In this article, I study non-material harm in cases of environmental liability. Environmental tragedy does not only come at great economic cost but often also brings about non-material loss – that is, loss that has no market value. In order to better recognize, assess, and measure this type of harm, more insight is needed into its psychological conception and parameters. Departing from the available legal frameworks on non-material harm in Belgium as well as in the Netherlands, I study how environmental psychology can help in recognizing, assessing, and measuring environmental non-material harm. More specifically, I focus on solastalgia, a notion that describes the psychological impact of negatively perceived changes to a familiar environment. Solastalgia describes a crisis of identity as a result of a disturbance in the way in which humans inhabit their environment. It describes a form of ecological grief over the loss of a familiar place – that is, the aggregate meanings, values, familiarity, and predictability attached to a specific environment. Using the available theoretical framework around solastalgia and the available empirical insights in the solastalgia literature, I show that solastalgia qualifies as a valid type of harm and bears significant advantages when implemented in environmental tort law frameworks.

This article examines the historical transformation of childhood vaccination in the Netherlands between 1872 and 1959. It analyses how vaccination was reframed from an individual parental responsibility to a collective practice through the establishment of the ‘Rijksvaccinatieprogramma’ (National Immunisation Programme). I analyse this historical trajectory as a case of ‘public health atomism’, a strategy that achieves collective health by prioritizing individual health outcomes and local action. Rather than relying on top-down state mandates, the ‘Rijksvaccinatieprogramma’ was a consequence of co-operation between general practitioners, municipal health officials, civil society organisations, and volunteers. Drawing from published medical sources, parliamentary records, and material from local and national archives, this article provides a detailed historical account of how local governance and autonomy shaped vaccination practices, highlighting the role of the ‘entgemeenschap’ (vaccination community) as a key organisational model for situated collaboration. As such, it revisits childhood vaccination as an archetypical example of biopolitical state intervention, demonstrating how localised, flexible co-operation was instrumental in integrating vaccination into Dutch society.

This article explores the semiotic and embodied dynamics of improvisation by focusing on tactile interaction, risk, and the temporal conditions under which meaning must emerge. Drawing on ethnographic examples from competitive and free solo rock climbing, as well as greeting practices among Swahili women in Lamu (Kenya) and Toronto (Canada), I explore how improvisation operates not as a deviation from routinized behavior, but as a generative force. Through an examination of these disparate tactile encounters, I argue that under high-stakes temporal pressure, improvisation becomes a form of semiotic labor: an interpretive responsiveness to emergent signs that are not only felt in the moment but are also anticipated and evaluated against embodied memory. Rock surfaces and handshakes are treated as communicative environments that elicit the anticipation of qualia and require semiotic attunement when such anticipation fails. In such moments, I argue, improvisation does not simply fill a gap but constitutes a recalibration of meaning through the body.

Loneliness is recognized as a significant public mental health issue, especially among adolescents. There is insufficient research on adolescent loneliness in countries such as Kenya, where adolescents make up 23% of the population. The aim of this study was to examine the prevalence of loneliness among high school students living in different regions of Kenya. This cross-sectional study included 2,652 high school students from ten schools across three Kenyan regions, reflecting both urban and rural settings. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing socio-demographic, educational, and psychological factors, along with their experiences of loneliness over the past year. The level of loneliness was assessed by the question “During the past 12 months, how often have you felt lonely?”. Loneliness during the past 12 months (responses “always” and “most of the time”) were identified in 17.1% of males and 16.6% of females. Significant factors associated with loneliness included grade level, geographical location, family structure, and perceived economic status. Urban students and those attending schools in Nairobi and Kiambu, as well as those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, reported higher loneliness. The high prevalence of loneliness highlights the need for targeted interventions, particularly in urban and economically disadvantaged groups.

In this study, we investigate Hungarian Plain Language (PL) and Simple Language (SL) with the primary objective of training a machine-learning-based sentence-level PL model that flags sentences where expert intervention may be needed during PL-oriented rewriting. The analysis uses a legal-administrative PL corpus and a news-based SL corpus, currently the only publicly available high-quality Hungarian resources for PL and SL. In low-resource settings, PL data are typically scarce, so selective data augmentation is a natural candidate for improving model performance. Our aims are threefold: (i) to provide a feature-based descriptive comparison of these Text Simplification resources; (ii) to test whether selectively chosen SL sentences can augment PL training data; and (iii) to evaluate the impact of such augmentation on sentence-level PL detection. Methodologically, we extract handcrafted linguistic features spanning surface, morphosyntactic and discourse properties. We derive a PL-likeness score from logistic-regression coefficients and use it to select SL sentences most similar to PL for augmentation, followed by supervised sentence-level PL detection with XLM-RoBERTa-large. Results show clear differences between PL and SL in sentence length, lexical diversity, syntactic depth and connective use. Selective inclusion of SL sentences yields modest gains in constrained settings, whereas indiscriminate mixing reduces precision and reliability.

This article explores how memories of Muslim-Tibetan alliances predating Communist rule still shape social dynamics in Amdo. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Northwest China, it analyzes narratives about relationships between Muslim Xidaotang merchants and Tibetan religious or secular institutions. These accounts reinterpret the past to make sense of present relationships, reshaping the meaning of historical interactions. The paper examines the emblematic case of the offering of a large cauldron to a Tibetan monastery – an act of alliance rooted in local conflict-resolution practices. This tradition of gift-giving is traced within a broader inter-institutional economy sustained by reciprocal hospitality and protection. The Tibetan designation of Xidaotang merchants as Chösoma (“new religion/teachings”) highlights the role of ethical reputation and technical skill in building trust. The paper concludes by examining the evolution of Xidaotang’s Tian Xing Long commercial label amid China’s ongoing economic reforms. The narratives reveal a trading culture grounded in moral valuation, shared responsibilities, and economic collaboration.

Fossil fuel companies no longer deny anthropogenic climate change in litigation, but they challenge the validity of climate science in establishing legal responsibility. Research on climate litigation, social movements, and legal mobilization has focused primarily on plaintiffs’ perspectives, showing how they use the judicial process as a site of knowledge production. This article shifts the focus onto defendants, conducting an analysis of scientific disputes in major climate change lawsuits and developing a typology grounded in both empirical analysis and theoretical insights for studying their arguments about science and evidence. Corporate defendants build evidentiary counter-narratives, challenge the substantive quality of plaintiffs’ claims, and contest the scientific integrity of compromising evidence. The future impact of such litigation will hinge on how courts evaluate climate research as legal evidence, and whether corporate defendants are successful in their efforts to reframe, undermine, and discredit the science.

What would it mean to build an archive not of texts or images, but of tastes, sounds, silences, and gestures, the fleeting traces through which memory takes shape? This essay proposes “taste archives” as a method within the public humanities for engaging communities around everyday acts of remembering and belonging. Beginning with chai as a personal anchor of migrant memory, I move outward to imagine a framework for archiving food-related stories and practices. The process unfolds in three movements: (1) gathering oral histories through food-centered conversations; (2) recording recipes, smells, tastes, and the sonic-material rhythms that accompany them; and (3) curating these into accessible, community-based collections, whether in libraries, cultural centers, or digital spaces. Along the way, I reflect on questions of consent, ownership, and the difficulty of translating sensory experience into archival form. “Taste archives,” I suggest, democratize heritage by placing ordinary rituals-meals, drinks, shared preparation at the center of cultural memory. By making the invisible histories of migration and daily life tangible and audible, the public humanities can reimagine the archive itself as something that can be sipped, smelled, and heard: a living practice of remembering together.