Marco Filoni, The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève, trans. David Broder (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2025)

Boris Groys, Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso, 2025)

Labor history has for a long time struggled with so-called “informal” labor, which is situated outside of regularised labor relations, but is widespread in many regions of the globe. The essay reviews five recent books from different fields on transport and labor in Africa, which explore the question of informality, everyday labor, labor organisation, and the infrastructure and technology of mobility. It develops an approach to informal labor that emphasizes historicity and a dialectical model between the stability of the transport infrastructure and the precarity of the workers that uphold it.

Processes of repression, criminalization and penalization were importantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Mobilizing data produced through an ethnographic study of plea courts in Ottawa, this article reports on the ways in which lower criminal courts administered what judges described as “COVID justice.” In this transitory form of justice, we observed a) a dilated reward system for guilty pleas; b) the work of the virtual resolution team, a workgroup dedicated to unburdening the courts from backlogs attributed to the pandemic; c) requests to increase the credits granted for time served in locked-down, noxious prisons, and; d) the diversion of sentenced individuals from prison on the grounds of the primacy of public health over criminal justice.

Cabbage root maggot, Delia radicum (Linnaeus) (Diptera: Anthomyiidae), has been an economically serious pest, damaging a wide range of Brassica crops, across Canada since the late 1800s. A robust body of research literature exists, encompassing a range of control options that have been explored across commodities within Canada. Despite this body of work, pesticides remain the most commonly used option for control of D. radicum. Insecticides registered for use against D. radicum in Canada are facing increasing restrictions or deregulation, making D. radicum more difficult to manage. This review provides an overview of the research conducted in Canada up to 2022 and discusses various management approaches that need to be explored to lessen our current reliance upon insecticides for D. radicum control.

‘Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question’, the much-celebrated aphorism from Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’ (1928), conflates literature and cannibalism, offering Brazilian modernists a means of creatively ingesting the culture of the colonizer and liberating themselves from oppression. This article extends de Andrade’s emancipatory notion to a new context through a critical analysis of the (anti-)colonial discourses of Chinese cannibalism in the Japanese empire. Although cannibalism functioned as a recurring calumny in Western colonial practices of ‘othering’, the figure of the Chinese man-eater circulating in Japanese imperial discourse from the Meiji (1868–1912) to the Taishō eras (1912–1926) has received scant scholarly attention. Two contrasting engagements with the subject of Chinese cannibalism are read contrapuntally: Kuwabara Jitsuzō’s seminal Sinological study, ‘The Custom of Eating Human Flesh Among the Chinese’ (1924), and the counter-discursive essays of the Hong Kong writer Ye Lingfeng, published during the Japanese occupation (1941–1945). Ye’s anti-colonial discourse is analysed through the lens of ‘writing back’ or, more precisely, ‘literary cannibalism’, a post-colonial strategy that rewrites canonical texts as a form of subversion. Similar to, yet distinct from, ‘writing back’ in Anglophone and Francophone post-colonial literatures, Ye’s rewritings constitute a form of ‘literary restoration’ aimed at reversing the colonial distortion of Chinese cultural heritage under Japanese imperial rule. Ultimately, this article proposes literary cannibalism as a critical framework for (re)discovering marginalized voices and bodies of knowledge at the periphery of empire throughout the course of Japanese and Western colonization in modern East Asia.

It has long been argued that paying politicians higher salaries should help decrease corruption. However, the empirical evidence is mixed, partly due to the large variation in contexts, research designs, conceptual definitions and measures of corruption, and the predominance of case studies with potentially limited generalizability. To alleviate these challenges, we evaluate uniformly defined and validated corruption risk indicators from an original dataset of more than 2.4 million government contracts in eleven EU countries, covering more than half of the European Union population and gross domestic product. To aid causal identification, we exploit sizable changes in salaries of local politicians tied to population size across close to 100 discrete salary thresholds. Applying fixed effects estimators, regression discontinuity, and difference-in-discontinuities designs, we consistently find that better-paid local politicians (by about 15 per cent on average) oversee less risky procurement contracts, by a third to one standard deviation on our measure of corruption risk.

The Victorians were devoted to spectacles, from large-scale dioramas to the more modest magic lantern shows which became the staple of the popular lecture circuit. Taking advantage of developments in a whole range of new optical technologies, they offered their audiences both education and entertainment.1 Playing with illusion and a sense of wonder, they broke down the barriers between stillness and life, absence and presence, opening up new vistas for imaginative participation. This roundtable brings together award-winning creative practitioners who continue in this tradition, working in diverse ways with the latest developments in optical technologies, while also using their respective forms of expertise to explore the legacies of Victorian science and culture, reanimating the past for contemporary audiences. All three articles show how humanities projects can draw on artistic forms to enhance research and to widen public participation.

If A and B are subsets of an abelian group, their sumset is $A+B:=\{a+b:a\in A, b\in B\}$. We study sumsets in discrete abelian groups, where at least one summand has positive upper Banach density.

Jin proved in [27] that if A and B are sets of integers having positive upper Banach density, then $A+B$ is piecewise syndetic. Bergelson, Furstenberg, and Weiss [4] improved the conclusion to “$A+B$ is piecewise Bohr.” In [2] this was shown to be qualitatively optimal, in the sense that if $C\subseteq \mathbb Z$ is piecewise Bohr, then there are $A, B\subseteq \mathbb Z$ having positive upper Banach density such that $A+B\subseteq C$.

We improve these results by establishing a strong correspondence between sumsets in discrete abelian groups, level sets of convolutions in compact abelian groups, and sumsets in compact abelian groups. Our proofs avoid measure preserving dynamics and nonstandard analysis, and our results apply to discrete abelian groups of any cardinality.

How does technological change affect social policy preferences? We advance this lively debate by focusing on the role of dual vocational education and training (VET). Existing literature would lead us to expect that dual VET increases demand for compensatory social policy and magnifies the effect of automation risk on such demands. In contrast, we contend that dual VET weakens demand for compensatory social policy through three non-mutually exclusive mechanisms that we refer to as (i) material self-interest; (ii) workplace socialization; and (iii) skill certification. We further hypothesize that dual VET mitigates the association between automation risk and social policy preferences. Analyzing cross-national individual data from the European Social Survey and national-level data on education systems, we find strong evidence for our argument. The paper advances the debate on social policy preferences in the age of automation and sheds new light on the relationship between skill formation and social policy preferences.

The roots of the concept of human dignity have habitually been traced back to Immanuel Kant. However, recent scholarship suggests that this might be a false parentage, and feminist theorists have long criticized the gendered nature of Kantian dignity. This paper suggests looking to another thinker for the origins of human dignity: Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft’s notion of dignity more closely resembles present currents of thought about the concept and offers a sterner defence of moral equality for women as well as men. To demonstrate this, the paper first analyses what Wollstonecraft understood by the term “dignity,” and then explores the wider role that it played in her thought, and especially her analysis of the French Revolution.

The Agreement between the Council of Europe and Ukraine establishes a Special Tribunal to prosecute individuals bearing the greatest responsibility for the crime of aggression against Ukraine. Adopted in June 2025, the treaty-based tribunal responds to Russia’s use of force beginning in 2014 and escalating in 2022. The Tribunal’s Statute explicitly removes head of state immunity, ensuring that senior leaders may face prosecution. Jurisdiction is limited to aggression as defined by UN General Assembly Resolution 3314. The institutional framework includes chambers, a prosecutor’s office, and a registry, with robust fair trial guarantees. This represents a significant development in international criminal justice and accountability for leadership crimes.

This study presents a corpus-based analysis of the verb blîven in combination with the present participle and the infinitive in Middle Low German (thirteenth–seventeenth century), with the goal of identifying the aspectual and semantic properties of these constructions. In contrast to previous research, which focused primarily on the verbs wērden and wēsen or relied on limited textual material, the present study draws on a broader corpus, allowing for a more comprehensive assessment of usage patterns across different periods and genres.

The analysis shows that blîven in combination with a present participle or an infinitive can express both mutative and nonmutative meanings, with the nonmutative interpretation clearly predominating regardless of form. The study further explores how the aspectual interaction between blîven and the nonfinite verb influences the overall interpretation of the construction.

The semantic patterns observed for blîven are compared with those found in wērden and wēsen + present participle constructions, revealing significant semantic convergence among Middle Low German predicative structures. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the development and aspectual behavior of periphrastic constructions in the historical Germanic languages.*

The current study examines the effect of talker identity and linguistic experience on the perception of novel speech patterns by English speakers, focusing on vowel insertion in Korean-accented English. Experiment 1 shows that English speakers with no experience of living in Korea identify English words with vowel insertion as valid words more frequently throughout the experiment only when the talker is described as Korean, but not when the talker is American or Mexican. In Experiment 2, we find similar results with English speakers living in Korea, who provide more word responses to vowel-inserted English words in the Korean talker condition but not the American talker condition. Comparing Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, participants living in Korea show a greater preference for the inserted vowel that is similar to the one found in Korean-accented English ([ʊ]) over the control vowel ([ɪ]), as well as faster adaptation to this type. These results suggest that both talker identity and previous exposure to an accent influence how listeners perceive and adapt to foreign-accented speech, consistent with exemplar models of speech perception.

The paper set out to answer how logics of racialisation and racism operate in the EU’s documents on anti-racism particularly in relation to Roma community, arguing that these policies paradoxically reproduce the racialisation they aim to dismantle. While the European Union frames racism—especially antigypsyism—as a matter of societal attitudes, the analysis demonstrates that EU institutions themselves continue to contribute to structural racism through policy language and implementation. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and Critical Romani Studies the paper employs critical discourse analysis to reveal patterns of deflection, denial, and distancing within key EU documents. It shows how Roma are constructed as a racialised “other,” often aligned with other marginalised groups in ways that reinforce exclusion. By foregrounding institutional responsibility, the paper challenges dominant narratives that externalise racism and highlights how EU frameworks sustain racism, ultimately undermining their stated commitment to anti-racism and equality.