The article contributes to memory work on serfdom, which is part of the current momentous debate in Poland on the history and heritage of the peasantry. The article also explores the role that the arguments presented by peasant circles in favour of the implementation of land reform in the early Second Polish Republic (1918–26) played in the politics of history, in particular peasant memory of serfdom and its key element, compulsory labour. Drawing upon the main press organs of the leading peasant parties (PSL Piast and PSL Wyzwolenie), the article shows that in addition to advancing arguments of a social, economic and ethical–legal nature, supporters of both the moderate and radical versions of this reform justified their positions in historical terms, regarding reform as compensation for the centuries of systemic injustice that the nobility inflicted upon peasants in the Polish lands during serfdom. The article ends with the conclusion that despite deep divisions between various factions of the Polish peasant movement in the first decade of independence, the shared aspects of peasant historical policies regarding historical injustice were an important factor that enabled the unification of this movement in the early 1930s.

This article traces the conservation history of the inner suburb of Parkville in Melbourne, Australia. It focuses on its 1972 designation as Melbourne’s first urban conservation area by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria). It examines Parkville’s establishment in the setter-colonial city as an elite neighbourhood, its post-war transformation, the role of the resident amenity group, the Parkville Association, and the evolution of heritage planning policies by the City of Melbourne and the state government of Victoria. Using a range of archival sources, including the Victorian Heritage Database, the article analyses the expanding building, conservation area and heritage overlay protections for Parkville from the 1950s to the 2020s, with a particular focus on the years 1971–85. This article interlaces policy and planning, heritage and conservation, and cultural and social change. It argues that Parkville’s designation was demonstrative of urban conservation in Melbourne and reflected evolving international approaches to urban heritage.

Has international human rights law become a tool reserved for the global elite? While some argue that human rights frameworks empower advocacy groups to pressure governments, others claim these institutions are accessible only to well-funded, transnational nongovernmental organizations and risk depoliticizing activists’ demands. Based on a study of the blacklisted workers’ movement in the United Kingdom, this study shows a new way in which human rights laws and institutions can catalyze social movements. Recognizing the limitations of human rights, activists take an instrumental approach that creates a duality in their movement. On-stage before public audiences, they leverage human rights to amplify grievances and push for reform. However, off-stage, human rights norms do not shape their ideological commitments or solidarity, which remain rooted in class-based identities. These findings demonstrate how human rights law can spur grassroots mobilization while decoupling the material and cultural drivers of social movements.

This article looks at how Jewish groups were portrayed in Italian colonial guidebooks of the 1920s and 1930s. More than simple travel aids, these publications reflected and shaped the ways colonial society imagined its subjects. The article compares the depictions of Jews with those of other ethnic and religious groups, paying attention to the stereotypes employed, the construction of ethnic identities and the imprint of colonial and Fascist ideology. The article asks three main questions: how were Jewish groups represented in the colonies? In what ways was their ‘otherness’ articulated? And how did these representations evolve in step with Fascist imperial policy and antisemitism? By following these dynamics across both European and African colonies, the article highlights the entanglements of colonialism and antisemitism in Italy’s imperial project.

In acquiring a syntax, children must detect evidence for abstract structural dependencies that can be realized in variable ways in the surface forms of sentences. In What did David fix?, learners must identify a nonlocal relation between a fronted object of the verb (what) and the phonologically null ‘gap’ in canonical direct object position after the verb, where it is thematically interpreted. How do learners identify a nonadjacent dependency between an expression and something that has no overt phonological form? We propose that identifying abstract syntactic dependencies requires statistical inference over both overt linguistic material and unsatisfied grammatical expectations: noticing when a predicted argument for a verb is unexpectedly missing may serve as evidence for the gap of an argument movement dependency. We provide computational support for this hypothesis. We develop a learner that uses predicted but unexpectedly missing objects of verbs to identify possible gaps of object movement, and identifies which surface morphosyntactic properties of sentences are correlated with these possible movement gaps. We find that it is in principle possible for a learner using this mechanism to identify the majority of sentences with object movement in child-directed English, and that prior knowledge of which verbs require objects provides an important guide for identifying which surface distributions characterize object movement. This provides a computational account for why verb argument-structure knowledge developmentally precedes the acquisition of movement in a language like English. More broadly, these findings illustrate how statistical learning and learning from violated expectations can be combined to novel effect in the domain of language acquisition.

Ascidiella aspersa is a solitary ascidian native to the North-east Atlantic that has been introduced to many regions around the globe. In 2023, individuals matching the description of A. aspersa were found on an artificial dock structure in Stanley Harbour, Falkland Islands, where there were no previous records of the species. Individuals were collected for morphological and genetic analyses, and previous surveys of the site were reanalysed to estimate the abundance of the population. The morphological examination and genetic analysis confirmed the individuals were A. aspersa. Analysis of the survey data suggested the species has been present since at least 2011 and forms a reasonably dense population on the more sheltered areas of the dock structure. Further survey work and population genetic investigations are required to better understand the likely origin of the population, and the abundance and extent of the species around the Falkland Islands.

It is difficult to understand the safety profile of drugs based on a single clinical trial since clinical trials are often designed to prove efficacies, and sample size is not powered for safety assessment. Thus, meta-analysis would be a valuable tool to infer the safety profiles utilizing multiple studies. Individual clinical trials usually report the incidence proportions of adverse events (AEs) observed in the study. The follow-up duration may be study-specific, and furthermore different between the treatment groups within a single study. It often occurs in oncology clinical trials and if this is the case, it is hard to interpret the aggregated relative risk of AEs and compare the risk of AEs between the treatment groups with the standard meta-analysis techniques. The progression-free survival or the overall survival is often used as the primary endpoint in oncology clinical trials and the Kaplan–Meier estimates of the survival functions for the primary endpoint are often demonstrated graphically, which give us information of the follow-up duration of the AEs. We propose novel meta-analysis methods for AEs that address differences in follow-up durations by efficiently utilizing the Kaplan–Meier estimates of the primary endpoint. We adapt our approach using both simulated data and real data from a meta-analysis of bevacizumab. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed methods perform well when follow-up time differs between trials and groups.

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.