The Shona people of Zimbabwe hold rich social histories that should be approached as public humanities. This article explores the oral traditions, pre-colonial sociopolitical systems, and the profound impacts of colonial and post-colonial developments on cultural identity to understand the cohesion of the Shona people. The Shona people’s rich culture of myths, folktales, and storytelling serves as a repository of collective memory that preserves the values, beliefs, and cosmologies underpinning their society. In examining pre-colonial Shona governance, this article highlights the decentralised political systems rooted in chieftaincy, kinship networks, and communal land tenure still in practice today. Using a hybrid methodological approach that integrates ethnographic insights, historical analysis, and theoretical frameworks, such as Santos’ (2018) epistemologies of the South, this study positions Shona public humanities within broader debates on African Indigenous knowledge systems and post-colonial identity reconstruction. The analysis extends to the economic practices of agrarian subsistence and long-distance trade, underscoring the sophisticated socio-economic frameworks of Shona society. Despite the challenges posed by industrial encroachment and cultural commodification, a resilient Shona heritage upholds adaptive strategies. A Shona situated approach contributes to broader debates on decolonisation for the preservation of Indigenous knowledge in a rapidly globalising world.

Since the 1990s, incumbent-led autocratization in democracies is increasingly common. However, there is surprisingly little systematic and comparative research into the actions would-be autocrats actually take when they undermine democracy. We analyse the wealth of in-depth case studies of all cases of incumbent-led autocratization in democracies from 1990 until 2023 to develop such an overview of autocratic actions inductively. This empirically based would-be autocrats’ toolkit encompasses over 400 unique autocratic actions which we classify into seven overarching modes of autocratization: evasion, manipulation, infiltration, duplication, restriction, prohibition, and delegitimation. Would-be autocrats selectively use these different modes in varying arenas of democracy to gradually erode democracy. The toolkit provides a starting point to more systematically study autocratization within and across different cases, enabling the identification of sequencing and diffusion patterns, and helping generate better understanding of when autocratization is successful.

The Viewpoint Alberta Consolidated Dataset is a novel resource for understanding political attitudes and behaviours in Alberta which includes over 10,000 interviews across nine waves in 5 years. The Viewpoint dataset combines both cross-sectional and longitudinal (panel) data on Albertans’ attitudes towards political parties, federalism, democracy, social movements, energy transitions, media and a range of issue areas. We demonstrate some of these potential applications in this note. To our knowledge, this dataset is the largest and most comprehensive dataset of political attitudes in a single province that has ever been publicly released. This matters because we know much less about provincial politics than national politics in Canada, despite many of the most interesting and important political developments taking place at the provincial level. Furthermore, by following the same respondents over multiple periods of time, we can develop a much greater understanding of individual-level changes across a range of key issue domains

Co-morbid mental health diagnoses present challenges for services structured to provide disorder-specific models of treatment, such as NHS Talking Therapies services. Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) has been identified as both disorder specific and transdiagnostic, although little research explores transdiagnostic approaches to treatment of IU alone. A transdiagnostic cognitive behavioural therapy treatment targeting IU, the ‘Making Friends with Uncertainty’ (MFWU) group, was developed and piloted in a Talking Therapies primary care service in an earlier evaluation (Mofrad et al., 2020). The aim of this study was to replicate and further evaluate the intervention. Twenty people presenting with a range of anxiety disorders started the intervention in two groups. The study used a single group, within-subjects quasi-experimental design, collecting data at eight points for routine outcome measures of anxiety, depression and functioning, and five points for measures of anxiety disorder-specific symptoms and IU. Intention-to-treat analyses showed improvement on a general measure of anxiety as well as improvement on the measure of IU. Significantly there was improvement on the disorder specific measures even though the intervention was aimed at the underlying process of IU, rather than the particular symptoms targeted by these measures. The MFWU group may be an efficient and effective way to deliver a highly specified transdiagnostic intervention for intolerance of uncertainty when people are treated in a mixed group format.

Key learning aims

1. (1) To consider the effectiveness of a transdiagnostic group targeting IU.

2. (2) To develop understanding of a group intervention for building tolerance to uncertainty.

3. (3) To consider the impact of targeting IU on specific anxiety disorders.

4. (4) To offer a methodological framework for effectively evaluating a group intervention in routine practice.

Cold War historiography has long assumed an interruption of most pan-European, West–East economic relations between 1945 and 1989, before the circulation paradigm imposed the idea of a porosity of the ‘iron curtain’. This article offers a double displacement in the analysis of pan-European economic connections during the Cold War. It first highlights the legacy, up to the late 1950s, of pan-European economic debates about socialist economics that have been developed in the interwar period within the communist parties’ network in Europe. Second, it shows how these networks created opportunities in the people’s democracies for challenging the implementation of the Soviet economic model. A clear Cold War divide in the field of economic ideas was delayed, at least until the beginning of the 1960s. A pan-European discussion about the limits of the equation between central planning and socialist economics, developed in capitalist interwar Germany, lived on.

Vitamins are important scientific categories in different contexts. This article argues that vitamins are investigative kinds in middle-range ontologies: Categories subject to open-ended investigation and that track features of the world. Section 2 presents the history of vitamin discovery to illustrate how the introduction of the “vitamin” category and subsequent research led to the identification of many different vitamins. Section 3 explores whether vitamins can be considered natural or conventional kinds. Section 4 argues that vitamins are investigative kinds. Section 5 considers the ontology of vitamins as investigative kinds in a middle-range ontology.

We prove a ‘Whitney’ presentation, and a ‘Coulomb branch’ presentation, for the torus equivariant quantum K theory of the Grassmann manifold $\mathrm {Gr}(k;n)$, inspired from physics, and stated in an earlier paper. The first presentation is obtained by quantum deforming the product of the Hirzebruch $\lambda _y$ classes of the tautological bundles. In physics, the $\lambda _y$ classes arise as certain Wilson line operators. The second presentation is obtained from the Coulomb branch equations involving the partial derivatives of a twisted superpotential from supersymmetric gauge theory. This is closest to a presentation obtained by Gorbounov and Korff, utilizing integrable systems techniques. Algebraically, we relate the Coulomb and Whitney presentations utilizing transition matrices from the (equivariant) Grothendieck polynomials to the (equivariant) complete homogeneous symmetric polynomials. Along the way, we calculate K-theoretic Gromov-Witten invariants of wedge powers of the tautological bundles on $\mathrm {Gr}(k;n)$, using the ‘quantum=classical’ statement.

The internet has been increasingly employed in the treatment of binge eating, including to facilitate guided self-help (GSH). However, few studies have investigated provision of GSH over email and there are questions regarding the viability of this approach, and how facilitators might best deliver this treatment. We describe a case study of a woman in her early 50s with a diagnosis of binge-eating disorder (BED) who received email-supported GSH over 12 weeks within a larger randomised controlled trial. At assessment, she presented with regular binge eating episodes (approximately twice a week) in addition to co-morbid medical and psychiatric issues, for which she was prescribed several medications. Treatment, provided within the UK National Health Service, involved provision of a self-help manual (Overcoming Binge Eating; Fairburn, 2013) in addition to email support over 12 weeks. A summary of the intervention is provided, along with email excerpts to demonstrate practice, illustrate how treatment might be delivered, and outline the type of interaction that may occur during email support. Consistent with larger studies, improvement on several self-report symptom measures was seen, including eating disorder symptoms, psychosocial impairment, psychological distress, self-esteem, and therapeutic alliance, all of which met criteria for reliable improvement at post-treatment. This case study, which provides data from one individual, demonstrates delivery of GSH with email support for regular binge eating, which could be considered as an alternative to face-to-face treatment. Future work might look to enhance outcomes following GSH, including reducing drop-out, and increase dissemination and uptake of GSH.

Key learning aims

1. (1) Consider the potential role of email-assisted self-help in the treatment of recurrent binge eating.

2. (2) Provide guidance to support the delivery of guided self-help, particularly in an online format.

3. (3) Review an example of using a CBT-based self-help intervention to overcome binge eating in the presence of medical and psychiatric co-morbidity.

4. (4) Understand how to implement guided self-help for binge eating and use this approach to facilitate a strong therapeutic alliance and symptom change.

Eugenic arguments are not a thing of the past. In 2016, geneticist Michael Lynch published an article in Genetics arguing that human mental and physical performance are declining at a rate of 1% per generation. This estimate is not based on measurements of performance but on an argument from mutational load: Medical interventions are relaxing selection on the human population, which will lead to a buildup of deleterious mutations. This simple argument from mutational load is invalid. When the argument is made valid, it is not obvious that there are any significant consequences for human population health.