Since the mid-twentieth century, foreign-physician migration to the United States has challenged mainstream medicine. Facing simultaneous demands to address physician shortages and concerns about the quality of foreign-trained doctors, regulators struggled to create effective systems for evaluating international credentials. This essay traces three pivotal episodes reflecting the evolution of this regulatory landscape: the postwar incorporation of Jewish émigré doctors, the rise of Asian physician migration following the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and the contemporary role of global regulatory entities. Over the past sixty years, as physician migration from the global South has increased, the regulatory apparatuses to facilitate this mobility have grown in scale, size and number. The multiplication of these supranational bureaucracies and institutions is not a value-neutral endeavour. It reflects racialized assumptions coded through ‘competence’ discourses, geopolitical investments and a bias toward global North educational models, and raises broader questions about global health care equity. Despite these overlapping and sometimes redundant global-governance structures, however, foreign-physician integration continues to raise questions about trust, equivalency and the variability of human capital.

Drawing on textual, archaeological, and palaeoclimatic evidence, this article reconstructs the broad patterns of plague’s arrival in the southern Red Sea region during the 1430s. It contends that this initial introduction led to the formation of a medium-term reservoir that generated recurrent epidemic waves over the subsequent 150–200 years. This development is attributed to the interplay of environmental and human-driven factors acting together. The study adopts a dual approach: first, it examines how commercial networks across the Red Sea facilitated the spread of the plague; second, it investigates the environmental and topographical shifts in the southern Red Sea between 1370 and 1470 to understand how these conditions allowed the disease to become endemic to the region.

This article examines the reality of “let the adjudicator judge” by investigating how Chinese judges are held accountable for their judgments under the expanded ex post case review system. We examine the first three years of the implementation of this headline initiative in a grassroots court (Court T) located in a major city in China. Our data include the internal quarterly reports produced by the court’s case review committee and interviews with judges. The assessments went beyond legal analysis, commenting on matters such as work ethic, diligence and moral sensibilities. Frontline judges view the review system as subjective and arbitrary. The new mechanism, however, alters the power dynamics between senior judges and their subordinates. While frontline judges no longer require pre-approval from senior judges, they rely on the goodwill of those same seniors to navigate the review process. Within this ostensibly freer framework, frontline judges are subjected to a more diffuse but pervasive form of discipline. Our analysis reveals how the adjudication committee, far from being sidelined, has shifted its role, concentrating ex ante supervision on a minority of difficult cases while holding judges accountable through ex post reviews of flawed judgments. The article further underscores the challenges of disentangling legal analysis from political supervision in a framework of authoritative legality.

Recent advances in ancient DNA and isotope analysis have enabled archaeologists to detect migration events in the distant past. Yet, novel approaches evaluating the cultural impact of these migrations are lacking. As a result, archaeologists continue to debate problematic culture-historical scenarios in which migrants rapidly supplant passive indigenous communities. This study outlines a bottom-up, quantitative approach to prehistoric migrations. This approach uses Bayesian chronological modelling to investigate whether migrating and indigenous communities co-existed. In addition, a novel probabilistic comparison of ceramic technology traces whether cultural knowledge is exchanged between potters in these communities. This approach is applied to the emergence of Corded Ware communities in the Netherlands during the 3rd millennium BC. The outcomes demonstrate that this process was not a rapid replacement of indigenous groups by migrants, as sometimes stated. Instead, migrants likely co-existed with indigenous communities for centuries, learned ceramic production from them, and incorporated this knowledge into the production of characteristic Corded Ware ceramics. Furthermore, the outcomes suggest this scenario was likely commonplace for prehistoric migration in the 3rd and 4th millennia BC. As such, this study provides new approaches and insights which enable archaeologists to shed light on prehistoric migration, talk back to archaeogenetics on an equal footing, and contribute to broader societal debates on migration.

We argue that surveillance technologies, increasingly powered by artificial intelligence, translate print capitalism into data capitalism. We observe this transition as championed in Japan, a country favorable to its development given a strong techno-nationalism, by adopting Aurora Donzelli’s criticism of capitalism as a translation machine. Unlike traditional CCTV that simply records passersby in real-time, retail surveillance systems in Japan sense repeat customers and known offenders. These technologies are justified through Japanese techno-nationalism, recursively translating sociotechnical imaginaries of nationhood into databases. We observe that an epistemology of big data responsible for this transition paves the way for new technological infrastructures while maintaining old imaginaries of print capitalism. The goal of automating interpretation turns society into a closed system that interprets itself. Through this study, we also explore how semiotics can contribute to research on emergent technology, by eschewing the traditional analysis of discourse by differentiating “form” from “content.”

We systematically study the intersection flatness and Ohm-Rush properties for modules over a commutative ring, drawing inspiration from the work of Ohm and Rush and of Hochster and Jeffries. We establish new structural results for modules that are intersection flat/Ohm-Rush by exhibiting intimate connections between these notions and the seminal work of Raynaud and Gruson on Mittag-Leffler modules. In particular, we develop a theory of Ohm-Rush modules that is parallel to the theory of Mittag-Leffler modules. We also obtain descent and local-to-global results for intersection flat/Ohm-Rush modules. Our investigations reveal a particularly pleasing picture for flat modules over a complete local ring, in which case many otherwise distinct properties coincide.

Recent years have witnessed increased interest in everyday forms of heritage and the emergence of alternative terms designating cultural goods, monuments, and sites on the margins of official heritage (e.g., mundane, ordinary, informal). This paper systematically compares these terminologies to explore how their marginality challenges official discourses, offering insights into epistemic shifts within the Anglophone and Eurocentric heritage domain. Through a systematic literature review (SLR), we examined academic literature on heritage categories that fall outside official vocabularies, lists, and traditional preservation measures. Two questions guided this analysis: (1) How is each heritage term defined? (2) What values do authors attribute to these alternative designations? The research highlights tensions between traditional heritage frameworks and contemporary demands for adaptive, locally relevant approaches. In response to these emerging dynamics, and to facilitate future reflections on the issues raised by our SLR, we use the notion of liminality as a conceptual lens to reclaim the marginal status of these heritages while simultaneously emphasizing their capacity to serve as a fertile ground for critical and future-oriented heritage imaginaries. The study concludes by opening a reflection on how liminal heritage practices can inform more inclusive policymaking by challenging rigid age thresholds, reinterpreting continuity through adaptation, and expanding authenticity to include transformation.