Many people experiencing mental ill health are trapped in cycles of worsening social exclusion. Individual Placement and Support (IPS) is being implemented to support those with mental ill health into employment. However, this intervention does not address the many challenges faced by those who are more vulnerable and is less effective for those with more severe clinical presentations. Although National Health Service (NHS) guidance suggests broader support is needed, there is little clarity over what this should look like. We discuss one model, drawing on years of experience facilitating user-led services at Lambeth Vocational Services, implementing a genuinely person-centred, trust-based approach to facilitate social inclusion.

Social scientists are paying attention to the role that knowledge plays in economic phenomena. This focus on knowledge has led to exploring two challenges: first, its governance to reap positive externalities and solve social dilemmas, and second, how we can craft institutions to match the intangible nature of ideas with adequate property rules. This article contributes by elaborating on the different knowledge property regimes and the elements contributing to their classification. This paper first taxonomises knowledge governance regimes based on Ostrom’s work on institutional analysis. Second, it examines why governance structures for managing knowledge production vary across industries, according to (1) the characteristics of knowledge, (2) the attributes of the organisations, and (3) the different rules-in-use to enforce property rights. This is the first study at the intersection of institutional analysis and political economy that highlights the knowledge features, incentive structures, and mechanisms undergirding knowledge governance in different property regimes.

Culture is increasingly articulated by financial actors and financial firms as a solution to the dislocations of contemporary capitalism. It therefore matters, not just how actors behave, but how they articulate culture and what importance they accord it. Drawing on pragmatist sociology, the present paper takes this injunction seriously and reports the findings of a field study involving 29 interviews with senior members of financial firms whose understanding of culture and its importance were interrogated directly. The discourse concerning purposeful culture articulated in these interviews simultaneously recognises current arrangements between finance and society as fractured while positing organisational culture initiatives as the most realistic means of repairing said fracture. The paper draws on these findings to argue that, despite masquerading as a call for change, purposeful culture discourse has the effect of protecting against calls to rethink or radically transform the roles and effects of finance in society. The paper thus contributes to sociological perspectives on finance by illustrating how existing cultural discourse in financial markets serves as a kind of conservative critique where shortcomings are conceded in a way which insulates finance from wider structural change.

This article tries to explain the flourishing of geopolitical alternatives to the nation-state form and foreign policies organized around giant militarized power blocs during the two decades after World War II. The first section presents these new approaches to organizing the world. The first set of alternatives consisted of ideas and practices of the federation and the amalgamation of states into larger political units. These included Senghor’s vision of a postcolonial federation in which France and its former colonies would be equals; Nkrumah’s vision of a United States of Africa; and various short-lived amalgamations of states, including the Mali Federation and the United Arab Republic. These new geopolitical alternatives also included nonalignment, which originated with Jawaharlal Nehru of India and culminated with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia but also encompassed Ireland between 1957 and 1961 and France in the early Fifth Republic. One of the distinctive features of this conjuncture is that these experiments were not limited to the global peripheries, colonies, and recently decolonized states, but also characterized certain nonhegemonic European core countries. The second section examines a set of four factors in this period that created an opportunity structure or space of possibilities for geopolitical experimentation: (1) late colonialism; (2) the Cold War; (3) the character of decolonization; and (4) the United Nations. The coexistence of these factors opened spaces of maneuver and autonomy for a flourishing of geopolitical imaginaries. The final section discusses possible reasons for the end of this period of experimentation.

The global food system puts enormous pressure on the environment. Managing these pressures requires understanding not only where they occur (i.e., where food is produced), but also who drives them (i.e., where food is consumed). However, the size and complexity of global supply chains make it difficult to trace food production to consumption. Here, we provide the most comprehensive dataset of bilateral trade flows of environmental pressures stemming from food production from producing to consuming nations. The dataset provides environmental pressures for greenhouse gas emissions, water use, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and the area of land/water occupancy of food production for crops and animals from land, freshwater, and ocean systems. To produce these data, we improved upon reported food trade and production data to identify producing and consuming nations for each food item, allowing us to match food flows with appropriate environmental pressure data. These data provide a resource for research on sustainable global food consumption and the drivers of environmental impact.

Historians of colonial and postcolonial attempts to deal with undernutrition in Africa have generally argued that, after the Second World War, scientists and doctors “medicalized” hunger by emphasizing specific deficiencies that could be medically “cured” or alleviated through dietary supplements, thereby covering up the economic, social, and political causes of (post)colonial hunger. This article argues that this explanation obscures the persistence of a more holistic approach immediately after the Second World War, which rejected this narrow vision of hunger and, on the contrary, framed it as a very broad problem requiring interdisciplinary research and ambitious economic and social solutions. It focuses in particular on the work of British nutrition specialist B. S. Platt and his “experiment” in The Gambia that was meant to devise a replicable recipe to cure colonial malnutrition through mechanization and agricultural development. Like many other such colonial projects, the project ended in dismal failure, but it illustrates how malnutrition was understood at the end of the war as a broad economic and social problem. It also shows how this more holistic approach was tightly associated with the postwar project of colonial “development” and was predicated on an ambition to thoroughly re-engineer colonial landscapes and subjects.

The U.S. Supreme Court is often regarded as an impartial arbiter of justice, yet various prejudices may influence its decisions. This article examines Supreme Court justices’ biases, focusing on how they invoke racialized stereotypes of criminality. We argue that justices are more likely to vote in favor of white, nonviolent litigants, reinforcing stereotypes that depict nonwhite defendants as inherently more criminal and violent. Drawing on the U.S. Supreme Court Database’s criminal procedure cases from 2005–2017, combined with an original dataset of litigants’ racial identities, we estimate a series of multilevel logistic regressions. Our findings show that litigant race, crime type, and justice ideology jointly shape judicial votes. We further investigate how bias appears in justices’ written opinions, revealing language that perpetuates racialized conceptions of criminality. Overall, our results underscore the Court’s role in constructing what it means to be both “criminal” and “nonwhite,” suggesting that the Court is not a neutral interpreter of law, but an institution shaped by broader social and political biases.

While gender-based violence (GBV) is increasingly recognised as a significant social and political issue, its impact on women educators remains underexamined. In the context of growing concerns about violence against educators and the prevalence of GBV in educational institutions, this study investigates gendered patterns of violence against school leaders in Australian schools. Drawing on 18,172 observations from reports by principals and deputy principals, this analysis explores incidents of bullying, threats of violence, and physical violence to identify disparities in the experiences of men and women school leaders. The analysis determined that women school leaders were more likely to experience threats of violence and bullying at work than their male counterparts. Logistic regression analyses revealed that gender, school sector, and role significantly influence the likelihood of experiencing various forms of workplace violence, with women in secondary schools and those in government or Catholic sectors being particularly vulnerable.

Cognitive impairments are a core feature of psychotic disorders, but their long-term trajectory remains contentious. Previous meta-analyses focused on the first 5 years following psychosis onset. Here, we evaluated the change in cognitive impairments in psychotic disorders with a meta-analysis of studies with follow-ups of 5+ years. Following preregistration, databases were searched for relevant articles until July 2024. Two authors screened the reports for studies reporting on the change in cognitive impairments in global cognition, verbal learning and memory, visual learning and memory, working memory, attention, speed of processing, reasoning and problem-solving, and verbal fluency in individuals with psychotic disorders, with a minimum follow-up of 5 years. Three authors extracted data, and the PRISMA guidelines were followed. Random-effects meta-analyses and moderator analyses were conducted. Twenty-four studies comprising 2,633 patients and 1,019 controls were included in the study. Over an average of 8.46 years, cognitive impairments remained stable in all eight measures: global cognition (g = 0.09; 95% CI = 0.03–0.20), verbal memory (g = 0.05; 95% CI = −0.11, 0.21), visual memory (g = −0.16; 95% CI = −0.35, 0.03), working memory (g = 0.03; 95% CI = −0.09, 0.14), attention (g = 0.22; 95% CI = −0.36, 0.80), speed of processing (g = 0.10; 95% CI = −0.14, 0.35), reasoning and problem-solving (g = 0.16; 95% CI = −0.03, 0.35), and verbal fluency (g = 0.08; 95% CI = −0.03, 0.19). We conclude that cognitive impairments remain stable over time, consistent with the neurodevelopmental view of psychotic disorders.

Overconsumption of unhealthy, discretionary, foods and beverages are associated with an increased risk of weight gain and non-communicable diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. This cross-sectional study explored preferences for setting goals to reduce discretionary food and beverage consumption. The online survey included items about discretionary food and beverage intake, goal setting preferences to reduce intake, habit strength, personality traits, and demographic characteristics. A total of 2664 Australian adults completed the survey. The sample was mostly female (65.9%), half (52.8%) were aged between 30–49 years, and the median intake of discretionary food and beverages was 4.9 (IQR: 3.6 to 7.2) serves per day. Multinomial logistic regression and ordinal logistic regression models were used to explore demographic and psychological predictors of the helpfulness of long-term and short-term goals, elimination and gradual goals, specific food goals, specific eating occasion and food goals, self-set goals, collaboratively set goals, and assigned goals. The results showed participants with higher habit strength had greater odds of finding short-term (OR 1.40, 95% CI 1.06–1.86), gradual (OR 1.14, 95% CI 1.01–1.29), specific (OR 1.35, 95% CI 0.84–1.76), assigned (OR 1.38, 95% CI 1.14–1.66) and collaborative goals (OR 1.24, 95% CI 1.01–1.53) helpful. The results also indicated that age and gender were important predictors of goal setting preferences, particularly for long-term goals, elimination goals, broad goals, and collaborative goals. Interventions to reduce discretionary food and beverage intake are needed and consideration of goal setting preferences could be a novel way to developing more tailored and effective dietary interventions.

Boundary points on the moduli space of pointed curves corresponding to collisions of marked points have modular interpretations as degenerate curves. In this paper, we study degenerations of orbifold projective curves corresponding to collisions of stacky points from the point of view of noncommutative algebraic geometry.

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a significant public health concern in China. Using data from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study 2021, we analyzed trends in age-standardized incidence rate (ASIR), prevalence rate (ASPR), mortality rate (ASMR), and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for TB from 1990 to 2021. Over this period, HIV-negative TB showed a marked decline in ASIR (AAPC = −2.34%, 95% CI: −2.39, −2.28) and ASMR (AAPC = −0.56%, 95% CI: −0.62, −0.59). Specifically, drug-susceptible TB (DS-TB) showed reductions in both ASIR and ASMR, while multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) showed slight decreases. Conversely, extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) exhibited upward trends in both ASIR and ASMR. TB co-infected with HIV (HIV-DS-TB, HIV-MDR-TB, HIV-XDR-TB) showed increasing trends in recent years. The analysis also found an inverse correlation between ASIRs and ASMRs for HIV-negative TB and the Socio-Demographic Index (SDI). Projections from 2022 to 2035 suggest continued increases in ASIR and ASMR for XDR-TB, HIV-DS-TB, HIV-MDR-TB, and HIV-XDR-TB. The rising burden of XDR-TB and HIV-TB co-infections presents ongoing challenges for TB control in China. Targeted prevention and control strategies are urgently needed to mitigate this burden and further reduce TB-related morbidity and mortality.