This paper renews the contemporary and enduring salience of archaic and discredited concepts of spatiality and physical geographic determinism, but historicises, repurposes and reworks them: it is an essay in critical and decolonial palaeo-territorialisation. Concreteness may well have been misplaced, but place – and space – might not have been altogether mis-concretised. Rethinking the global is an opportunity to step back and think about macro-scales and macro-scalarity more broadly. This paper exhumes and decolonially/critically reappropriates Carl Schmitt’s Großraum concept (re-examining, along the way, if not quite rehabilitating the Meer und Land thesis and Mackinder’s ‘geographical pivot’ (Mackinder 1904)) as a heuristic device to explore the overlooked scales of continents and continentality in the genealogy of a global geographic imaginary that is as much geotectonic as geo-historical. ‘The Global’ would then come to signify pre-eminently – or perhaps has always signified – as the intercontinental rather than the international: a space or set of spaces in some ultimate sense conditioned by the configuration of the planetary crust yet nonetheless produced through historical processes. We may never have been global, but we have been (inter)continental for the last half-millennium. State sovereignty, (racial) capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, public international law, fascism, communism and neoliberal globalisation have all been projects or formations – directly or indirectly, by design or accident – producing, pursuing, exploiting, organising and ordering continental Großräume. Contemporary regional trade blocs, regional international governmental organisations, regional human rights systems, military alliances and even putative civilisational divides all reflect the perdurable continental horizons of our ostensibly global imaginary.

Psychiatrists and anthropologists both rely on observation, discourse analysis and access to participants’ internal and external worlds. Ethnographic fieldwork, a key method in medical anthropology, offers a powerful tool to establish a robust evidence base of how to address mental health inequalities in ethnic minority communities.

After World War II, Japan was severely degraded, and its people were generally devastated. For the country’s very survival, the beleaguered Japanese people sought to rebuild economically and reputationally. During this postwar period, Japanese business, union, and government leaders grappled with lagging progress and the necessary abandonment of prior transwar social and business arrangements. They sought new strategies to stimulate advancement in the wake of a governmental vacuum, labor unrest, and the threat of communism. In this context, Moral Re-Armament (MRA) took root in some areas of Japan during the period when Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew from $102 billion in 1945 to $420 billion by 1961. MRA introduced Western-oriented societal values, intended to help nurture individual and societal change, including collaborative relations between unions and management. Of the first eight Japanese prime ministers after World War II, six either worked openly with or endorsed the MRA movement.

Childhood maltreatment can lead to poor socioemotional development, which may undermine parental functioning in adulthood. Having a large social network of relatives and friends, however, might buffer the effects of childhood maltreatment on parents. This prediction was examined using prospective data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk Adaptation (N = 173). Early childhood maltreatment was assessed prospectively at ages 0 – 5. Socioemotional competence during middle childhood and adolescence (ages 5 – 16) was assessed via teacher reports. Adult parenting was assessed using a semi-structured interview at age 32 (N = 106) and dyadic parent-child observations at various ages (N = 85). At age 32, participants also wrote the names of friends and relatives in their inner, middle, and outer social circles. In a moderated mediation analysis, childhood maltreatment forecasted low socioemotional competence, which in turn predicted more negative parental orientations (greater hostility and lower emotional connectedness and involvement) and lower observed parental support in adulthood. However, having a large social network and having friends in one’s inner circle buffered this effect. These results highlight the significance of social networks in supporting parents who were maltreated in childhood, and primarily the importance of close friends.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person in 2017 has generated a lively debate. While advocates argue that ascribing personhood to natural entities is a powerful tool for redressing historical injustices against Indigenous peoples and for protecting the environment, critics argue that it is incompatible with Western legal and political systems. In this article, we use Thomas Hobbes’s theory of personhood to develop a novel account of ecological personhood. Hobbes explains how natural entities can be empowered to speak and act through authorized representatives, much as states, corporations, and wards do. Our Hobbesian account has three main payoffs. First, it offers a bridge between different legal orders and ontologies of nature. Second, it explains how “ecoship” is normatively different from corporate personhood and guardianship. Third, it highlights both the transformative potential of ecological persons and the ways in which they can be coopted and subverted.

Partisanship is the primary driver of voter decision-making in the United States. Partisans expect to prefer their party’s candidates’ issue stances and personal characteristics. Even when they learn negative information, motivated reasoning often keeps them from changing their candidate evaluations or vote choice. However, there is a “tipping point” at which partisans will update their priors and may vote against their preferred party’s candidate. This study seeks to determine whether voters are more likely to reach that tipping point when they see a woman in their party, and under what circumstances. We use a unique experimental design to vary a candidate’s gender, congruence with major elements of the party platform, and their participation in a scandal. We find that women are often evaluated more negatively and that subjects rely on substantive information more when evaluating women candidates. Our findings suggest that campaigns and campaign information may matter more for women candidates.

The extent to which EU competition law applies in the healthcare context remains a contested question. The contemporaneous publication of the European Commission’s Evaluation of State Subsidy rules for health and social services of general economic interest (SGEI) in December 2022, and of the Court of Justice of the European Union’s April 2023 judgment in Casa Regina Apostolorum regarding state support to hospitals in Italy, underscore uncertainty and appear to indicate an impasse. These publications unfold against the backdrop of two tensions: between state and market, and between the EU and national levels. Hospitals illustrate these tensions well due to the expansion of competition mechanisms into the hospital sector (notably expanding private provider delivery of public hospital services, often supported by “patient choice” policies), and of hospitals remaining typically local or regional in character rather than supranational. This article provides a timely and original analysis of the Casa Regina Apostolorum judgment in light of Commission policy regarding SGEI and hospitals and how EU Member States engage with this. It offers insights into the potential legacy of Casa Regina Apostolorum, and indicates where future legal challenges may focus.

Drawing on the two-factor model of organizational justice and social exchange theory, this study investigates the mediating roles of procedural and distributive justice in the relationship between work locus of control (WLOC) and leader–member exchange (LMX). Using data collected from two cultural contexts – the United States and South Korea – this research further examines whether culture moderates the indirect relationship between WLOC and LMX through perceived justice. The findings indicate that subordinates with an internal WLOC tend to report higher-quality LMX relationships, and that both procedural and distributive justice partially mediate this relationship. Moderated mediation analyses reveal that the indirect effects of WLOC on LMX via justice perceptions are significantly stronger in the U.S. sample than in the Korean sample. These results contribute to the literature by identifying perceived justice as a key psychological mechanism linking individual traits to relational outcomes at work, and by highlighting how cultural values shape this process.

The original declarative procedural reflective (DPR) model is a well-established model of therapist knowledge and skill development. To date, although it has been used to guide reflection and discussion around personal and practitioner selves, it has not emphasised the various intersecting identities of practitioners and how these interact within wider concepts such as power, society, service contexts and the patient and supervisory relationships. The learning, development and implementation of CBT skills does not occur in a vacuum or separate to the practitioner identities however relatively little has been written on this. This paper aims to expand the original DPR model to illustrate potential ways that social context, identity and power could be considered within CBT training, delivery and supervision. It delineates and explores the additional components of the model (i.e. practitioner identity(s), context/society and power) and then provides examples of how this framework could inform key CBT activities (including low-intensity CBT).

Eocene snakes of India have the potential to shed light on the nature of snake diversification on the subcontinent following the Deccan volcanism at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (K-Pg), when India was still a northward-drifting isolated landmass prior to its collision with Asia. Here, we report a diverse snake fauna from the Eocene of Kutch, western India. The fauna, dominated by aquatic forms, includes palaeophiids, a giant madtsoiid, and a possible nigerophiid. The palaeophiids from the middle Eocene (late Lutetian) comprise ?Palaeophis Owen, 1841 and Pterosphenus rannensis n. sp. Together, these taxa enrich the record of fossil snakes in the poorly known late Lutetian of India and represent the youngest record of Palaeophiidae from the Indian subcontinent. Pterosphenus rannensis n. sp. shows intermediate morphology between Palaeophis and Pterosphenus-grade snakes and is phylogenetically the earliest-diverging member of Pterosphenus Lucas, 1898. Additionally, the middle Eocene Pterosphenus biswasi Rage et al., 2003 is reassessed and retained as a valid taxon based on pterapophyseal morphology and overall form. Biogeographic considerations highlight the importance of the Indian fossil record in understanding the origin and diversification of the genus Pterosphenus. The prevalence of niche partitioning is suggested for the palaeophiids, with Pterosphenus rannensis n. sp. recovered from a tidal setting and ?Palaeophis sp. indet. from a marsh/swamp setting. The new Indian madtsoiid from the middle Eocene (early Lutetian) represents a sympatric taxon with the terrestrial/semiaquatic giant Vasuki indicus Datta and Bajpai, 2024 coexisting in a back-swamp marsh setting. The early Eocene (Ypresian) nigerophiid is among the oldest Cenozoic occurrences of this family globally.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/dc529074-73a6-4869-9b49-44caf9e2d956