Securitization scholars in Canada have investigated how settler-colonial governments discursively construct extractive infrastructure and policing on Indigenous lands as “critical” for Canada’s economic security. Less literature exists about how Indigenous activists through provincial institutions counter colonial securitization discourse and legislation. This article interrogates discourse in the Manitoba Legislature pertaining to three “critical infrastructure” bills presented by the PC government during the fall 2020 and winter 2021 sessions: Protection of Critical Infrastructure Act (Bill 57), Animal Diseases Amendment Act (Bill 62), and The Petty Trespassers Amendment and Occupiers’ Liability Amendment Act (Bill 63). The study combines an analysis of the bills’ debates, drawn from Hansard, with an interview with then-official opposition house leader, Nahanni Fontaine, to explore the interactions between securitization and counter-securitization discourse(s) and defeat of Bill 57. The study hypothesizes that Indigenous MLAs’ counter-securitization discourse reconstructed the bills as attacks on Indigenous ontological, environmental, and physical security.

Economic policy and research rely on the accurate measurement of welfare. In nearly all instances, measuring welfare requires collecting data via long household surveys. If survey response patterns change over the course of a survey to introduce measurement error, this measurement error can be either classical (i.e., changing distributions, leading to noise) or non-classical (i.e., changing expectations, leading to bias). We embed an experiment in a survey by randomly assigning a questionnaire with either the assets module near the beginning of the survey or the assets module at the end of the survey, delaying enumeration of assets by about 60 minutes. We find no evidence in the full sample that survey ordering introduces differential response patterns, either in the number of reported assets or the reported value of those assets. In exploratory analysis of heterogeneity, we find evidence of non-classical measurement error due to survey ordering within sub-samples of respondents who (i) are from larger households or (ii) have low levels of education. Our experimental design can be generalized to serve as an ex-post test of data quality with respect to questionnaire length.

Data-driven neural word embeddings (NWEs), grounded in distributional semantics, can capture various ranges of linguistic regularities, which can be further enriched by incorporating structured knowledge resources. This work proposes a novel post-processing approach for injecting semantic relationships into the vector space of both static and contextualized NWEs. Current solutions to retrofitting (RF) word embeddings often oversimplify the integration of semantic knowledge, neglecting the nuanced differences between relationships, which may result in suboptimal performance. Instead of applying multi-thresholding to distance boundaries in metric learning, we compute taxonomic similarity to dynamically adjust these boundaries during the semantic specialization of word embeddings. Benchmark evaluations on both static and contextualized word embeddings demonstrate that our dynamic-fitting (DF) approach produces SOTA correlation results of 0.78 and 0.76 on SimLex-999 and SimVerb-3500, respectively, highlighting the effectiveness of incorporating multiple semantic relationships in refining vector semantics. Our approach also outperforms existing RF methods in both supervised and unsupervised semantic relationships recognition tasks. It achieves top accuracy scores for hypernymy detection on the BLESS, WBLESS, and BIBLESS datasets (0.97, 0.89, and 0.83, respectively) and an F1 score of over 0.60 on four types of semantic relationship classification in the shared Subtask-2 of CogALex-V, surpassing all participant systems. In the analogy reasoning task of the Bigger Analogy Test Set, our approach outperforms existing RF methods on inferring relational similarity. These consistent improvements across various lexical semantics tasks suggest that our DF approach can effectively integrate distributional semantics with symbolic knowledge resources, thereby enhancing the representation capacity of word embeddings in downstream applications.

Despite worldwide uptake, there has been little published evaluation of actually delivering the World Health Organization (WHO) Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) in typical low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This paper aims to evaluate the impact of a pilot study in which mhGAP guidelines for mental health sensitisation of community leaders were implemented in 1-day training events across 25 urban and rural health facilities (n = 1004 community leaders) in Uganda. A multiple choice mental health questionnaire was used to assess the community leaders’ mental health knowledge before and after completing the training. Training was evaluated across multiple sites and qualitative feedback comments were used to identify key themes on the impact of the training. The sensitisation training was found to be affordable, accessible and effective, and could be replicated in other LMICs and settings with local adaptations.

This study investigates the applicability of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in early-stage architectural design by evaluating the daylight performance of AI-generated sustainable housing plans across five distinct climate zones. A three-phase methodology was implemented: (1) Plan generation using text-to-image diffusion models (ChatGPT, Copilot, and LookX); (2) digital reconstruction in AutoCAD; and (3) daylight simulation via Velux Daylight Visualizer. Climate-adaptive prompts were formulated to guide the AI tools in producing context-specific floor plans with passive strategies. Out of 31 initial plans, eight valid outputs (five from ChatGPT and three from Copilot) were reconstructed in AutoCAD and simulated. Quantitative simulations were conducted on equinox and solstice dates, and average illuminance values were analyzed for key interior spaces (living room, kitchen, and bedroom). ChatGPT-generated plans demonstrated higher spatial clarity and more balanced daylight performance, whereas Copilot outputs varied significantly, and LookX was excluded due to insufficient architectural legibility. Results revealed that none of the models consistently integrated solar orientation or seasonal lighting considerations, indicating a gap between generative representation and environmental logic. The research contributes a replicable workflow that bridges generative AI and performance-based evaluation, offering critical insight into the current limitations and future potential of AI-assisted architectural design. The findings underscore the need for next-generation AI systems capable of semantic, spatial, and climatic reasoning to support environmentally responsive design practices.

Following the French example, the Meloni government has introduced the phrase ‘sovranità alimentare’ (sovereignty in food) into the title of the ministry of agriculture, and makes clear that it is engaging in a very determined effort to defend and promote the cultural heritage of Italian cuisine on all fronts, at home and abroad. But the origins of this impulse go back to the 1980s and the arrival of the McDonald’s hamburger chain, which gave birth to the Slow Food movement, now a global phenomenon. All this conceals several paradoxes: Italian cuisine has always been open to hybridised versions invented elsewhere (especially in America); production in key sectors, including wine, depends on large numbers of immigrant workers at a time when the government is trying to discourage immigration; and the ‘sovereignty in food’ concept unwittingly unites the government and some of its most radical opponents. But the very basis of this concept is challenged by the hyper-protectionist trade policy of the Trump administration.

This article examines the Philippines’ engagement with international law and institutions under Duterte’s populist presidency. While populism is often associated with hostility toward multilateralism, this case study reveals a more nuanced dynamic. The article argues that state engagement under populist administrations is more complex than assumed, and populist rhetoric does not uniformly dictate international behaviour. Using a novel conceptual framework and empirical data, it analyzes the Philippines’ multilateral interactions in human rights, trade, and health. Duterte’s government displayed ritualistic engagement with the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), constructive engagement with the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Health Organization (WHO), and destructive disengagement from the International Criminal Court (ICC). Key themes include the divergence between rhetoric and action, instrumental use of institutions for domestic priorities, and the critical filtering role of domestic institutions. These findings offer broader insights as to how populist states balance domestic imperatives with international commitments, offering broader insights into the interplay between populism, foreign policy, and multilateralism.

Collaboration is both a process and an outcome. Collaboration is based on the idea that interactions between participants with a common goal, working together as partnerships and sharing resources, can solve complex or “wicked” problems that are not possible to solve in isolation. Collaboration may be simple, occurring between individuals, or more complex interorganizational arrangements across sectors, with the life cycle and size of the collaboration determined by the issue at hand. HTA collaborations may involve a wide range of stakeholders, including HTA agencies at the national, regional, or global level, academia, government (including regulatory authorities), industry, clinicians, providers, and patient organizations. Regardless of the number or type of participants, collaborations need a shared understanding of the common goal, an agreement on aims, and a commitment to shared solutions.

Industry and agency members of the Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) Asia Policy Forum (APF) met in Seoul, South Korea, in November 2024 for open discussions on how to facilitate and improve the collaborative process between all stakeholders in the health system, including government, HTA agencies, industry, academia, clinicians, as well as patients. Over the three days, these discussions identified some of the risks and obstacles to collaboration in the region, how to develop and use collaboration better, as well as articulating the value and benefits of collaboration both in the region and globally.

This article reflects on my experience recovering and organising two judicial archives in Uganda — the High Court and Mengo Court archives — which had long been neglected due to bureaucratic disinterest and legal hierarchies inherited from the colonial period. Together, these archives contained over 150,000 uncatalogued case files documenting how ordinary Ugandans used both native and colonial British courts to contest injustice and claim rights. Their exclusion from formal archives was not incidental; it reflected a legal order that considered British colonial statutes, appellate decisions and English-language records as authoritative expression of law, while dismissing native court records, as informal without precedential value and unworthy of preservation. Drawing on critical scholarship and my own archival experience, I argue that the archive of law should not be seen merely as a collection of sources or as sites of power and knowledge, but as a space where legal authority and legitimacy are produced, preserved, and erased. The recovery of these records not only unearthed a neglected legal history shaped by ordinary people but also challenges dominant narratives of legal authority in Africa. This work also exposed the omissions in the archival collections, the influence of colonial memory, and the importance of vernacular legal records for both historical research and contemporary legal practice.

The Grothendieck construction establishes an equivalence between fibrations, a.k.a. fibred categories and indexed categories and is one of the fundamental results of category theory. Cockett and Cruttwell introduced the notion of fibrations into the context of tangent categories and proved that the fibres of a tangent fibration inherit a tangent structure from the total tangent category. The main goal of this paper is to provide a Grothendieck construction for tangent fibrations. Our first attempt will focus on providing a correspondence between tangent fibrations and indexed tangent categories, which are collections of tangent categories and tangent morphisms indexed by the objects and morphisms of a base tangent category. We will show that this construction inverts Cockett and Cruttwell’s result, but it does not provide a full equivalence between these two concepts. In order to understand how to define a genuine Grothendieck equivalence in the context of tangent categories, inspired by Street’s formal approach to monad theory we introduce a new concept: tangent objects. We show that tangent fibrations arise as tangent objects of a suitable $2$-category and we employ this characterisation to lift the Grothendieck construction between fibrations and indexed categories to a genuine Grothendieck equivalence between tangent fibrations and tangent indexed categories.

A common feature of public policy in Australia in recent decades has been use of wage caps to restrain public sector wage growth. In this paper we explore the nature of the relationship between wage growth in public and private sectors, and thereby whether wage caps have also influenced private sector wage growth. Despite the differences in wage setting institutions and mechanisms, analysis presented reveals that private and public sector wage growth are closely entwined at the aggregate level for Australia, and in all states and territories. Naïve Vector Error Correction Models identify the private sector as the long run wage leader for Australia and half the states and territories. However, after controlling for a structural break occurring during the COVID-19 era, our results indicate that joint or bi-directional wage leadership between both sectors is the norm. Findings suggest that wage caps implemented after the GFC to suppress public sector wage growth likely spilled over to the private sector, contributing to widespread wage stagnation experienced throughout the 2010s. More recently, these public sector wage caps stifled the ability of public sector wages to adjust to rapid private sector wage growth. These findings have important policy implications for public sector wage policy as a key contributor to governments’ labour market and macroeconomic management.