When the American political scientist James C. Scott passed away in July 2024, tributes praised him as one of the most influential thinkers of his generation.1 Building on years of ethnographic research in Southeast Asia, his numerous books offered new ways of thinking about subaltern resistance, as well as the mechanisms of state oppression and control. A self-professed anarchist, he organized against the Vietnam War as a junior faculty at the University of Wisconsin in the latter part of the 1960s, and he maintained a forty-six-acre farm for decades while teaching at Yale. While obituaries widely remembered Scott as a figure of integrity, some dissonant voices on social media commented more negatively on his involvement with the CIA as a young man and as a leader in the United States National Student Association (USNSA). The political scientist Karen Puget first brought this episode in Scott’s life to light in a book that carefully exposed the ties of the USNSA with US intelligence (Puget 2015). Puget showed how, in the 1950s and 1960s, what was then the most important student organization in the USA allowed itself to be fully infiltrated by the government. The young liberal-minded students at the helm of the organization worked hand in hand with CIA handlers to curb Soviet influence among their peer organizations in Europe, Asia and Africa. For a few years, after graduating from Williams College and before embarking on his doctoral studies at Yale, Scott occupied a prominent role among these young shadow Cold Warriors, first as the USNSA’s representative in Paris and later as its vice president in charge of international affairs.

This article maps out some of the relationships between performers and their instruments in live and improvised electronic music. In these practices, musical machines – be they computers, mechanical assemblages or combinations of different sound-makers and processors – act as generators of musical material and sources of unpredictability with which to improvise. As a lens through which to consider these practices, we examine a number of different roles these musical machines may take on during improvised performances. These include running, playing, surprising, evolving, malfunctioning, collaborating and learning. We explore the values of these different roles to the improvising musician, and contextualise them within some broad and historical trends of contemporary music. Finally, we consider how this taxonomy may make us more open to the vital materialism of musical instruments, and offer novel insights into the flows of agency and interaction possibilities in technologically mediated musical practices.

How do you create a dance of self-defense? Brazilian choreographers Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira try to answer this question by performing with, through, and despite racial objectifi cation. Against the backdrop of Jair Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil, the artists challenge the audience’s gaze by refusing the spectatorial demand that expects mastery and predictability—a demand often linked to racist, sexist, and colonial frameworks.

This is the second of two articles examining a distinctive but overlooked system for organizing child and youth labour in rural England. It reveals how parishes used their powers under the 1601 Poor Law to allocate children as unpaid indentured farm servants (for up to 17 years) to local landholders occupying properties of a certain value. As both apprentice and master could be compelled by law, parish authorities were able to implement centralized rotation schemes. This article (Part II) examines the political and economic aspects of these compulsory apprenticeship schemes in the South-West. First, it reviews their scale and the policies for regulating the distribution of children to landholders, including calculations for the optimum apprentice-to-acreage ratio. Second, it presents a case study of Awliscombe in Devon, which bound one-quarter of local children, offering a new model of governance whereby the leading farmers were able to control both poor relief and the labour supply through their multiple roles as policymakers, administrators and masters themselves. It concludes by reflecting on the distinctiveness of farm apprenticeship schemes as a system of labour that combined elements of life-cycle service with a serfdom-like bond between land and labour.

The celebration of the anniversary of the Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights (the “Center”) provides an opportunity to reflect on what defines the field of health law, as well as its conjoined twins of bioethics and human rights. The related fields are vast, and the subjects they encompass are ever-expanding. It is probably impossible to lay out a summary that does justice to their expansive, interdisciplinary scope. Instead, my discussion of the Center examines a subject that barely existed when the Center was formed in 19581 and that continues to make headlines more than sixty–six years later — organ transplantation. Transplantation is useful as an illustration of the joint fields of health law, bioethics, and human rights. It is a field that grew with us from infancy to maturity during the time of the Center’s growth and that illustrates how several related disciplines — most notably law and medical sciences — are essential to the development of organ transplantation. Additionally, organ transplantation and experiments involving organ transplantation have produced some of the most spectacular cases of human experimentation. Because of both the novelty and human drama these experiments involve, I will use some of them as examples of the pivotal health law and bioethics work the Center engages in. These examples, and others that will be touched on, lead me to conclude that there is no field that matches the life and death drama of health law, especially in the human organ transplantation field. This selective history of health law at the Center, including the definition of death and the limits of surrogate consent, suggest that the legal and bioethical issues brought to us by innovative organ transplantation surgery are unlikely to be exhausted any time soon.