In the United States, Latinos are often treated as a monolithic voting bloc, but this approach overlooks significant variation in political behavior across sub-groups from different countries of origin. This paper explores the role of country of origin (CoO) in shaping the partisanship and electoral choices of U.S. Latinos, arguing that national origin influences party identification and voting behavior. Using data from the Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), spanning elections from 2008 to 2020, we examine how Latino voters from different countries differ in their partisanship and support for Republican and Democratic candidates. Our findings reveal substantial variation in vote choice and partisan identification based on CoO. We employ genetic matching to control for key covariates, revealing that aggregate country-of-origin differences show up repeatedly in elections over time. These results suggest that aggregating Latinos into a single voting bloc obscures meaningful political diversity and that a country-of-origin approach offers valuable insights into Latino electoral behavior.

Posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTS) have been observed in children exposed to family violence. Although functioning improves for many children after cessation of violence, pathways to recovery are poorly understood. This study tests the mediating pathways between changes in family violence and children’s PTS through children’s emotional security, parental stress, and parents’ PTS. We used longitudinal data of 562 children and their parents who were referred to child protection service. Data included three waves over a one and a half years period. Questionnaire data of both children and parents were analyzed in R Lavaan with Random Intercept Cross Lagged Panel Models to examine intrafamilial associations. Child-reported, but not parent-reported, decreases in family violence predicted decreases in child PTS from the first to the second wave. Changes in parental stress, parent PTS, and emotional security did not mediate the associations between change in family violence and child PTS. We found in exploratory analyses that decreases in parental stress predicted decreases in parent-reported family violence. The results emphasize the importance of reducing family violence for children to recover from PTS. Parental stress may be a factor in restoring safety.

This study examined the interaction of different types of crosslinguistic cues in second language (L2) morphosyntactic processing. Our target constructions, Korean morphological causatives, contain morphosyntactic constraints that present interlingual overlap for Japanese speakers when the construction is derived from an intransitive verb, while constituting interlingual contrast when derived from a transitive verb. For Chinese speakers, these constraints only exist in the L2 and thus constitute L2-unique information. In two self-paced reading experiments involving proficiency-matched Japanese- and Chinese-speaking learners of Korean, we found that Japanese speakers successfully detected morphosyntactic errors only in the intransitive-based construction, which shares overlapping constraints with Japanese, but not in the transitive-based construction whose morphosyntactic constraints contrast with the Japanese counterparts. In contrast, Chinese speakers exhibited sensitivity to the violations in both intransitive- and transitive-based constructions. These findings suggest that crosslinguistic competition causes a major problem in L2 sentence processing.

Community development represents the synthesis of post-war British colonial development policy. Officially used for the first time in 1948, in Arthur Creech Jones’ definition community development was a movement based on the active participation and cooperation of local community members promoting a better life for the community, encompassing all forms of improvement in the areas of agriculture, public health and sanitation, infant and maternal welfare, and the spread of literacy. The main purpose of this article is not to delve into the community development projects themselves but to discuss the ways this concept was implemented, used, and promoted by Britain in two different spaces: the colonies and the United Nations. These two contexts are pivotal for the promotion of the post-war British colonial rhetoric. In the colonies, British colonial discourse pursued two intertwined goals: on the one hand, the relegitimisation of the colonial empire and, on the other, the preparation of the transition to independence in order to maintain an influence that would replace political rule and physical presence. The United Nations were used instead by the British as an arena to internationalise their colonial policy and establish their legitimisation.

Intertextual linkages between Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions and mythological narratives have significantly contributed to our understanding of royal self-presentation and historicization. Less explored, however, are how such linkages may be interpreted and visualized within royal art. In this paper, I propose an intervisual connection between Ninurta mythologies and Assyrian royal lion hunts by unpacking modes of display and interaction embedded between image, text, and lived experience in the palace art of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Intervisuality was arguably deployed as an innovative strategy to craft a sophisticated connection between royal and divine kingship. I explore how Anzû, a mythological adversary of Ninurta that embodies chaos and disorder, was conceptualized and manifested across media, including cylinder seals and in relief art. Consequently, the paper displaces the typical focus given to the Assyrian king by instead investigating the roles of animals and monsters in upholding royal narratives. I argue that the form and actions of Anzû as embodied and performed in objects act as powerful symbolic referents that anchor its transformed image in royal hunt narratives. In conclusion, I consider why Ashurbanipal may have employed visual references to Anzû in his palace art.

The love factor in the field of second language acquisition has gained considerable traction since the turn of the century. This article is the first to take a variationist perspective to investigate how multilingual coupledom affects sociolinguistic development in the second language (L2). Participants were 76 users of L2 German living in Austria, all of whom were in a romantic relationship with an Austrian partner. We analyzed the effects of multilingual coupledom on self-reported changes in learners’ use of, attitudes toward, and proficiency in standard German, the Austrian dialect variety, and first language(s), and whether (psycho-)social variables moderate this relationship. Individual differences in psychological and social variables (e.g., adaptability, Open-mindedness, length of residence, orientation toward the Austrian dialect) predicted reported changes in the sociolinguistic repertoire. Qualitative analysis revealed a blended operation of socioaffective and exposure-related factors, which helped explain why, how, and for whom multilingual coupledom affects (socio-)linguistic development.

A survey was conducted among teak and melina growers across Costa Rica to assess their perceptions of problematic weed species and to document current weed management practices in forest plantations. A total of 180 farmers were selected from six provinces, yielding an 87% response rate. Results revealed that 47% of respondents had established plantations on formerly forested land, while 43% did so on previously used pastureland. Most farmers employed an integrated approach toward weed management that included manual, mechanical, and chemical methods. The most problematic species cited most frequently included coyol palm, jaraguagrass, orchid vine, raspa guacal, and arrocillo. Herbicide use was widespread, with glyphosate, metsulfuron-methyl, and paraquat being the most common active ingredients, typically applied singly, in mixtures, or sequentially. The findings reveal a heavy reliance on only three herbicides and highlight the need for targeted control of species in the Poaceae family and climbing vines. This work contributes valuable insights into weed dynamics in tropical forest plantations and emphasizes the need for region-specific and sustainable management strategies to mitigate potential productivity constraints and reduce reliance on herbicides.

Adding to the research on Guatemalan migration, this article analyzes semistructured interviews with young adults from the Guatemalan diaspora to understand how they experience exclusion and erasure in K–12 schools in Los Angeles, California. Using Critical Latinx Indigeneities as a framework, the author contextualizes these experiences within transnational histories of Indigeneity and race to unpack the various forms of erasure that students experience, including complex intersections of language, Indigenous background, and nationality. The findings note that Indigenous and non-Indigenous Guatemalans counter these erasures by finding sources of information to understand their community’s histories, including looking for information on their own, learning through student organizations, college courses or spaces, and community-based organizations. The author concludes by noting the need for Central American studies spaces that are informed by critical analysis of race and migration.

This study examines the organization of large-scale chert biface production in the Maya Lowlands, focusing on Took’ Witz, an architectural group of El Palmar in Campeche, Mexico. Excavations and debitage analysis at three plazuelas and a major debitage deposit revealed a complex lithic industry. The results identified segmented production activities in households, from sourcing materials and early-stage reduction to late-stage biface production. The production scale far exceeded household consumption, probably supporting intensive agriculture in the region. The results provide insight into the variable settings and organization of the biface industry throughout the Maya Lowlands.

Recent years have seen increased interest in Aquinas’s account of perception, its connection to other aspects of his thought and its relation to other theories, such as Kantian and empiricist ones. The present essay begins by discussing contributions to the understanding of Thomas’s position advanced by David Hamlyn and Anthony Lisska and later engages with Aquinas’s writings directly. It poses the question, ‘What sort of a theory does Aquinas offer?’ and suggests it is akin in type if not in substance to Quine’s ‘naturalised epistemology’. Aquinas holds that all human knowledge derives from experience, but I argue that this does not imply (as it would with a strict empiricism) that it is reducible, directly or indirectly, to the contents of immediate sense experience. This is because of the role of two capacities: the cogitative power and the active intellect in constructing contents that transcend immediate experience but which are expressed in perception. Also, some concepts are non-empirical. This leads to a consideration of the sense in which Aquinas is or is not a metaphysical and epistemological realist.

We propose a novel approach to classifying inflation-targeting (IT) economies using fractionally integrated processes. Motivated by the rising prevalence and diversity of IT, we leverage variation in the persistence of inflation rates to identify four de facto strategies, or “shades” of IT. Moving from negative orders of fractional integration, indicating anti-persistent behaviour, to more persistent long-memory processes, often associated with less credible policy frameworks, we classify countries into average, strict, flexible, and uncommitted IT. This framework sheds light on differences between declarative and actual strategies across 36 advanced and emerging economies. Most countries fall into the flexible IT category, though extreme cases, including uncommitted IT, occur quite frequently. Furthermore, we link our classification to institutional features of national frameworks using ordinal probit models. The results suggest differences across categories are related to variations in the maturity and stability of IT frameworks, with weaker connections to central bank independence and transparency.

The outsourcing of traditionally military functions in Africa to private military companies (PMCs) such as the Wagner Group and the Africa Corps has been accompanied by violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law. According to the International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, state responsibility for these violations can be imputed to the states that employ PMCs to function as their agents, to exercise government authority or to act in the vacuum left by official authorities. States that do not intervene to prevent these abuses fail their obligations of due diligence through persistent non-action and should not be excused from demanding accountability by immunity agreements between the host and hiring states. We explore the possibility of the communitarian invocation of state responsibility by third-party states, on behalf of victims, in order to end impunity, drive accountability and secure effective redress for victims.

This cluster of short essays discusses Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel and Sexual Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2023), winner of the North American Victorian Studies Association’s 2023 Subsequent Book Prize, along with a response from the author.

In this article I look at the collaboration between Dickens and his greatest illustrator, Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), in Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and especially Bleak House. In these works, text and image cluster around themes of fallen sexuality, feminine transgression, and the problematic identity of woman as both protagonist and narrator or author. I argue that Browne’s illustrations offer not a counternarrative to Dickens’s but a submerged one, especially in relation to controversial or taboo material. The text and plates work in unison to make manifest what might be present but only subtly telegraphed by Dickens’s words. My piece culminates in speculation about Dickens’s creation of the first-person narrator, Esther Summerson, in Bleak House: was Dickens responding to the proliferation of women-authored texts and women narrators? And were Dickens and Browne signaling in repeated depictions of a faceless Esther that the sex and identity of authorship were mysterious and unsettlingly mutable?

Engaging residents of long-term care homes (LTCHs) in their home’s environment, programs, and operations is required in some jurisdictions and could improve resident quality of life and other outcomes. This scoping review summarized existing research on resident engagement in LTCH organizational design and governance, including associated enablers, barriers, approaches, and outcomes. The database search yielded 5,580 records (after deduplication), and 62 articles covering 59 studies were included. These studies predominantly described Residents’ Councils (n = 38; 64%) and enablers or barriers pertaining to resident and home perspectives, as well as implementation and sustainability infrastructure. Few studies described approaches to considerations of resident diversity (n = 8; 14%) or the presence of dementia and/or cognitive impairment (n = 12; 20%). Ten studies reported quantitative data evaluating resident engagement, and only four with resident-reported outcomes. Robust, evidence-informed frameworks that are co-designed with residents, staff, and others in the LTCH sector are needed to engage residents in their LTCHs.

This article charts the intellectual development and application of communication theology, centering two church-led communication training programs in Nyegezi (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya), from their founding amid East African decolonization in the 1960s through to the challenges of Africanization in the 1970s–1980s. This has implications for two growing bodies of scholarship. First, speaking to histories of Christian thought—particularly on ecumenism, secularization, and localization in the context of decolonization—I show that these training centers, their African staff, and their students enabled the elaboration of communication theology, and revealed its contradictions. Second, speaking to intellectual histories of attempts to decolonize information and communications, I reinsert theology into an often state-centric narrative, suggesting how these training programs informed debates about relevance and self-reliance in the media. I thus make the case for locating intellectual histories of both communications and Christianity in regions of the decolonizing world.