The use of religious symbols has sparked heated debate and numerous judicial cases across Europe. Early case law from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been criticised for allegedly employing biased discourses. However, it remains unclear whether such biased discourses are present in recent ECtHR rulings or in comparable decisions by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). This article applies Critical Discourse Analysis, a linguistic and social science approach, to examine the narratives used by the ECtHR and ECJ in cases involving religious symbols. It argues that religious and gender biases are pervasive in ECtHR judgements. While the ECJ generally employs neutral language, biased discourses occasionally emerge in the ‘subtext’ of its decisions. These biases are not incidental but serve as strategic tools within judicial narratives, reinforcing the argumentative legitimacy of rulings for audiences influenced by societal prejudices.

During speech production, bilinguals need to encode target words phonologically before articulation, and the encoding units differ across languages. It remains an open question whether bilinguals employ the encoding unit in their L1 or L2 for phonological encoding. The present study examined the primary unit of phonological encoding in L2 speech production by Mandarin Chinese-English bilinguals with high and low L2 proficiency using the picture-word interference paradigm. Results revealed segmental priming effects with one or two segments and syllabic overlap at varied stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), for both groups in their L2 speech production. Additionally, the results demonstrated increasing effects with more overlapping segments for both groups, and the facilitation effects decreased as SOA increased. These results indicate that bilinguals encode English words with the segment as a primary planning unit regardless of their L2 proficiency. The time course of segmental encoding in L2 production is also discussed.

This article examines the pioneering contributions of a generation of women civil servants, diplomats, and intellectuals—referred to as Cepalinas—to economic thought at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) between the late 1960s and early 1980s. These women experts, including statisticians, economists, sociologists, and demographers, played a critical role in reshaping CEPAL’s development agenda by advocating for the integration of gender perspectives into regional policies. Through extensive fieldwork and data collection, they highlighted the economic and social contributions of women, particularly those from marginalised communities, and challenged the prevailing male-dominated models of development. Despite the progress made following the 1975 UN International Conference on Women, the Cepalinas often remained on the periphery of institutional power and have been largely overlooked in the historiography. This article brings their work to the forefront, analysing their publications and mission reports to reveal how their efforts transformed both the Commission’s economic frameworks and broader global development policies.

Spatial intensity modulation in amplified laser beams, particularly hot spots, critically constrains attainable pulse peak power due to the damage threshold limitations of four-grating compressors. This study demonstrates that the double-smoothing grating compressor (DSGC) configuration effectively suppresses modulation through directional beam smoothing. Our systematic investigation validated the double-smoothing effect through numerical simulations and experimental measurements, with comprehensive spatiotemporal analysis revealing excellent agreement between numerical and practical pulse characteristics. Crucially, the DSGC enables a 1.74 times energy output boost compared to conventional compressors. These findings establish the DSGC as a pivotal advancement for next-generation ultrahigh-power laser systems, providing a viable pathway toward hundreds of PW output through optimized spatial energy redistribution.

This article takes a worm’s eye view of the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts and comments on the political realities that inform their operations. My work as a scholar and an applied theater practitioner with Aquila Theatre received program support from both agencies and has represented them at the White House, US Capitol, and US Supreme Court. I suggest that the traditional division that exists between arts and humanities, as reflected in the policies of both endowments, should be erased for the betterment of public-facing humanities, and, as a humanities program director, I want to address the structural problems of fundraising and the politics of money that inform the granting decisions of these US federal agencies.

In the aftermath of the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision on access to reproductive healthcare, we published a commentary in this journal to inform the infectious diseases (ID) community about anticipated worsening of maternal and neonatal sepsis outcomes and relevant stewardship and healthcare associated infection issues. Three years later, we seek to keep the ID community engaged with important updates and intensify their commitment to providing high-quality care and reduce disparate health outcomes in this vulnerable population.

It is often argued that when legislators have personal vote-seeking incentives, parties are less unified because legislators need to build bonds of accountability with their voters. I argue that these effects depend on a legislator’s ability to cultivate a personal vote. When parties control access to the ballot and the resources candidates need to cultivate personal votes, they can condition a legislator’s access to these resources on loyalty to the party’s agenda. I test this theory by conducting a difference-in-differences analysis that leverages the staggered implementation of the 2014 Mexican Electoral Reform. This reform introduced the possibility of consecutive reelection for state legislators, increasing their incentives to cultivate personal votes. I study unity in position-taking and voting behaviour of Mexican state legislators from 2012 to 2018. To analyze position-taking, I apply correspondence analysis to a new dataset of over half a million legislative speeches in twenty states. To study voting, I analyze over 14,500 roll-call votes in fourteen states during the same period. Results show that reelection incentives increased intra-party unity, which has broad implications for countries introducing electoral reforms aiming to personalize politics.

Reflective thinking often predicts less belief in God or less religiosity – so-called analytic atheism. However, those correlations involve limitations: widely used tests of reflection confound reflection with ancillary abilities such as numeracy; some studies do not detect analytic atheism in every country; experimentally encouraging reflection makes some non-believers more open to believing in God; and one of the most common online research participant pools seems to produce lower data quality. So analytic atheism may be less than universal or partially explained by confounding factors. To test this, we developed better measures, controlled for more confounds, and employed more recruitment methods. All four studies detected signs of analytic atheism above and beyond confounds (N > 70,000 people from five of six continental regions). We also discovered analytic apostasy: the better a person performed on reflection tests, the greater their odds of losing their religion since childhood – even when controlling for confounds. Analytic apostasy even seemed to explain analytic atheism: apostates were more reflective than others and analytic atheism was undetected after excluding apostates. Religious conversion was rare and unrelated to reflection, suggesting reflection’s relationships to conversion and deconversion are asymmetric. Detected relationships were usually small, indicating reflective thinking is a reliable albeit marginal predictor of apostasy.

This study investigates how institutional origin affects the dot tax haven (DTH) internationalization of Chinese family firms (FFs). Drawing on institutional theory and the mixed gamble perspective, we propose that restructured FFs (RFFs), originating from state-owned enterprises (SOEs), are more likely to engage in DTH internationalization than entrepreneurial FFs directly established by family founders. This propensity is attributed to the institutional legacies inherited from their SOE predecessors, which create a distinct potential gain-loss calculus. Our empirical analysis of publicly listed Chinese FFs from 2012 to 2021 demonstrates that restructured FFs are 30% more likely to use DTH and establish 43% more DTH subsidiaries than entrepreneurial FFs. This tendency, however, is mitigated by the firms’ economic ties to financial institutions. Our study enhances understanding of FFs’ global entrepreneurial decision-making, contributing to FF heterogeneity research. A novel aspect of our study is examining the impact of institutional legacies on FFs – a topic less explored in family business literature. Furthermore, our findings provide insights for policymakers and regulators, emphasizing the importance of tailored policies that consider the intricate interplay between institutional origin and contemporary entrepreneurial goals in FFs.

Although the evidence is limited, examples of professional female poets who composed public songs for their communities, commissioned by wealthy families and women patrons, suggest that female performance activated the same economic dynamics as the work of male poets in relation to their patrons. Thus, women contributed to the economic life of their communities through their poetic voices, and were able to express their views on social, political and economic matters.

Regardless of method, political scientists often seek to develop arguments that can be generalized to a population of cases. But is this the only way to think about how cases speak to one another? We advocate for a new way to think about how qualitative research produces broadly applicable insights: translation. Much like linguistic translation, the goal of translation in political science is to develop ideas that are intelligible in a different context, even as the context will change how an idea or political practice is interpreted or enacted. Translation offers at least three benefits. It allows us to (1) rethink how we form and deploy concepts; (2) rethink what a generalizable argument is by carrying parts of an argument, instead of entire causal chains to other cases; and (3) rethink how we conceptualize knowledge accumulation to include an abductive process where generating theory is the primary goal.

This paper re-evaluates recent kinship studies in Neolithic Ireland through a close analysis of biomolecular and fine-grained archaeological data. It outlines the rich possibilities these datasets offer when interwoven to enhance our understanding of diverse webs of social relationships. We synthesize a range of archaeological and scientific data to form a new model of kinship and its relationship to shifting traditions of megalith building and funerary and cosmological practices. This model is put in dialogue with recently published genetic data and used to test a variety of explanations for the patterns of biological relatedness revealed using these methods. We argue that the detected genetic patterning is best interpreted as reflecting a reconfiguration of social relations after 3600 bc linked to the consolidation of emergent social and religious communities.

Survey research in the Global South has traditionally required large budgets and lengthy fieldwork. The expansion of digital connectivity presents an opportunity for researchers to engage global subject pools and study settings where in-person contact is challenging. This paper evaluates Facebook advertisements as a tool to recruit diverse survey samples in the Global South. Using Facebook’s advertising platform, we quota-sample respondents in Mexico, Kenya, and Indonesia and assess how well these samples perform on a range of survey indicators, identify sources of bias, replicate a canonical experiment, and highlight trade-offs for researchers to consider. This method can quickly and cheaply recruit respondents, but these samples tend to be more educated than corresponding national populations. Weighting ameliorates sample imbalances. This method generates comparable data to a commercial online sample for a fraction of the cost. Our analysis demonstrates the potential of Facebook advertisements to cost-effectively conduct research in diverse settings.

We investigate the effects of age and first language (L1) on the acquisition of verb morphology in L2 English by Chinese and Russian children learning English as a foreign language in EFL schools in Shanghai and Moscow. We tested children 5 years after they started their EFL classes and considered two groups in each country: one group started EFL classes at the age of 4 and was tested at the age of 9, while the other group started at 7 and was tested at 12. We assessed the production of 3SG-agreement and past tense using two elicited production tasks (TEGI). Our results show that later starters consistently outperform earlier starters. Unexpectedly, Chinese children showed higher accuracy with 3SG-agreement than their Russian counterparts. Finally, learners were more accurate with regular past tense than 3SG-agreement.

This article traces the reproduction of whiteness in Jamaica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the lens of domestic labor. Articulated in dialogue—and at times in tension—with Britain, what it meant to be white was forged through representations and practices of domestic service and household management, shaped by the legacies of slavery and the shifting colonial relationship. Anxieties about a declining white population and attempts to rejuvenate the island's image contributed to prescriptions of domestic labor management that positioned the white creole mistress as a model of respectability and colonial modernity. Black domestic servants were repeatedly presented as the mirror through which white creole womanhood was constructed, and this article argues that these representations served to consolidate class/color hierarchies that privileged whiteness into the twentieth century. Yet mapping these discourses onto the daily interactions between mistress and maid also exposes the persistent work required to secure racialized hierarchies. Through photographs, diaries, and correspondence read alongside published oral histories, the article argues that domestic servants persistently exercised agency that disrupted and spoke back to popular depictions, demonstrating the fraught reproduction of creole whiteness at the intersections of race, class, color, gender, and colonial identity.