In the past five years, 13 counties in Eastern Oregon have voted in nonbinding referendums to separate from the liberal state of Oregon to join the conservative state of Idaho. Drawing on theories of secessionism and irredentism, this article examines the drivers of the so-called Greater Idaho movement by administering a survey in these separatist counties. Our findings indicate that economic discontent and a strong regional identity are more important than fears or partisanship in determining support for moving the interstate border. Our study suggests that more inclusive governance may help to overcome ideological polarization in this case and offers insights into how political divisions may be managed to prevent separatist violence in the United States more generally. We conclude that political minorities need to believe that they have a voice in the system so that they do not mobilize for exit.

Firefighters face significantly elevated cancer risks due to chronic exposure to carcinogenic fire effluents and occupational stressors. In 2022, the World Health Organization classified firefighting as a carcinogenic occupation, linking it to increased incidences of cancers, including mesothelioma, bladder, prostate, colon and melanoma. Drawing on UK-specific data where possible, this narrative review explores how dietary strategies, particularly the Mediterranean diet, may complement existing protective measures in mitigating these risks. It investigates specific food-based nutrients that show promise in addressing risks associated with fire effluent contaminants, examining nutrient-mediated mechanisms and their relevance to firefighter health. The review also highlights the distinct combination of challenges firefighters face in adopting healthier dietary patterns, including disrupted routines, group eating cultures and gaps in nutritional education. While the evidence for firefighter-specific dietary interventions is still emerging, this review highlights the potential of sustainable dietary strategies to significantly reduce cancer risks and improve long-term health outcomes. Finally, it calls for targeted research and interventions to refine these strategies and deliver tangible health benefits for firefighters worldwide.

This introduction to the round table attempts an overview of the conceptualizations of ‘voice’ and ‘agency’. It maintains a dialogic balance between the novel insights offered by each contribution’s topic and the authors’ distinct angles, and current debates around voice and agency. The introduction interweaves philosophical, anthropological, and, of course, (ethno)musicological approaches to the vocal phenomenon, highlighting its complex dimensions as well as its dense intersubjective meaningfulness. If ‘listening’ is the counterpart of ‘voicing’, integral to its very materialization, ‘vocal agency’ urges us to think beyond the interconnection between the vocalizer and the listener, shifting our focus of attention to the capacity of the voice to offer insights into and through itself.

Holistic frameworks of mental health outline that a focus on psychopathology does not represent an optimal approach to defining, measuring and treating mental health. Rather, theoretical, empirical, and applied psychological efforts should incorporate psychological well-being (PWB). Studies of PWB have overwhelmingly focused on adult populations, rendering a translation down to adolescence difficult. The current study explores the between-person, as well as within-person short-term, prospective relations between psychopathology and wellbeing within a community sample of adolescents (i.e., 553 youth aged 12 – 18, mean age: 14.97 years, 51.2% Male, 40.7% of participants identified as Hispanic (225 individuals), 38.5% identified as White (213 individuals), and 35.6% identified as Black (197 individuals), 3-wave, 1-year survey). Results demonstrated significant, negative between-person relations between psychopathology and PWB (bPHQ = −0.25, SE = 0.11, p = 0.021, bVDS = −0.39, SE = 0.15, p = 0.011). At the within-person level, consistent positive prospective relations were identified for violent-delinquent behaviors and PWB, such that increases in individual levels of violent-delinquent behaviors tended to forecast higher levels of PWB at the next follow-up (bPWBW2 = 0.21, SEPWBW2 = 0.076, p < 0.01; bPWBW3 = 0.14, SEPWBW3 = 0.051, p < 0.01). At the within-person level, prospective relations between depressive and PWB were not identified. Gender and racial/ethnic identities did not moderate findings.

This article conceptualises voice as a constellation, examining how objects, images, and sounds (or their absence) speak to the lived experiences of displacement. Drawing from a British Academy-funded project with a Syrian artist collective and a women-led social entrepreneurship initiative in Istanbul, we explore the affective assemblages of loss, belonging, and forced displacement through an ethnographic mode of listening. Bringing together a crocheted life jacket, a painting, and a piece of music that cannot be played, we consider how a politics of listening can offer new ways of understanding forced displacement and agency beyond voice as speech or narrative. We advocate for an approach that foregrounds thick solidarity, collective expression, and intersubjective relations of vocality.

Previous studies have suggested that nature contact is a protective factor for problem behavior in children. However, there remains a significant gap in research exploring the reciprocal relationship between nature contact and children’s problem behavior, as well as the underlying mechanisms driving this relationship. This study employed a longitudinal three-wave design involving 516 children in China (268 girls, Mage = 10.88 ± 0.66 years old at Time 3). Cross-lagged analyses indicated that nature contact and problem behavior negatively predicted each other over time, and prosocial behavior bidirectionally mediated the relationship between nature contact and problem behavior. These results provided evidence for the relationships among nature interaction, social development, and behavioral development in children. These findings suggested that promoting prosocial behavior could reduce problem behavior and enhance nature engagement, potentially serving as a strategy to foster comprehensive development in children.

The article summarizes the history of the Russian–Ukrainian encounters in memory politics from the 1990s to the start of the 2020s. It compares and contrasts Russia’a and Ukraine’s perceptions of the issues, goals, tasks, and methods of historical policy. Having a shared history and similar challenges in developing identities and tackling the politics of commemoration, the cultural elites and governments of both countries approached the task of identity-building from opposite perspectives. These differences stemmed from different interpretations of one’s nation’s place and role in world history. The article summarizes all critical points of disagreement regarding how the two countries understood their shared past and interpreted it. It observes the history of the joint initiatives between Russia and Ukraine to reconcile confronting narratives. The analysis shows how the shared past perceived and conceived in divergent ways amounted to the mnemonic anxiety and securitization of the collective memory clash of antagonistic versions of the past and triggered the conflict and war.

Persecution for belief-based uses is a major threat to raptors in West Africa. Critically Endangered Hooded Vultures Necrosyrtes monachus are traded openly in West African vodun (also known as voodoo or fetish) markets in Benin, despite national laws protecting this species. We interviewed 115 vendors selling Hooded Vultures and/or their body parts at nine different markets in southern Benin to understand the extent and drivers of this illegal trade. Over four months, we counted a total of 522 Hooded Vultures in market stalls, including whole dried vulture carcasses (73.4% of vulture products offered for sale), vulture heads (17.2%), and live birds (9.4%). Vultures offered for sale originated from at least 10 foreign countries, suggesting there are far-reaching impacts of illegal trade on Hooded Vultures. Vodun practitioners sacrifice and consume vultures in the belief these practices will protect them from witchcraft and achieve other supernatural aims, and the resulting high demand for vultures has driven the price of a Hooded Vulture to exceed the average monthly income in Benin. Despite serious legal, conservation, and animal welfare concerns, wildlife trade for belief-based use is thriving and growing in West Africa, and our findings highlight that legislation aimed at protecting vultures in Benin appears to be currently ineffective. From our discussions with traders, it appears that low education levels, weak law enforcement, and disregard for legislation contribute to this trade that threatens remaining vultures across West Africa. Public awareness campaigns to educate residents about conservation laws and improved law enforcement are urgently needed to mitigate on-going threats to this and other Critically Endangered species.

This article discusses the horse imagery related to the winds in the storm episode at the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid. A close analysis of Aen. 1.50–86 brings to light the pervasiveness of this imagery, only partly noticed by scholars, who have regarded it as metaphorical (§1). It is here suggested that the winds released by Aeolus could instead be considered as real horses. A reassessment of the ancient literary—and, briefly, iconographic—evidence of the depiction of the winds as horses, horsemen or charioteers is proposed; Virgil fits into a long-standing tradition of Homeric ancestry, which represents the winds as horses (§2). This allows a better understanding of the narrative dynamic which in Aeneid Book 1 opposes Aeolus to Neptune, the god of the sea as well as of the horses; moreover, the equestrian (and circus) imagery evoked by Virgil contributes to the political and cosmic significance of the tempest episode (§3).

In this paper, we introduce a non-homogeneous version of the generalized counting process (GCP). We time-change this process by an independent inverse stable subordinator and derive the system of governing differential–integral equations for the marginal distributions of its increments. We then consider the GCP time-changed by a multistable subordinator and obtain its Lévy measure and the distribution of its first passage times. We discuss an application of a time-changed GCP, namely the time-changed generalized counting process-I (TCGCP-I) in ruin theory. A fractional version of the TCGCP-I is studied, and its long-range dependence property is established.

We consider a single server queue that has a threshold to change its arrival process and service speed by its queue length, which is referred to as a two-level GI/G/1 queue. This model is motivated by an energy saving problem for a single server queue whose arrival process and service speed are controlled. To obtain its performance in tractable form, we study the limit of the stationary distribution of the queue length in this two-level queue under scaling in heavy traffic. Except for a special case, this limit corresponds to its diffusion approximation. It is shown that this limiting distribution is truncated exponential (or uniform if the drift is null) below the threshold level and exponential above it under suitably chosen system parameters and generally distributed interarrival times and workloads brought by customers. This result is proved under a mild limitation on arrival parameters using the so-called basic adjoint relationship (BAR) approach studied in Braverman, Dai, and Miyazawa (2017, 2024) and Miyazawa (2017, 2024). We also intuitively discuss about a diffusion process corresponding to the limit of the stationary distribution under scaling.