In the early twentieth century, the steady increase of women entering higher education led to mixed gender university theatre groups. The lack of extant archival documentation complicates the task of reconstructing such experiences in many contexts and cultures. A notable exception to this widespread situation is La Barraca, a state-funded university theatre group created during the short-lived Spanish Second Republic (1931–6). The intimate relations between one of Europe’s first mixed gender university groups with national politics and education policies left behind a rich assortment of primary materials, including but not limited to journalistic coverage, memoirs, interviews, photos and film recordings. This article provides socio-political context for La Barraca before going on to critically interrogate what I will maintain was its most important legacy, the active participation of female students. In the process, I offer new insights into the gender dynamics within and beyond the university in the politically charged build up to the Spanish Civil War.

Smartphones, as more sophisticated versions of mobile phones, are expected to significantly influence how rural households manage their farms. This paper examines the extent to which smartphone ownership affects the adoption of modern agricultural inputs and technologies at the extensive margin. Using a rich, nationally representative household-level dataset from Nigeria and appropriate identification strategies, we find that smartphone ownership increases the likelihood of hiring labor, using phytosanitary inputs, and operating tractors. These findings suggest that promoting the diffusion of modern digital tools in rural areas can complement traditional agricultural input support programs, offering a promising avenue to enhance agricultural productivity and livelihoods in Nigeria.

Archaeologists in North America often think of the bow and arrow as appearing more or less instantaneously, a conception baked into many culture-historical schemes. However, this specialized technology likely has a more complex history. From a single Old World origin, it is thought to have spread throughout North America from the Arctic after about 5000 cal BP. From there, it seems to have moved from north to south, but the specific timing of the arrival of this important technology is not known in great detail throughout most of California. Rather than using typological or culture-historical categories to discern this technological replacement, this study plots salient artifact attributes from a large sample of projectile points from central and northern California through continuous time to provide more detail on the timing of the spread of this important prehistoric technology. Results suggest the bow and arrow entered northeastern California before 2000 cal BP and moved southward, arriving at the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta as much as 1,000 years later. The changepoint analysis method introduced here should be broadly applicable to a wide variety of similar archaeological patterns.

This paper draws on two seemingly disparate moments – standing witness to protest in Guatemala and unpacking programme design in New York City – to explore the connections, linkages and methodological insights brought forward by front-line organisers. These individuals, though not typically recognised as policy experts, offer crucial knowledge that challenges dominant approaches to law and policy. Turning to their actions and framing, this paper argues that these organisers share a deep and urgent analysis of institutional and state violence. Their perspectives highlight the inadequacies of conventional institutional lenses, which often exclude or dismiss such grassroots expertise. The paper emphasises the importance of how these voices are heard and responded to, particularly given the historical and ongoing marginalisation of such knowledge holders. Drawing on multiple examples, it critiques institutional investments in spatial and bureaucratic schemes that deflect responsibility for violence, and that distance possibilities for accountability. This raises the question of what orientation or sensibility is necessary to engage with and to listen to these collective voices differently, especially from within administrative and bureaucratic systems. Grappling with the possibilities and limitations of what a category of ‘activist-scholar administrator’ could mean, this paper identifies three key lessons: the need for bureaucratic imagination, an iterative approach and expanded analytical frameworks. I argue that much more thinking and action are needed to navigate bureaucratic systems – whether in universities or state institutions – in ways that centre community knowledge and respond meaningfully to calls for broader accountability.

We show that each connected component of the moduli space of smooth real binary quintics is isomorphic to an open subset of an arithmetic quotient of the real hyperbolic plane. Moreover, our main result says that the induced metric on this moduli space extends to a complete real hyperbolic orbifold structure on the space of stable real binary quintics. This turns the moduli space of stable real binary quintics into the quotient of the real hyperbolic plane by an explicit non-arithmetic triangle group.

This commentary responds to a case study of a drawing group on a perinatal psychiatric ward, framing it as a threshold practice: one that invites creative presence between clinician and mother, between symptom and symbol. The commentary highlights the therapeutic potential of shared non-verbal creative acts, but points to the potential for aesthetic coercion and the ethical tensions that arise when clinicians step into aesthetic space alongside patients. It argues that arts interventions in mental health require neither romanticisation nor reductive measurement, but a critical and generative mode of engagement attuned to thresholds, relationships and the fragile work of recovery.

We experimentally study how individuals strategically disclose multidimensional information to a Naive Bayes algorithm trained to guess their characteristics. Subjects’ objective is to minimize the algorithm’s accuracy in guessing a target characteristic. We vary what participants know about the algorithm’s functioning and how obvious are the correlations between the target and other characteristics. Optimal disclosure strategies rely on subjects identifying whether the combination of their characteristics is common or not. Information about the algorithm functioning makes subjects identify correlations they otherwise do not see but also overthink. Overall, this information decreases the frequency of optimal disclosure strategies.

The primary aim of this paper is to give topological obstructions to Cantor sets in $\mathbb{R}^3$ being Julia sets of uniformly quasiregular mappings. Our main tool is the genus of a Cantor set. We give a new construction of a genus g Cantor set, the first for which the local genus is g at every point, and then show that this Cantor set can be realized as the Julia set of a uniformly quasiregular mapping. These are the first such Cantor Julia sets constructed for $g\geq 3$. We then turn to our dynamical applications and show that every Cantor Julia set of a hyperbolic uniformly quasiregular map has a finite genus g; that a given local genus in a Cantor Julia set must occur on a dense subset of the Julia set; and that there do exist Cantor Julia sets where the local genus is non-constant.

Discussions on populism in Japan have often been overlooked in the comparative politics literature. However, as theoretical and empirical discussions progress, the need for more Japanese contributions to expand observers’ understanding of the global populist phenomenon is evident now more than ever. The sudden rise of Ishimaru Shinji as a populist figure in the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election sparked claims that “social media populism” has arrived in Japan. However, although social media certainly played a role in propelling Ishimaru’s popularity during his campaign, limiting considerations of populism to election campaign performances overlooks a greater question: What happens when populists are elected? This article suggests that the Ishimaru phenomenon needs to be contextualized with examples of distinct practices of populist governors. This article argues that, in a neoliberal era of “political reform” (seiji kaikaku) populist political entrepreneurs have introduced “innovations” to governing practices as a way to personalize the executive in pursuit of their policy agendas. Specifically, three governing practices of the populist governors Hashimoto Tōru and Koike Yuriko are identified and considered as a “populist playbook” from which Ishimaru, and future populists, will likely borrow.

Does religious affiliation affect evaluations of the president’s policy performance? We examine support for President Barack Obama’s handling of seven policy areas using data from the Pew Research Center. We show that the intersection of race/ethnicity and religion drives support for Obama’s policy performance and that religion’s impact transcends that of partisanship. Compared to Black Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, non-Hispanic Catholics, and (to a lesser extent) seculars and mainline Protestants are significantly less approving of Obama’s policy performance. The most striking result in this study concerns the differences between Black Protestants and evangelicals, as the latter group is consistently opposed to Obama’s handling of policy, whether domestic or international. Taken together, our findings reveal that the political significance of religious affiliation on presidential policy approval intersects powerfully with race/ethnicity.

This is an extended review of Jonathan Owens, Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) that addresses several important issues in the methodology of historical Arabic linguistics.

Back in 1982, when I started studying with Samuel Scheffler, a major subject of debate was whether – and, if so, exactly why and how – the existence of agent-relative reasons for action justifies making fundamental changes to consequentialist moral theory. How dramatically the tables have turned in the years since! Now the question tends to be whether – and, if so, exactly why and how – agent-neutral reasons for action can have a significant role to play in contractualist moral theory. In the first half of this paper, I offer some arguments for thinking that agent-neutral reasons do exist and that they are more basic than reasons of other sorts. In the second half of the paper, I offer some arguments for thinking that such reasons, being more basic, must have a central role to play in contractualist moral theory.

Citizens’ opinions about politicians are shaped by their perceptions of politicians’ personalities, characters, and traits. While prior research has investigated the traits voters value in politicians, less attention has been given to the traits politicians project in their public communication. This may stem from challenges in defining politicians’ public personality traits and measuring them at scale using computational text analysis. To address this challenge, we propose a computational approach that builds on public statements (personality cues) to infer politicians’ personalities from textual data. To do so, we operationalize two key political traits—agency and communion—using a theory-driven, domain-specific framework. We then compare various computational text analysis methods for extracting these traits from a large corpus of politicians’ parliamentary speeches, social media posts, and interviews. We validate our approach using a comprehensive set of human-labeled data, functional tests, and analyses of how prominently personality traits appear in the statements of German politicians and in the 2024 U.S. presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Our findings indicate that prompting based techniques, particularly those leveraging advanced models such as DeepSeek-V3, outperform supervised and semisupervised methods. These results point to promising directions for advancing political psychology.