The 2024 war in Lebanon has created an urgent humanitarian crisis, significantly exacerbating the already existing challenges in the health care sector. With a high number of casualties reported, hospitals are overwhelmed and struggling due to the prolonged economic downturn and deteriorating infrastructure. Many health care facilities face the threat of closure from bombings and critical supply shortages, while health care workers are increasingly at risk, leading to a troubling exodus of medical professionals from the country. This alarming situation complicates the treatment of war-related injuries, particularly as essential medications and medical supplies become increasingly scarce. Moreover, the lack of adequate resources limits the ability to effectively respond to the growing medical needs of the population. Immediate international assistance, focusing on providing essential medical supplies, supporting health care workers through safety measures and incentives, and reinforcing hospital infrastructure to prevent closures, is crucial for mitigating the ongoing conflict’s devastating impact on public health. Addressing these challenges by securing resources for both immediate medical treatment and long-term health care infrastructure resilience is vital for restoring a functional health care system amid the ongoing violence.

This article examines the dynamics of youth identity formation at a boarding school for “at-risk” children. The school prepares its young boarders for adulthood through systematic intervention in their everyday cultural practices. By inducing a state of social liminality, or felt in-betweenness, the school seeks to guide its students—mainly youth of color—towards particular social roles, norms, and beliefs. However, children respond and adapt to this ambivalence, which leads to lasting effects as they transition into young adulthood. Utilizing extensive fieldwork and longitudinal data, the analysis employs an interpretive approach to provide context-specific insights into these dynamics. The study details the cultural interventions observed in 2013-14 and revisits the children, now young adults, a decade later, to understand the policy and ethical implications of those interventions. In so doing, this study contributes to understanding the complex interaction between authority, conformity, and identity management within institutions devoted to transforming the lives of children at the social margins.

Here we examine interactions between centralised and devolved employment policy and welfare in Scotland, Wales and England, taking a qualitative approach to gain a street-level perspective. This paper’s twin aims are to challenge the privileging of methodological nationalism in the study of welfare regimes and to offer a substate alternative through a street-level perspective. In the context of prevailing trends towards activation measures and mixed economies of welfare across Western Europe, the UK’s work first approach and categorisation as a Liberal welfare regime of minimal provision is complexified using a devolved policy context.

Our findings on cross-jurisdictional interactions show devolved employment programmes in Scotland and Wales actively reshaping welfare delivery in ways that resist the UK’s historically centralised approach. We contribute to a growing body of literature on substate welfare regimes with significant implications for the privileging of methodological nationalism in the study of work and welfare.

Colonization and ongoing colonial policies and practices are contributing to increased dementia rates in Indigenous populations. This health inequity could be addressed by implementing culturally safe dementia interventions specifically designed for Indigenous people. We conducted a scoping review of culturally safe dementia care interventions for Indigenous populations. Databases searched included OVID (Medline, PsycINFO, Embase, Healthstar), Informit Indigenous Collection, JBI EBP, Scopus/Elsevier and PubMed. Eligibility criteria included studies in English, interventions designed specifically for Indigenous persons living with dementia and evaluative outcomes of the intervention. In total, 2,259 articles were identified. After removing duplicates, 1,394 titles and abstracts were screened and 54 studies were screened for eligibility. Of these, no studies were eligible for inclusion. This empty review reveals a massive and inexcusable gap in knowledge around developing, implementing and evaluating culturally safe Indigenous-specific dementia care interventions. Future directions for research include working with Indigenous peoples to determine what culturally safe interventions for dementia look like, implementing high-quality studies with evidence-based measures and outcomes, and improving efforts to get this important work published to inform future studies.

Aviation employees operate in a dynamic, complex safety-critical system that is filled with uncertainty, requiring quick and correct expert decision-making. The purpose of this study is to investigate the decision-making indicators among aviation employees. Fifty-five technical engineers and air traffic controllers participated in this study by completing the Cambridge Gambling Task (CGT) at one of Iran’s airports. The CGT provides one of the most reliable and widely used decision-making assessment tasks and related indicators, including decision-making quality, risk-taking, delay aversion, deliberation time, risk adjustment and overall bet ratio. Higher risk adjustment, less deliberation time, and a lower delay aversion index resulted in better decision-making quality. Higher risk-taking does not necessarily mean lower self-control. No significant differences were observed between the studied groups, including between air traffic controllers (both Ground and Tower vs. RADAR and Approach) and between air traffic controllers and technical engineers in the CGT performance. The decision-making quality increased with age and work experience, which has important implications for training and selection processes.

Over the past two decades, English has become a key medium of instruction in higher education in non-native English contexts, especially Asian countries. Extant research highlights the rapid expansion of English-medium instruction (EMI) and challenges in policy implementation, revealing tensions between different language policy levels (i.e., macro, meso and micro). Thus, a multilevel analysis is needed to understand these tensions. This review examines factors influencing EMI adoption in China, Japan, Malaysia, and Nepal, focusing on policy implementation by educators and students. Findings show that EMI adoption is driven by English's role as a global lingua franca and the permeation of neoliberal ideologies at the macro policymaking level. Such a macro-level endorsement of monolingual EMI has resulted in micro-level inequalities for students, with resistance manifested through multilingual practices, such as translanguaging, in the classroom. The discrepancies between language policies and practices highlight the necessity of reassessing the adequacy of monolingual EMI policies and the importance of adopting a multilingual policy framework. The article concludes with a critical discussion of the trends observed in these contexts and recommends several policy directions for the future.

The scandal of the Cuban Missile Crisis lies in the fact that it brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war for actions associated with relatively minor strategic and political gains. In this article I will treat this crisis as a diagnostic event to identify two significant interinstitutional dynamics that drove Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy to this rationality-defying precipice. The first of these dynamics explores the consequences of transitioning military units from peacetime routines to crisis-level field deployment, which quickly created considerable command-and-control problems for both political leaders. Yet each believed that the other side remained in control of its forces, erroneously understanding local action by the other side as strategic moves ordered by central command. This created the potential for uncontrollable escalation. The second dynamic resulted from the interaction of two institutional arrangements in the United States. American presidents are simultaneously the country’s highest decision makers in foreign affairs and political campaigners interested in their own reelection. Foreign policy decisions thus become potential campaign moves. After World War II, a campaigning tradition emerged in which both parties felt compelled to outdo each other with anticommunist rhetoric and policies. This strategy built on deeply instituted anticommunism in the electorate, which politicians felt compelled to further cultivate. This dynamic significantly limited Kennedy’s response options, making it more likely than not that he would have called for an invasion of Cuba if Khrushchev had not backed down. The consequences would have been disastrous. The article concludes with tentative lessons to learn from these two dynamics.

This paper explores the implementation and enduring significance of the German language program in Milwaukee Public Schools between 1867 and 1918. Despite the German language program facing challenges, notably the Bennett Law of 1889—which sought to restrict foreign language instruction statewide—the program persisted, highlighting the tension between local identity and state mandates. This study argues that the creation of the German course initiated a process of consolidation and standardization in Milwaukee Public Schools, shifting decision-making to school administrators who sought to accommodate the largest cultural group in Milwaukee. This case study of the Milwaukee Public Schools’ German Language Program reveals how school policies prioritized a multilingual approach to Americanization. The paper is structured in three sections, examining the evolution of language policy, the political implications of the Bennett Law, and the post-Bennett landscape of language education, ultimately demonstrating the interplay between consolidation and cultural inclusivity.

Since the 1960s, the concept of civil religion has informed a great number of scholarly works exploring the relationship between religion and nationalism in the west — and beyond. It is therefore not surprising that the concept also informed seminal works on Buddhism and politics in Thailand. In recent years, however, the concept appears to have fallen out of fashion within Thai Studies and perhaps Southeast Asian Studies more broadly. This article surveys and critically discusses the widely diverging and confusing ways in which the concept of civil religion has been used in the study of Thai history and politics. It then seeks to demonstrate the continued relevance and analytical utility of civil religion, understood as a particular kind of nationalism, according to which the state should accommodate or actively encourage and support religious pluralism by developing ideological and institutional links with multiple religious communities. In Thailand, the dominant form of civil-religious nationalism is ‘cosmopolitan royalism’, which positions the king as the leading patron and protector of religions (plural). The final section of the article illustrates how this conception of civil religion might inform both the study of Thai intellectual history and the study of contemporary political contestation.

The making of the Passeio Público, Lisbon’s first public garden, is filled with contradictions, advances and setbacks. By looking at the long-term history of this green infrastructure, from its inception in 1764 until the inauguration of the boulevard built on its footprint in 1886, and considering the various technical-scientific, artistic, economic, social and political factors, this article demonstrates that the so-called public garden of the ancién régime was in fact made by the Liberals. Political issues and the Liberals’ narration of events were primarily responsible for the disappearance of the Passeio Público.

A new form of human–machine collaborative capabilities has been called to complement traditional capabilities to ensure higher but more responsible performance. We reviewed the extant literature on leadership in the artificial intelligence context to identify the leaders’ essential artificial intelligence-driven capabilities and synthesize the systematic review findings into an integrated conceptual framework to highlight how artificial intelligence-driven organizations could lead more responsibly. We conducted the systematic review and thematic analysis based on 37 papers identified from Emerald Insight, EBSCOhost Business Source Complete, and ScienceDirect databases. We found organizational leaders require technical, adaptive, and transformational capabilities to lead in an artificial intelligence-driven disruptive organizational environment. Our findings contribute to dynamic managerial capability and responsible leadership for performance theories by showing how these three uncovered capabilities enable organizational leaders to deploy dynamic managerial capabilities – sensing, seizing and reconfiguring more responsibly.