Governments are the most frequent interveners at the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC). However, we know little about government interventions, with the last substantive study only providing coverage of Charter cases up to 2007. To update this body of research, we provide an analysis of government interventions across all constitutional cases decided by the SCC between 2013 and 2023. Building upon earlier work by Hennigar (2010) and Radmilovic (2013), our study shows that despite changes to the intervener landscape in the past decade, governments continue to primarily intervene defensively in Charter cases. Importantly, however, our findings reveal complexity in how governments intervene across various constitutional cases, with distinct intervening behaviour in division of power disputes and reference cases.

What does it mean to be a public Catholic institution in Canada? How does this Catholic identity evolve with the secularisation and diversification of society, and with the rising awareness of the complicated legacy of Catholicism and colonisation in Canada? This article explores those questions drawing on document analysis and interviews with staff working in Catholic health care. Taking a legal pluralist approach, it documents how Catholic health-care institutions navigate between transnational canon laws and ethics, and human rights law. Catholic health care is situated in a web of national and transnational legal regimes. We argue that this navigation takes different forms to adapt to societal changes, such as the authorization of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). This article speaks directly to how Christianity continues to play a subtle, but still constant presence in Canadian Catholic hospitals, and debunks tropes that construct relationships between state and religion as one of clear separation.

Carnap’s (Categoricity) Problem concerns the relationship between (rules of) inference and model-theoretic values. In particular, it asks whether proof-theoretic constraints are ‘strong enough’ to uniquely determine intended semantic values. Carnap [20] demonstrated that already in the classical bivalent setting this is not the case for the majority of the usual logical constants. To remedy this underdetermination of ‘semantics by syntax’ a variety of solution strategies has been explored in the literature. This article is a philosophical-logical survey of these attempts, comparing them with respect to scope, motivation, and success. Besides the mathematical interest held by Carnap’s Problem, the underdetermination it uncovers has significant consequences for a variety of philosophical projects and positions, warranting a systematic study of attempts at resolving it.

Using three waves (2011–15) of CHARLS data, we analyze the short-term effects of widowhood on cognitive function among older Chinese. Fixed-effect models show that widowhood has significant adverse effects on cognition for rural elders but not for urban ones. Furthermore, compared to rural men, rural women exhibit greater declines in cognition, especially in fluid cognition. We explore the possible mechanism from the neighborhood perspective. The results show that community sports and entertainment facilities and public services can effectively mitigate the negative impact of widowhood on cognitive function for rural widows. Sports and entertainment facilities can mainly enhance word recall ability, especially delayed word recall. Public services such as elderly health centers focusing on the healthcare function for the elderly can also improve the word recall ability of rural widows. On the other hand, family-based elderly care centers mainly increase the cognition ability of mental intactness.

Boat-based metaphors, which portray individual societies or even humanity as a whole as cast adrift on a sea of challenges, have resonated within political theory since the time of Plato, and they continue to frame how we understand and respond to key political choices. However, unless handled very carefully, they can facilitate mis-framings of our contemporary predicament. To date, these metaphors have often done a poor job of capturing the ecological challenges we face. They also risk downplaying the messy pluralism that enduringly characterises political life. If this is true, we should be suspicious of the conclusions their authors seek to draw about our collective future. Lifeboat metaphors, I will suggest, are prone to the same general problems but also add some distinctively their own. As a consequence they should be deployed with especial caution.

The incorporation of trace metals into land snail shells may record the ambient environmental conditions, yet this potential remains largely unexplored. In this study, we analyzed modern snail shells (Cathaica sp.) collected from 16 sites across the Chinese Loess Plateau to investigate their trace metal compositions. Our results show that both the Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios exhibit minimal intra-shell variability and small inter-shell variability at individual sites. A significant positive correlation is observed between the shell Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios across the plateau, with higher values being recorded in the northwestern sites where less monsoonal rainfall is received. We propose that shell Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios, which record the composition of soil solution, may be controlled by the Rayleigh distillation in response to prior calcite precipitation. Higher rainfall amounts may lead to a lower degree of Rayleigh distillation and thus lower shell Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios. This is supported by the distinct negative correlation between summer precipitation and shell Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios, enabling us to reconstruct summer precipitation amounts using the Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios of Cathaica sp. shells. The potential application of these novel proxies may also be promising for other terrestrial mollusks living in the loess deposits globally.

This study examines geographic origins of basketry, animal and human grave offerings (including a feline trophy head, camelid bone instruments and human trophy heads) interred as grave goods at the cemetery of Uraca in the Majes Valley, Arequipa, Peru during the Early Intermediate Period to Middle Horizon (c. 100 bce–750 ce). We aim to identify whether any of these human or non-human beings or artifacts were non-local to the Majes Valley and explore the ontologically informed meanings underlying the incorporation of geographically distant beings and things into mortuary landscapes. We report new grave good 87Sr/86Sr (n = 36) relative to published data from Uraca human trophy heads and non-trophy individuals (n = 55). Defining the local 87Sr/86Sr range as the mean ±2σ of the non-trophy and non-camelid or small home-range fauna, we compare the proportions of non-local outliers between plant, animal and human grave-offering types. The 87Sr/86Sr range of all new samples is 0.70609–0.70954, encompassing the 87Sr/86Sr variability of much of southern Peru from the coast to the highlands. Nearly half of camelids, the feline trophy, most camelid whistles and one basketry sample were non-local, suggesting that assembling beings and things from both local and distant geographies was an important aspect of making the mortuary landscape.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most prevalent co-occurring conditions amongst cognitively unimpaired autistic people. The evidence-based treatment for social anxiety known as cognitive therapy for SAD (CT-SAD) may to an extent be beneficial to autistic people, but adaptations for autistic people are recommended to increase its effectiveness. The present study aimed to co-produce and pilot an adapted SAD treatment protocol for autistic people based on the Clark and Wells (1995) model, including assessing its feasibility and acceptability. A bespoke 12-week CBT online group intervention was created to meet the needs of autistic people with a diagnosis of SAD. The treatment protocol was created collaboratively with autistic people. It was piloted with seven adult participants (three males, four females) with autism or self-identified autism who completed the group intervention targeting SAD symptoms. With regard to feasibility, we met our initial aims of recruiting our intended sample size of a minimum of six participants for the intervention with an attendance rate of at least 80% of sessions. The excellent completion and attendance rates, respectively 100% and 95%, indicate that the intervention was acceptable to our participants. These findings extend previous research and support the continued adaptation of CBT interventions for autistic people. Furthermore, the evidence of feasibility indicates that further study to evaluate the efficacy of this group intervention is warranted.

Key learning aims

1. (1) To reflect on social anxiety, autism and identify ways to improve the delivery of cognitive therapy for autistic people.

2. (2) To identify useful adaptations to cognitive therapy for autistic people.

3. (3) To learn how to deliver group cognitive therapy remotely for autistic people who present with social anxiety.

This article addresses classical issues in conversation analysis related to the overall structural organization of social interaction, achieved through opening and closing sequences. While the integrity and autonomy of social interaction are most often oriented to by participants in single interactions, the study of some institutional interactions shows that forms of porosity between encounters do exist, in which one encounter impinges on another. This is the case of encounters-in-a-series, in which a new encounter is opened as the previous is not yet closed. The article examines interactions in which participants orient to the preservation of the integrity of successive encounters, contrasted with cases in which the initiation of the opening of a new encounter happens during or before the closing of the previous, and discusses how and when this is treated as normatively delicate or not, within the participants’ local endogenous analysis of the overall structural organization of the interaction. (Social interaction, conversation analysis, multimodality, overall structural organization, opening, closing, encounters-in-a-series, porosity)

Drawing on ethnographic research from Amami Ōshima, southern Japan, this paper documents the ways in which contemporary societies, from the hamlet to the nation state, are wrestling with opposing forces of environmental and economic sustainability and discusses the fractures this creates for people and ecosystems. It uses as a case study the protest to stop the construction of a seawall being built in Katoku, an ocean hamlet in Amami, based within the buffer zone of the island’s United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Natural Heritage Site. Rather than being built with the primary aim to protect “people and property,” I suggest this infrastructural intervention is a symbolic declaration of risk management and repository of huge economic value for the island and prefecture. The background to the paper is the return of a cache of color photographs taken by an American anthropologist in the 1950s and the 70th anniversary of the reversion of Amami in 1953 from US military to Japanese control. The paper considers the contemporary ramifications of policy instituted in the post-World War II period, that has sought to maximize the potential of “remote” areas and continues to favor growth and development at the expense of the health of multispecies island communities.

A number of philosophers have recently argued that there is such a thing as ‘epistemic blame’: blame targeted at epistemic norm violations qua epistemic norm violations. However, Smartt (2024) and Matheson and Milam (2022) have recently provided several arguments in favour of thinking epistemic blame either doesn’t exist or is never justified. This paper argues that these challenges are unsuccessful and along the way evaluates the prospects for various accounts of epistemic blame. It also reflects on the dialectic between sceptics and realists about epistemic blame and what choice points are available for moving the debate forward.

This essay reviews the following films:

El agente topo. Directed by Maite Alberdi. Produced by Micromundo Producciones, Motto Pictures, and Sutor Kolonko. Chile, 2020, 84 min. Distributed by Micromundo Producciones, Mandra Films, and Volya Films.

La memoria infinita. Directed by Maite Alberdi. Produced by Micromundo Producciones. Chile, 2023, 85 min. Distributed by Micromundo Producciones, Mandra Films, and Volya Films.

Los niños. Directed by Maite Alberdi. Produced by Micromundo Producciones, Mandra Films, and Volya Films. Chile, 2016, 82 min. Distributed by Micromundo Producciones, Mandra Films, and Volya Films.