This article illuminates the variety and diversity of mechanisms and strategies of (European) identification that were used by Ranga Reinhardt Kaundinya. The Indo-German was born into a German Indian (Brahmin) family in service of the Protestant Basel Mission from Switzerland. Having spent his youth in India, Germany, and Switzerland, he later became a planter in India before managing a cotton plantation in German East Africa (GEA). Producing his identity in a visual source and two German publications released during WWI, the examination of Kaundinya’s sources offers a perspective on how an individual developed an (European) identity in colonial frameworks and dynamics of power across three continents and two empires. In the field of tension between race, class, gender, and religion, he drew on the image of a virile, white colonial hunter and on the self-image of an experienced colonial planter. He further attempted to distance himself from his Brahmin descent and to exploit the Christian part of his family history instead. Moreover, he criticized British colonial rule of India. He even envisioned his own European identity and a vague Indo-German alliance. Amalgamating major ideas of Orientalism, racist thought, and geopolitical theories prominent at the fin du siècle, he called this alliance ‘Indo-Germania.’

Law and society scholars have examined how nonlegal actors, or “legal intermediaries,” construct the meaning of compliance as they translate law into organizational practice and policy. This article applies the legal intermediaries framework to analyze how higher education professionals navigate federal and state immigration law to mitigate the impact of illegality on undocumented students at the institutional level. We find that staff work within the underdefined, flexible, and often complex dimensions of immigration law by developing “creative solutions,” or university-specific policies and practices that interpret and apply existing legal frameworks in ways that broaden access to opportunities for undocumented students. Staff proceed through four steps within this process: developing an understanding of one’s legal and professional context, implementing and troubleshooting solutions, raising awareness and mobilizing support across and beyond the institution, and institutionalizing workarounds. In the process, staff shape broader understandings and organizational treatment of (il)legality at their respective institutions. Through this analysis, we extend the literature on legal intermediaries to the immigration context. We also refine the processes involved in the organizational intermediation of compliance and identify the set of contextual factors that may facilitate or hinder the creative solutions process within and beyond higher education.

The article examines the Slovenization of public space in the Habsburg crownland of Gorizia and Gradisca from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. As in other ethnically mixed regions of the empire, public space became a contested arena shaped by the rise of nationalism, with competing national groups seeking to inscribe their ideologies onto the urban landscape. The Slovene national movement aimed to assert its identity and political aspirations through symbolic spatial interventions. However, owing to the specific circumstances of the Slovene community in the region—characterized by a predominantly rural population and internal divisions between liberal and conservative currents—Slovene spatial politics exhibited distinctive features compared to other nationally driven spatial strategies. The article traces the gradual assertion of a Slovene presence in local public space, from the first nationally inspired monument erected in 1898 to the construction of the national hall in the center of the provincial capital, Gorizia.

Mainstream artificial intelligence (AI) ethics primarily takes vertical approaches: top-down, principle-driven and expert-led frameworks that often exclude the very publics affected by algorithmic systems. This paper explores whether citizen juries (CJs) can function as a horizontal alternative empirical ethics method that emphasizes participation, situated knowledge and epistemic justice. We conducted a citizen jury with Brussels residents to deliberate on the use of an AI system for electricity distribution during brownouts. The jury process combined guidance ethics, speculative fiction, and generative AI tools to scaffold inclusive deliberation. Using affordance theory, we analyze how the citizen jury method structurally mediates certain forms of participation and ethical reasoning. We evaluate its normative value through the lenses of epistemic justice and effective performativity. Our findings show that citizen juries can foster testimonial inclusion and support hermeneutical sense-making, offering a partial corrective to abstract, generic AI ethics. However, we also identify critical constraints: problem-posing was narrowed, alternative epistemologies discouraged, and the outputs risked reproducing the generic performativity forms of vertical ethics. While citizen juries hold promise for doing AI ethics otherwise, their transformative potential hinges on reflexively examining their own methodological affordances and institutional framing.

Ruination studies allow one to see the past not as a fixed “thing” but as living landscapes. Over the past two decades, Mesoamerican scholars have increasingly recognized that ruins were an integral part of ancient Mesoamerican peoples’ experiences in and with the world and not just a modern invention of cultural heritage. Any understanding of ancient Maya ruins must consider the Indigenous ontologies, cosmologies, and myths of peoples of that region. Indigenous approaches highlight the affective and dynamic nature of ruins, perspectives that can be put in conversation with metaphysical or posthumanist ideas more generally. One particularity of ruins in the Maya area is that they often were, and in many cases still are, entangled with forest beings that are both feared and revered. This article reviews some of the ways in which ancient Maya peoples lived with ruins, drawing a number of case examples from the Maya site of Ucanal in Petén, Guatemala, and then contextualizes these findings with the darker side of ruins. This darker side of ruins was part of the making of moral communities that were—and are—in a constant state of motion.

Using data on interbank relationships and note holdings in Pennsylvania, I estimate the probability that a bank will redeem the notes of other banks by the distance separating them. If two banks were separated by 50 miles, there was a 40 percent probability that a bank would hold the notes of another at a given time. At 200 miles, the estimated probability is virtually zero. My analysis of notes discounted by a small-town, Connecticut banknote broker reveals that distant notes were offered by travelers and traders who moved along the era’s principal waterways.

This Article examines the evolving stance of Russia and China on the use of sanctions, highlighting a notable shift from their traditional opposition to unilateral coercive measures toward increasingly employing such tools themselves. While both countries have consistently criticized sanctions not endorsed by the UN Security Council, recent practices reveal a growing reliance on national legal frameworks to impose retaliatory and strategic sanctions. China, for instance, has introduced targeted measures against foreign officials and companies, particularly in response to perceived threats to its sovereignty, such as arms sales to Taiwan. Russia, in turn, has enacted counter-sanctions against Western states through export bans and travel restrictions. The Article explores this duality and analyzes its implications for international law, contending that the gap between rhetoric and practice may signal a reconfiguration of the normative landscape surrounding unilateral sanctions.

The author presents a commentary on the trilogy of papers by Damien Morris entitled ‘Behavioral Genetics and Human Agency: How Selectively Deterministic Theories of Free Will Drive Unwarranted Opposition to Behavioral Genetic Research and Undermine Our Moral and Legal Conventions’, published recently in this journal [PMID 40457806, 40963213, 41107251]. In addition to commenting on this specific set of papers, the author offers a broader perspective and defense of the field of behavioral genetics.

This paper investigates the lived experiences of individuals confined within two major European psychiatric institutions, Miguel Bombarda Hospital in Portugal and the Cadillac-sur-Garonne psychiatric hospital in France, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using a people-centred approach, we integrate spatial analysis, archival research, material culture and oral testimony to examine how these institutions worked as spaces of social segregation and emotional discipline. Rather than viewing psychiatric hospitals just as sites of medical care, we critically assess their roles in reinforcing sanist, classist and gendered systems of control. Internment partly erased legal, social and personal identities, to an extent attempting to render patients ‘non-persons’. We want to change the current perspective about the dimensions of institutional life by highlighting the dehumanization, mortality rate and emotional experiences of the individual inside these institutions. We support an archaeology that acknowledges the structural violence of such institutions and the resilience of those who lived within them, seeking to restore voice and dignity to marginalized histories.

This article examines the extent to which hostile Russian activities have shaped legislative, organisational, and policy-orientation change in the United Kingdom (UK). Employing a historical institutionalist framework, the study traces the progress of the UK’s response across two critical junctures, the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in 2018, separated by an intervening period of accumulating pressures (2007–18) during which institutional path dependency absorbed repeated provocations without producing fundamental reform. Methodologically, the article combines event data analysis (ICEWS and POLECAT datasets) to identify these junctures with qualitative content analysis of parliamentary records (Hansard) to examine the institutional implications of these shifts. The study focuses specifically on hostile activities directed at or conducted within UK territory and institutions. The study finds that the UK’s institutional adaptation to Russian hybrid threats has been marked by strong path dependency, with responses often reactive, fragmented, and shaped by a continued emphasis on counterterrorism rather than state-based threats. Initial provocations failed to punctuate the institutional equilibrium, as economic interests and diplomatic pragmatism prevailed. It was only under mounting public pressure and advocacy from epistemic security communities that a tipping point was reached, enabling a shift towards more coordinated and enduring institutional reforms.

Despite the centrality of the achievement thesis within standpoint epistemology, thereare gaps in the literature on the epistemic significance of consciousness-raising and itsrole in providing access to knowledge that was previously inaccessible. To addressthese gaps, I argue that consciousness-raising is a transformative experience, one thatmakes us a different person. If, as the standpoint epistemologist suggests, what weknow is sensitive to facts about who we are, then to change what we know we mustchange who we are.

This study presents a sustainable surface engineering approach aimed at extending the service life and enabling the restoration of worn 42Cr4 steel components within a circular manufacturing framework. Wear-induced surface degradation is a primary failure mechanism in mechanical systems, leading to increased maintenance costs, energy losses, and excessive consumption of raw materials. In this work, the surface of 42Cr4 steel was modified by Tungsten Inert Gas (TIG) surface remelting assisted by a high-frequency magnetic field. Unlike conventional TIG treatments and post-process magnetic field applications, the proposed method applies the magnetic field in situ during remelting, enabling real-time control of molten pool dynamics. The tribological performance of the treated specimens was evaluated using a ball-on-disc configuration under paraffin lubrication, and friction and wear behavior were systematically quantified. The results indicate that magnetically assisted TIG remelting significantly enhances surface hardness and tribological performance. These improvements are attributed to intensified electromagnetic stirring within the molten pool, which promotes grain refinement, reduces porosity, and ensures a uniform distribution of alloying elements in the remelted layer. As a result, the treated surfaces exhibit improved load-bearing capacity and enhanced resistance to wear under lubricated sliding conditions. From an application perspective, the proposed hybrid process provides an effective and scalable solution for component repair and surface regeneration. Restoring functional surfaces without full component replacement offers clear environmental and economic advantages. In addition, localized surface treatment significantly reduces material consumption and energy demand, thereby supporting resource-efficient and circular economy strategies.