This paper analyses the tension between the double focus on critique and alterity within decolonial discourses. We argue that an excess of critical thinking could lead to scepticism, whereas an overemphasis on alterity could result in dogmatism. Consequently, since both approaches end up obstructing epistemic decolonization, we argue that it is necessary to strike a balance between critique and alterity; a balance that does not resolve the tension, but seeks to reveal its underlying relation. The first section locates decolonial theory within the framework of critical theory. We highlight how Quijano, Dussel and Mignolo invoke the critical tradition, whilst simultaneously claiming that a radical departure from it is necessary. Turning more explicitly to Dussel in Section 2, we explain Dussel’s analectics as a method to localize discourses, in which globally excluded perspectives are foregrounded. In the third section, we defend Dussel’s universalism and rationalism against criticisms from Castro-Gómez and Vallega by interpreting him as a relational thinker. Ultimately, the paper concludes that the success of epistemic decolonization hinges on its ability to reconcile classic notions of universality and rationality in a manner that avoids dogmatism and scepticism, namely by a continual grounding of philosophical discourse in material life.

This article assesses the state of research on the Tropologion of late antique Jerusalem. It is argued that the external and internal evidence points to a date of its redaction not before the later sixth century; this pertains both to the annual cycle, which presupposes the definitive introduction of Christmas in Jerusalem under emperor Justinian, and to the Oktoechos part of ordinary Sundays; also the famous chants for the veneration of the Cross, in part received in East and West, may be relatively late creations. While the reference of the book title to the ‘canon of the Anastasis’ implies a certain canonicity of the repertoire, its contents was subject to significant change; the role of particularly the Armenian tradition still requires further investigation. In any case, the history of the Hagiopolite Tropologion and its influence can only be written as a decidedly regional history.

This article is a discussion with supporting commentary, exploring the complex interplay and role of experimentation in various British Black music genres. We consider these as rich sources of cultural production, what we term the ‘Black Box’. As part of this Black Box discussion, we consider the researcher’s role in studying cultural production at global, national, regional and community levels. We critique the tendency of Western markets to both commodify and homogenise as well as raise concerns about perpetuating forms of neo-colonialism, especially with the increased importance of Africa, particularly styles such as afrobeats. Our discussion highlights the paradox of late corporate capitalism’s short-term focus, and we consider whether there is potential for a technological infrastructure to create genuine cultural and economic growth, that also challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American dominance of the music industry. Within this flux, the importance of experimentation and the emergence of micro-genres facilitated by the internet advances a global dispersal of new sounds. However, this diversity is shadowed by the continued relevance of major label structures and the role of streaming platforms in controlling and mediating artist–fan relationships.

Sometimes male ostriches emit a low guttural sound that sounds strangely like a lion. On the plains in South Africa, these sounds aimed at female ostriches might confuse an unknowing listener. But on a ship bound from South Africa to Galveston, Texas in February 1887, these lion-esque sounds would not have been heard. Instead, as these dozens of ostriches crossed the Atlantic, their vocalizations were probably a quiet chirp, despite each bird weighing well over 100 pounds. Each ostrich had a more solitary existence on the ship than they had experienced in the wild or on a South African farm. On the Atlantic, they lived in single padded stalls near the middle of the hold, with paddocks between the stalls to offer some exercise and perhaps some interaction among the birds.1

This editorial examines the systemic exclusion of Black and South Asian artists from the field of experimental sound, highlighting the historical and institutional biases that have marginalised their contributions. While experimental sound is often framed as a universal, ethnically neutral practice, this narrative obscures the racial and cultural biases shaping the discipline. The marginalisation of these artists is not simply about visibility; it reflects deeper socio-cultural and institutional mechanisms that have historically sidelined their radical sonic innovations. This issue challenges the Eurocentric frameworks that dominate the discourse, drawing attention to the pioneering contributions of Black and South Asian musicians whose work expands the possibilities of experimental sound. By centring these voices, we aim to decolonise the field and offer a more inclusive understanding of experimental sound that recognises its global, diverse influences. Through contributions from artists and scholars, this issue explores how race, identity, and culture intersect within sonic experimentation, offering critical perspectives that question established narratives. Ultimately, this collection aims to reshape the future of experimental sound by amplifying underrepresented voices, advocating for a more equitable and representative sonic landscape that acknowledges the depth of contributions from historically marginalised communities.

In a private 1972 report to the Director of the National Park Service, Jack Anderson, Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, confessed that “we are apprehensive that their proposal would ultimately end up with the complete slaughter of all bison, as occurred on the Crow Indian Reservation.”1 For decades, livestock producers at the local and national level pressured park officials to eliminate a specific disease—brucellosis caused by Brucella abortus—from Yellowstone’s buffalo herds. Following World War II, governments targeted this bacterial contagion in American domestic and wild animal populations to improve public health and livestock producers’ profits. Symptoms of brucellosis, which humans can catch from other mammalian hosts, vary across species. For domestic cattle, it can cause spontaneous abortions and, in rare cases, death. Buffalo seem largely unaffected by brucellosis but for humans, the bacterial infection can cause a plethora of chronic and debilitating symptoms.2

This article examines the challenges of subject formation within state-building efforts by analyzing Keyhān-e Bachcheh-hā (Children’s Universe), a widely circulated Iranian children’s magazine during the post-revolutionary period. Through analyzing the magazine’s content from 1979 to 1989, when the Islamic Republic was consolidating its power and building institutions, this study reveals how the publication served as a key informal education platform, attempting to create politically conscious yet ideologically compliant young citizens. While the magazine aimed to cultivate revolutionary consciousness through anti-imperialist rhetoric and Islamic values, it simultaneously imposed rigid behavioral and ideological boundaries to produce what I term “docile revolutionary children.” The research demonstrates how political themes permeated every aspect of the magazine—from stories and poems to puzzles and contests—transforming it from an entertainment platform into a vehicle for political socialization. Through examination of revolutionary and wartime discourses, gender representation, and the promotion of social humility, this study argues that Keyhān-e Bachcheh-hā embodied a fundamental tension in the state’s vision of ideal citizenship: the simultaneous demand for revolutionary agency and absolute submission to clerical authority. This research contributes to our understanding of how post-revolutionary states employ cultural institutions to shape young citizens and the inherent contradictions in such efforts at political socialization.

This article examines a rare sixteenth-century manuscript lectionary (Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Manoscritti, AH._X.9) containing Nahuatl translations of Biblical texts, long associated with Bernardino de Sahagún and the Franciscan evangelization project in New Spain. Through interdisciplinary analysis combining ethnohistory, art history, and conservation, the authors illuminate Indigenous roles in colonial knowledge production. The lectionary, in effect, offers a core sample of the intellectual labor of Indigenous peoples involved in its creation: They served as scribes and Biblical translators, as papermakers, and possibly as bookbinders. Unique among the corpus of Nahuatl lectionaries, this manuscript was created from two types of native paper, one for the main text and another for binding reinforcement. Considering the paper as the outcome of pre-Hispanic technologies allows us to expand the field of Indigenous knowledge manifested in the Christian book to include material knowledge, as well as theological and linguistic knowledge. This trinity of knowledge allows us to link the lectionary to Sahagún’s Nahuatl sermonary (Newberry Library Ayer MS 1485) produced at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. The lectionary’s preservation of neophytes’ alphabet practice offers singular evidence of the pedagogical practices at the Colegio.

As the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and other international organizations (IOs) are undergoing significant digital transformation and operate in an increasingly digitalized environment, questions as to how they can continue to ensure their information security are becoming more acute. Legal tools to protect IOs from harm in the digital age are central in this regard, alongside technical and organizational measures. This article focuses on one specific legal tool that can be used to foster IOs’ information security, namely legal interpretations of the concept of inviolability. Specifically, the article explores how the Agreement on the ICRC’s privileges and immunities in Luxembourg interprets the scope of the concept of inviolability, and the obligations arising under it.

We develop analogues of Green’s $N_p$ conditions for subvarieties of weighted projective space, and we prove that such $N_p$ conditions are satisfied for high degree embeddings of curves in weighted projective space. A key technical result links positivity with low degree (virtual) syzygies in wide generality, including cases where normal generation fails.

China frequently accuses Western governments of interfering in its domestic affairs. International lawyers might be inclined to dismiss these accusations as cynical misrepresentations of the doctrine of non-intervention. This article questions that view, drawing on Chinese State practice and recent Chinese literature. It argues that China propagates a new and distinctive approach to the doctrine of non-intervention, by which the doctrine changes depending on who is interfering with whom, in what context and for what purpose. This approach could also be increasingly useful to Western governments who seek to challenge pernicious forms of foreign influence over liberal democratic processes. Hence, Chinese and non-Chinese approaches to non-intervention might converge. This approach arguably reflects the concerns that originally animated the doctrine and is in line with ideas that have been advocated for by non-aligned States for at least 70 years. Whether this is a desirable development is another question. The article concludes with a critique of the new doctrine of non-intervention.

Starting in late September 1872, horses started falling ill with a severe respiratory complaint in the countryside about a dozen miles north of Toronto, Ontario. Veterinary experts swiftly diagnosed the malady, which paralyzed street transportation, commerce, and everyday life in Toronto itself during the first weeks of October, as influenza. Over the next year, an equine plague that most contemporaries referred to as the epizootic—and which I call the Great Horse Flu in the book I am completing on this outbreak—spread throughout southern Canada, every reach of the United States, and parts of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. The novel influenza virus responsible for this outbreak sickened between ninety and ninety-nine percent of horses, donkeys, and mules across this vast swath of the northern Americas.1 Our best guess is that the Great Horse Flu killed between one and four percent of the equines it afflicted—a case fatality rate roughly not unlike those recorded by the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1920 and the COVID Pandemic. In less than a year, an estimated 112,500 to 554,000 horses and ponies perished alongside tens or hundreds of thousands of mules and donkeys.2

Conventional meta-analyses (both fixed and random effects) of correlations are biased due to the mechanical relationship between the estimated correlation and its standard error. Simulations that are closely calibrated to match actual research conditions widely seen across correlational studies in psychology corroborate these biases and suggest two solutions: UWLS+3 and HS. UWLS+3 is a simple inverse-variance weighted average (the unrestricted weighted least squares) that adjusts the degrees of freedom and thereby reduces small-sample bias to scientific negligibility. UWLS+3 as well as the Hunter and Schmidt approach (HS) are less biased than conventional random-effects estimates of correlations and Fisher’s z, whether or not there is publication selection bias. However, publication selection bias remains a ubiquitous source of bias and false-positive findings. Despite the relationship between the estimated correlation and its standard error in the absence of selective reporting, the precision-effect test/precision-effect estimate with standard error (PET-PEESE) nearly eradicates publication selection bias. Surprisingly, PET-PEESE keeps the rate of false positives (i.e., type I errors) within their nominal levels under the typical conditions widely seen across psychological research whether there is publication selection bias, or not.

This article explores an under-discussed and unclaimed conceptualisation of futurity that can be located within historical sound practices and sonic thoughts of the Indian subcontinent. In the 1950s and 1960s, this alternative sonic worldview influenced Western music and its sound pallet without credit. The intervention of this futurism in the Western model of music, sounding and listening was revolutionary, proliferating an alternate aesthesis of time, space and subjectivities in sound practices – with an emergent environmentality, manifesting arguably in the birth of ambient music and sounding arts and remodelling of sensing the world from a relational perspective. Yet, this sonic worldview, knowledge system and a radical sense of non-linear futurity were not recognised then. But the importance of the futurity can be appreciated today on the verge of multiple planetary crises. It is in this time and day that a futurist vision may provide a new sense of surviving for a posterity and generate a possibility of emancipation from the fear and loathing for a dystopian tomorrow, which is construed from a Western perspective entrenched in its rationality. How can we hear possible futures from perspectives of South Asia that have been marginalised in sonic epistemologies by an absence of voices, which could offer new grounds?

During the past 20 years, the expansion of bilingual education programmes in Spain has generated a situation where the voices of stakeholders frequently go unheard. Accordingly, this paper is a critical review of bilingual programmes within the Spanish context. An analysis has been carried out on stakeholder perceptions, that is, of teachers, students, management teams, and families, as reflected in the literature published between 2014 and 2023. The corpus reviewed consists of 34 papers, ranging from pre-primary to higher education, with a particular focus on stakeholders' perceptions of the implementation of bilingual education in a foreign language (English). In terms of the characteristics of the studies analysed, the predominance of teachers' perceptions over other stakeholders and the scarcity of longitudinal studies and research based on national samples should be noted. The adoption of a more robust methodological design could provide a fuller assessment of the implementation of bilingual education in Spain. Nonetheless, this review highlights the need for specific improvements at each level of education if a more learner-centred approach to teaching is to be achieved. Such improvements could include additional training opportunities, collaboration among teachers, and measures to alleviate the additional workload associated with bilingual education.

Discussions about economic equality have, in recent years, extended beyond considerations of income distribution to encompass the distribution of wealth and its intergenerational transfer. Driven by new and more frequent data, a better understanding is emerging of the concentration of wealth within society and the dynamics of its transfer between generations.

This article contributes to that discussion by assessing the economic and social rationales for the taxation of intergenerational wealth transfers. It outlines the social policy case for inheritances taxes grounded in vertical equity principles. Then it presents comparative data on household wealth across high-income European countries before focusing on one of these, Ireland, to consider whether current inheritance taxation policies counter or perpetuate these inequalities. Focusing on that system, the article explores a range of inheritance taxation reforms intended to address wealth inequality while providing recurring funds for public services and redistribution.

This essay is a lightly edited version of a speech I gave at the annual reception of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) at the American Historical Association meetings in New York City in January 2025. It was written as a keynote address connected with my acceptance of CLAH’s Distinguished Service Award for 2024. I focus here on what have been the two most critical and intertwined commitments of my roughly five-decade career as a historian of Mexico and Latin America: broad intellectual collaboration across disciplines, academic generations, and national boundaries, and a two-way notion of mentoring. Apart from my own monographic research, these commitments have played out in an array of editorial arenas—academic journals, multi-authored collections, a massive country-level compendium of documents, and a long-running book series—that have remained integral to my intellectual growth and figured importantly in the mentoring of my doctoral students and their mentoring of me. My career trajectory in this regard may well have been a road less travelled and one certainly not for everyone; still, there is a case to be made for giving greater emphasis to broader collaborative strategies of research and dissemination in our work as scholars and teachers of Latin America’s past.