This article presents the concept of a ‘haptic aurality’ in soundscape composition, an aesthetic and perceptual model derived from visual art theory, media studies and phenomenology that extends the haptic beyond its common association to vibroacoustic phenomena in the sonic arts. Included in this framework are both the standard haptic arguments, from psychology and engineering, including notions of kinaesthesia and proprioception, and varied definitions of the haptic as a not necessarily tactile mode of knowing touch that involves synaesthesia, transmodal perception and philosophical notions of sensory dedifferentiation. In adapting this survey of sometimes contradictory accounts of the haptic as parameters for compositional analysis and application, the article simultaneously creates novel engagements between soundscape composition and acousmatic practice.

The ideological nature of public health is a problem for the profession. Ideological uniformity in the field of public health undermines scholars’ and officials’ legitimacy and compromises their ability effectively to prevent death and disease. I first provide some evidence that public health is ideological and then I argue that the ideology of public health is counterproductive. Additionally, public officials are also likely to violate people’s rights in trying to advance their ideology through public health policy. In light of these moral considerations against the ideological nature of public health, there are compelling reasons for people to resist the expanding scope of public health insofar as it consists in the further imposition of this counterproductive and harmful ideology. I therefore conclude that the profession would be more effective and just if public health officials and scholars focused more narrowly on improving health outcomes instead of promoting their broader ideological agenda through public health policy.

Recent historical studies on the origins of the postsocialist order in eastern and central Europe have adopted a “long transformation” perspective. They emphasize the importance of state socialist economic and political experts who, as early as the 1970s, began to think in ways that would prove compatible with neoliberal governance after 1989/91. Sharing this interest in longer genealogies of the postsocialist transformation, the present article shifts the focus of attention from the history of expertise to the everyday practices and “work on the self” of members of the urban and educated classes. It presents a microhistorical study of courses for students and white-collar workers that were offered by psychology coach David Gruber from the 1980s in Czechoslovakia and focused on intellectual productivity skills such as speed reading. These courses provide a unique insight into how people worked on themselves to become more effective in order to adapt to the newly emerging postsocialist world. The present article points to hitherto understudied continuities in the understandings and practices of productivity between the socialist and postsocialist periods.

This paper, building on new archival research and the social table method, presents comprehensive estimates of income inequality in Mexico in 1895, 1910, 1930 and 1940. Inequality grew from 1895 to 1910, driven by economic expansion within the context of an oligarchic economy. While real income increased for the lower classes during this period, the main beneficiaries were large landowners and entrepreneurs. In the revolutionary period from 1910 to 1930 inequality decreased especially as a result of land reforms, benefitting peasants at the expense of the large landowners. However, the economic structure of the country was not fundamentally changed, and in the 1930s inequality raised as incomes of peasants and those in the informal sector fell behind manufacturing and other high-earning sectors. The Mexican case shows the complex interaction of economics, demography and politics in determining economic inequality.

With the Russo-Ukrainian war, the language of decolonization has become central to scholarship on eastern Europe. Yet, residents of Lielciems in eastern Latvia find it hard to orient in a political field defined by the binary of colonized and the colonizer. They live in a place that is losing its constitutive elements due to a variety of other “de” processes—deindustrialization, depopulation, and devaluation. They live amidst absences rather than unwanted presences. They wish for someone—the Chinese, NATO, or the European Union—to establish some permanent structure that could bring back life to their place of residence. Otherwise, the place is doomed to empty out completely, and their children are destined to permanently settle abroad. Based on an ethnography of an emptying town, this article outlines the limits of the politics of decolonization and argues for the use of the lens of empire for analyzing the intersecting forms of power that shape Lielciems, Latvia and eastern Europe today.

As more jurisdictions permit a medically assisted death (MAiD)—and none of the jurisdictions that introduced MAiD has seen any serious attempts at reversing it—the focus of debate has turned to the question of what is a morally defensible access threshold for MAiD. This permits us to rethink the moral reasons for the legalization or decriminalization of assisted dying. Unlike what is assumed in many legislative frameworks, unbearable suffering caused by terminal illness is not what oftentimes motivates decisionally capable people to request MAiD. This matters when access thresholds are considered. The argument advanced in this essay is that because MAiD is less destructive to people’s relationships and less harmful than medically unsupervised suicide, access to medical assistance in dying should be open to anyone who is legally capacitated and who persistently requests such assistance.

Jean Genet’s 1966 epic play The Screens offers a unique insight into Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent devastation of Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces. Seen from this perspective, this is not a local war, but an event that has global significance.

Over the recent years, Polish historiography has experienced a noteworthy “people’s turn.” Regrettably, these works tend to reinforce stereotypes that portray the peasantry as a politically inert “mass.” The objective of this paper is to challenge this portrayal of the Polish peasantry as a largely passive majority lacking effective means of contestation. To accomplish this, I delve into an analysis of peasant self-organization during the turn of the early twentieth century in Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland. My investigation is based on a micro-historical approach, drawing upon autobiographies authored by activists engaged in rural cooperatives written in the initial decades after World War II. The cited autobiographies provide plenty of specific evidence regarding plebeian collective agency. By juxtaposing the political perspectives of modern institutions with the vernacular categories of actors within specific historical circumstances, I aim to ground theoretical conclusions in an asynchronous and subversive vision of modernity.

The emergence of innovative neuroimaging technologies, particularly highly portable magnetic resonance imaging (pMRI), has the potential to spawn a transformative era in neuroscience research. Resourced academic institutional review boards (IRBs) with experience overseeing traditional MRI have a special role to play in ethical governance of pMRI research and should facilitate the collaborative development of nuanced and culturally sensitive guidelines and educational resources for pMRI protocols. This paper explores the ethical challenges of pMRI in neuroscience research and the dynamic leadership role that IRBs should play to promote ethical oversight of emerging pMRI research.