This article offers a Baradian–Butlerian reading of Arendse & 42 Others v Meta, a landmark Kenyan case on outsourced content moderation. Moving beyond structural and subjection-centred framings, it theorises law as a site of ontological reconfiguration – where labour, harm and personhood are co-constituted through intra-action. Drawing on diffraction as an onto-epistemological method, the paper examines how the Kenyan courts reclassified digital labour, pierced jurisdictional separability and temporarily unsettled transnational corporate insulation. Yet, this legal aperture also generated recursive violence: moderators lost employment, residency and psychiatric care, even as their trauma became juridically legible. The paper challenges linear emancipatory or subjection-based accounts of such cases, arguing instead that law functions as a diffractive apparatus – producing patterns of recognition and exclusion without closure. It contributes to the governance of content-moderation scholarship by showing how Kenya’s legal system intra-acts with global capital to generate contradictory but generative juridical formations.

Citizen participation and empowerment are high on the political agenda of Western European welfare states. They are often pursued through processes of decentralisation with an appeal to ‘place-based’ working. Existing research focuses on citizen experiences or policymaker motivations, neglecting the perspectives of (municipal) public servants as mediators. Using an ethics of care framework, we examine the concept of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ within the context of local decision-making processes to help us understand how public servants negotiate local initiative within the spaces of local decision-making. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty-three municipal public servants and managers, we show that they frequently experience an absence of care and eschew joint responsibility for concerns voiced by citizens. We show how ‘privileged irresponsibility’ depends on invisibility and normativity and is the outcome of local political relations and institutional pressures. ‘Tokenist’ forms of participation make it difficult for municipal public servants to take up ‘caring’ responsibilities towards citizens, with effects on their job satisfaction.

We report new interpretation of >19,500 beach strandlines from waterbodies in the western St. Lawrence and Champlain Lowlands in northern New York and adjacent areas of Vermont, Quebec, and Ontario from ≤2-m-resolution digital elevation models. Strandline evidence supports a deglaciation model in which proglacial lake and marine shoreline deposits adjusted continuously in response to steady shoreline regression linked to outlet incision, differential isostatic adjustments, and postglacial relative sea-level rise. Gaps in strandline preservation reflect times of rapid water-level decline associated with breakout floods and abrupt shifts in drainage to new outlets. Water levels returned to slower, steady decline and renewed beach sedimentation during the later stages of a breakout as water levels in the source and receiving waterbodies equilibrated. Our conclusions contrast with previous models that infer discrete lake stages were controlled by stable outlets then fell abruptly as lower outlets were exhumed from beneath the Laurentide Ice Sheet during deglaciation. We present a new deglacial chronology and lake nomenclature that reflects this paradigm and redefines the spatial and temporal distributions of proglacial lake and marine water in the region.

Public health campaigns among Catholic Mexican American populations in New Mexico in the mid-twentieth century often relied on the expertise of anthropologists and sociologists to help tailor the campaigns to Mexican American culture. Social scientists produced several reports based on fieldwork that suggested that New Mexican village religious practices and beliefs, often referred to as “folk Catholicism,” were durable barriers to embracing scientific healthcare standards. This article uses those reports to reveal and analyze the role that public health campaigns and social science researchers played in defining and challenging Hispano religious healing traditions. It likewise examines the various intersections of science and racializing discourse in the reports. I argue that these social scientific studies of Spanish-speaking, New Mexican village culture were intended to facilitate the “right” kind of assimilation to Anglo cultural norms around health, one that paradoxically aimed to include Hispanos in modern medicine while simultaneously defining essential religio-racial difference. The regulation of Hispano bodies rested on social scientific discourses that racialized religion, science, and health.

This article responds to Wells & Giacco’s discussion of the theoretical frameworks that guide qualitative research. In addition to the methods they explore, I describe ethnography, focusing on the anthropological investigation of culture. I use examples from the research literature to highlight the unique values of ethnography. I describe what ethnography entails, before outlining illustrations of how ethnographic research has contributed to psychiatric clinical practice. Although it is difficult to generalise from the findings of ethnographic research, its focus on how social processes work and how people perceive them in a particular context makes it useful for advancing improvements in clinical care.

While a growing body of literature studies the effects of weather shocks on economic activity in low-income countries, relatively little is known about their impact on cross-border capital flows. This study investigates whether weather shocks, specifically deviations in precipitation and temperature from their long-term averages, trigger capital flight from Africa. Exploiting the variation in within-country exposure to weather shocks, we find that temperature shocks lead to increased capital outflows and trade misinvoicing. The long-run relationship between temperature and capital flight is conditional upon country-specific factors, such as reliance on oil exports, institutional frameworks and financial infrastructures. Our findings reveal a moderate role of state capacity in the relationship between weather shocks and capital flight, highlighting the need for further investigation into other potential mechanisms.

The Biden-Harris administration launched two important initiatives to expand public participation in the administrative state. These initiatives aimed to increase public engagement in developing federal regulations and reducing burdens in accessing public benefits. These two initiatives built on social science, especially political science. In this piece, I draw from my experience helping to lead the work to describe how political science research informed the design and implementation of both initiatives. I aim to open the “black box” of how federal policy makers use political science research. I also describe future research that could advance these initiatives. I conclude with a case study of such research, examining the barriers faced by food assistance applicants to sharing their experiences with government with a survey of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applicants. The survey points to barriers government must overcome to expand participation among SNAP applicants and strategies policy makers might use to do so.

The English modals have been used as case studies in many domains of linguistic enquiry. Their diachronic development and patterns of synchronic variation in historical and contemporary corpora have been used to develop theories of linguistic representation, to further understanding of correlations between structure and use, and to investigate relationships between form and meaning. However, much of this research explores only the modals themselves: relatively little attention has been given to the study of modal collocations. In this article, we explore variation and change in collocational patterns of two modals (may and might) when they appear directly adjacent to the adverb well. Our analysis is corpus based, using quantitative data to explore macro-level trends in recent American English, and qualitative analysis to explore micro-level variation, particularly with regard to the development of concessive uses of may and might, and post-modal meanings more generally. We foreground the idea that modals show subtly different diachronic trends in specific collocations compared to perceived trends when looked at as an isolated class of auxiliary verbs.

Fārābī had an Arabic translation of Ptolemy’s Harmonics and was deeply immersed in it. The evidence is internal to Kitāb al-Mūsīqā al-kabīr. A passage can be found at the end of the first book of the madḫal in which Ptolemy is mentioned by name and his treatise on music also receives explicit mention. The puzzle is that, according to Fārābī, Ptolemy acknowledges directly in the Harmonics that he could not discriminate different patterns of attunement by ear, but Ptolemy nowhere makes any comment about his level of musicianship. The best way to understand Fārābī’s puzzling claim is as an inference from Ptolemy’s attempt to disprove Aristoxenus’ argument that the fourth is equal to two and a half tones. The paper argues that the inference is plausible, that Fārābī drew it and that he could not have drawn it without being intimately familiar with Ptolemy’s Harmonics.