously true assertion of one’s gender identity. We begin by rejecting the intuition that gender terms should vary in truth value based on the “medical” and “bathroom” scenarios, where a trans woman (or man) should be classed as a woman (or man) in the latter, but not the former because she (or he) lacks certain organs (e.g. cervix or testicles). Assigning authority to self-identification, we hold that if someone identifies as a woman in bathroom scenarios she should also be classed as a woman in medical scenarios. Instead, we draw support for context sensitivity of gender terms from retraction data. We take gender retraction to be supported by the testimonies of trans people. Specifically, we explore the less discussed Later in Life narrative where individuals come to realise their true gender identities later in life. After demonstrating the shortfalls of existing contextualist accounts of retraction, we present a novel version of semantic relativism - Gender Relativism - that is faithful to gender testimonies. Our view accounts for retraction, takes into consideration self-identification and explains why transphobic denials of an individual’s gender testimony are false.

This paper revisits the restrictive/appositive distinction with Mandarin relative clauses and argues against the commonly held view that their restrictive/appositive status directly correlates with their structural positions. We demonstrate that distinct uses of demonstratives constitute a relevant factor in establishing the correlation, such that the pre-/post-demonstrative position is relevant to the semantic status of a relative when the demonstrative is used deictically, but not when it is used anaphorically; and that this refined typology of RCs can be accounted for once existing analyses of strong definites (Elbourne 2005. Situations and individuals; Schwarz 2009. Two types of definites in natural language; Jenks 2018. Linguistic Inquiry 49. 501–536) are extended to Mandarin demonstratives.

We study the existence and multiplicity of positive bounded solutions for a class of nonlocal, non-variational elliptic problems governed by a nonhomogeneous operator with unbalanced growth, specifically the double phase operator. To tackle these challenges, we employ a combination of analytical techniques, including the sub-super solution method, variational and truncation approaches, and set-valued analysis. Furthermore, we examine a one-dimensional fixed-point problem.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first workaddressing nonlocal double phase problems using these methods.

Legal systems often suffer from what may be called legal inflation: an excess of laws that erodes legal compliance. The difficulty lies in identifyng which laws are responsible for this erosion. Democratic deliberation is poorly suited to the task. This paper advances an identification criterion: laws that generate both widespread non-compliance and inconsistent enforcement should be regarded as defective, because they fail to function as laws. I propose a new version of the rule of obsolescence to repeal defective laws. This framework clarifies the mechanisms by which legal inflation undermines institutional stability and offers guidance for legal reform.

That God could have not created the world is a commonplace of Christian theology, often invoked to articulate the meaning of divine freedom. This essay argues that this counterfactual predication cannot be made consistent with the classical doctrine of God and so cannot be an adequate way of characterising God’s freedom. Drawing on a critical realist account of coherent counterfactual predications, it is shown that every cogent counterfactual attribution implies that the subject of the attribution is located in time, possessed of potential, and knowable in its essence. These entailments of counterfactual predications render them formally incompatible with a classical theist doctrine of God, in which God is not temporally located, purely actual and unknowable in essence by humans in the status viatoris. If the counterfactual on divine predicating compromises the divine simplicity, divine perfection and divine pure actuality, it should be understood to be a metaphorical, not substantial divine predication.

Deliberative practices have gradually become part of the political discourse, policies, and governance, particularly over the last 30 years in the Republic of Türkiye (Şahin 2024b). However, this period also coincides with a rise in competitive authoritarianism through centralization and regime change (Ergenç and Yüksekkaya 2024; Esen 2021). As debates continue regarding the mechanisms of representative democracy and basic human rights, the ruling party, AKP, presents deliberation as a tool for legitimizing its power, whereas opposition parties see it as a means by which to uphold democratic rights. Despite the wide use of deliberation-related terminology, effective and innovative deliberative examples remain scarce (Tansel 2018).

In many contemporary migration societies, an increasing percentage of residents do not have suffrage. This also holds true for the city of Vienna. In the 2020 municipal elections, almost a third of the Viennese population was excluded from suffrage; this rate of exclusion had doubled since 2000 (Mokre and Ehs 2021, 716). At the same time, Vienna has a long history of deliberative practices and experiments. A first deliberative experiment dates back to 1990, when a “Forum City Constitution” was initiated by the City Council to discuss the reform of citizens’ participation (Haas et al. 2024, 20). This forum did not lead to concrete political effects, and the deliberative turn reached Vienna only after 2000. Other deliberative practices have been introduced over time. Many of these instruments allow for the participation of the entire resident population irrespective of individuals’ voting rights; however, most of them are neither legally prescribed nor legally binding. These are the most inclusive instruments, and many of them allow people who ordinarily lack voting rights to participate. Normatively, this inclusion can be evaluated positively for two reasons: (1) some form of inclusion of the whole population in democratic decision making is desirable (Bauböck 2001; Gherghina, Mokre, and Mișcoiu 2021); and (2) deliberative practices arguably improve the quality of democracies by broadening inclusion, increasing the efficacy of political decisions, and contributing to civic education (Gherghina and Jacquet 2023, 504).

Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) are a specific form of deliberative mini-publics that are increasingly used to address complex policy challenges, especially in climate governance (Boswell, Dean, and Smith 2023; Smith 2024; Willis, Curato, and Smith, 2022). They involve randomly selected citizens who deliberate and provide policy recommendations (Curato 2021). However, their implementation and uptake largely depend on political parties and elites, which may perceive these novel instruments as challenging their authority (Elstub and Escobar 2019; Setälä 2017). Given the growing use of deliberative mini-publics by representative institutions (Paulis et al. 2021), research has explored their interaction with political parties (Gherghina 2024; Gherghina, Soare, and Jacquet 2020a).