This article offers a response of hope to the metacrisis. Because of modernity’s philosophical premises, particularly Enlightenment concepts that separated humanity from nature, modern approaches to environmental challenges embrace a dualistic schism between culture and nature, fragmenting understanding through the compartmentalisation of knowledge. In our current situation, many feel bleak and too helpless to act. In response, we offer the experiences of Māori youth from a specific iwi (tribe) of Aotearoa New Zealand, Rongomaiwāhine. These young people speak of their holistic conceptualisation of humanity, the natural and the spiritual. Their values focus on taking responsibility for care in all realms, often through actions significant in community or land-sky-seascape settings. Their lives and ideas suggest the value of a framework grounded in Indigenous Māori philosophy from which others may learn. Thus, far from seeking new technological solutions we offer rememberings of how the ecology of relationships was and, for the rangatahi, remains. In this, the past, present and future are woven together in an understanding of the natural world of which humanity is merely a small part. The result is a hopeful framing of life in which relations of care protect ecological continuity.

Medical practitioners are among the people with a refugee or asylum seeker background to whom Australia has granted sanctuary. Yet, as the media has reported, refugee doctors (as we refer to them for convenience in this article) are often employed in low-skilled roles, rather than continuing their medical careers in Australia. Provided it is established that they are safe and competent to practise medicine, it would benefit refugee doctors, but also the community if they obtain legal entitlement to do so; Australia is presently facing major shortages of medical practitioners in certain geographical locations and fields of practice. The researchers in this study conducted semi-structured interviews with ten refugee doctors to explore their experiences in navigating the pathways for international medical graduates (‘IMGs’) to attain registration to practise medicine from the Medical Board of Australia. The study identified that refugee doctors encounter substantial challenges in this regard. A comparative analysis of the findings of this study with those of previous research reveals that, while IMGs frequently face barriers, certain obstacles appear to be unique to refugee doctors’ experiences. This article recommends specific reforms to address them.

The Great Depression in 1929 had a transformative impact on Turkey. The institutions established to minimize the effects of the crisis propagated a set of statist measures. The National Economy and Savings Association and Public Press Directorate utilized photography and painting in the beginning of the 1930s to propagate those measures. In their efforts, these institutions constructed a new conception of landscape with a moral agenda: citizens and artists should travel in Anatolia to learn about the country, love it, and create art accordingly. Key to this conception was the productivity of the land. The most comprehensive cultural program during World War II, Homeland Tours, mimicked this new conception of a landscape. This article analyzes the conception of productive landscapes up until the end of World War II by drawing attention to the overlooked photography collection in the State Archives, which comprises paintings made during the Homeland Tours. One of the many tools that the statist economic institutions devised was agricultural statistics. The comparison between the paintings and actual land use statistics demonstrates that the artists collectively followed the statist economic agenda.

Multilevel modeling accounts for outcome dependence across lower-level units due to unobserved group effects, while spatial modeling accounts for outcome dependence across units in the same level of analysis due to diffusion. Outcome dependence can occur simultaneously due to both spatial diffusion in the lower-level units and spatial diffusion in the unobserved group effects. For example, counties are nested within states and diffusion processes might take place at both levels of analysis. Building on recent research from the spatial econometrics and multilevel modeling literature, we propose a class of spatial hierarchical models with binary outcomes. One method accounts for spatially independent, unobserved group effects and the other method accounts for spatially dependent unobserved group effects. We propose a Bayesian approach to estimate such effects while also accounting for lower-level diffusion in the outcome, and provide software to estimate these models. Our Monte Carlo results demonstrate that failing to correctly account for diffusion and/or the nested structure of data can lead to bias in both parameter estimates and substantive effects. We apply these models to analyze the causes of civil rights protests in the United States in the 1960s.

Social support is a key coping resource; its specific role for refugees from sub-Saharan Africa in high-income settings remains poorly understood. This systematic review synthesises existing evidence on the sources of social support and how these networks aid coping during resettlement. We applied an optimised search strategy to identify studies examining social support among sub-Saharan African refugees across six academic indexing databases. We then undertook a meta-synthesis of the identified studies. This involved the use of meta-thematic analysis of the interpretations and quotes presented in each study, combining thematic analysis through the reviewer’s reflexivity. The PRISMA framework guided the review process to ensure methodological rigour. A total of 22 articles were included in the qualitative meta-synthesis. The synthesis revealed four key sources of social support: 1) family, 2) friends, 3) ethnic and community groups, and 4) cultural and religious supports. These support sources played multiple roles, including enhancing community engagement and reciprocity, providing practical and emotional assistance, offering relief from distress and cultivating cultural continuity and adaptation. However, some individuals distanced themselves from their ethnic community and preferred self-driven coping. Access to social support systems remains a crucial coping resource for many sub-Saharan African refugees in high-income settings, alleviating distress and enhancing resilience. Programs that strengthen informal social support networks through community-driven initiatives can enhance the relevance of social support. Future research should investigate the role of social support across various phases of resettlement in relation to psychosocial well-being.

One-dependent first passage percolation is a spreading process on a graph where the transmission time through each edge depends on the direct surroundings of the edge. In particular, the classical i.i.d. transmission time $L_{xy}$ is multiplied by $(W_xW_y)^\mu $, a polynomial of the expected degrees $W_x, W_y$ of the endpoints of the edge $xy$, which we call the penalty function. Beyond the Markov case, we also allow any distribution for $L_{xy}$ with regularly varying distribution near $0$. We then run this process on three spatial scale-free random graph models: finite and infinite Geometric Inhomogeneous Random Graphs, including Hyperbolic Random Graphs, and Scale-Free Percolation. In these spatial models, the connection probability between two vertices depends on their spatial distance and on their expected degrees.

We show that as the penalty function, that is, $\mu $ increases, the transmission time between two far away vertices sweeps through four universal phases: explosive (with tight transmission times), polylogarithmic, polynomial but strictly sublinear, and linear in the Euclidean distance. The strictly polynomial growth phase is a new phenomenon that so far was extremely rare in spatial graph models. All four growth phases are robust in the model parameters and are not restricted to phase boundaries. Further, the transition points between the phases depend nontrivially on the main model parameters: the tail of the degree distribution, a long-range parameter governing the presence of long edges, and the behaviour of the distribution L near $0$. In this paper we develop new methods to prove the upper bounds in all sub-explosive phases. Our companion paper complements these results by providing matching lower bounds in the polynomial and linear regimes.

D-band waveguide transitions that combine a resonant patch on the printed circuit board with multiple waveguide irises are presented and shown to achieve a relative bandwidth of up to 35%. The irises implement an impedance-matching network that is described by a lumped-element circuit model. Parametric sweeps and Monte Carlo simulations quantify the influence of iris dimensions and manufacturing tolerances. The transitions’ group delay is characterized, and its influence on time-domain signals is demonstrated. As an application example, a transition design with six irises is integrated into a multichannel radar frontend with $40\,\mathrm{GHz}$ bandwidth, and measured range profiles are presented. The derived design guidelines enable straightforward customization of iris-based transitions for various applications and frequency bands.

The framing of the 2015 Rachel Dolezal transracialism scandal as a new kind of “trans moment” relies on a peculiar understanding of transness and Blackness, and the relationship they share. In this article, I analyze the “trans grammar” that structures this post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse, seeking to understand its points of reference in, and implications for, theories of transness and Blackness. I argue the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse evidences a concern amongst Black trans feminists that the institutionalization of a “trans” concept that indexes always and only a normative figuration of “transgender” is reliant on the abstraction of the racialization of gendered space, and the erasure of Black trans feminist genealogies. I analyze the debate’s use of “trans” as a prefix for descriptors of the phenomenon Dolezal has come to represent and find the most prevalent usages create “trans” as a qualifier that is emptied of conceptual significance and political investments. This grammar, I argue, captures both Blackness and transness as fixed and knowable. Ultimately, the analysis builds an argument that the discourses’ dominant trans grammars rely on and reproduce a deficient theorization of racialized and gendered identities that depoliticizes transness and recreates gendered and Black identities as a priori and immutable.

Social scientists often compare survey responses before and after important events to test how those events impact respondent beliefs, attitudes, and preferences. This article offers a formal analysis of such pre-event/post-event survey comparisons, including designs that seek to reduce bias using quota sampling, rolling cross-sections, and panels. Our analysis distinguishes major sources of bias and clarifies the comparative strengths and weaknesses of each approach. We then introduce a modified panel design—the dual randomized survey—to reduce bias in cases where asking respondents to complete the same survey twice could impact their Wave 2 responses. Our formalization of bias and novel research design improve scholars’ ability to study the causal impact of events through surveys.

Vicarious learning helps small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) acquire foreign market knowledge by observing and interpreting other firms’ actions and outcomes in international markets. We searched Scopus, ProQuest, and EBSCOhost (2000–2025) and retained 27 studies (2007–2025). The synthesis organizes prior studies into four analytically derived categories that summarize how vicarious learning is conceptualized and operationalized in SME internationalization research: (T1) peer performance benchmarking, (T2) imitation and leader-following, (T3) institutional mimetic pressures, and (T4) network-, cluster-, and advisor-enabled vicarious learning. Across themes, a subset of studies suggests that absorptive capacity may condition whether external experience is recognized, assimilated, and exploited, although direct tests remain uneven and in some cases the contingency is inferred rather than explicitly tested. We translate these insights into an organizing framework and a future agenda on boundary conditions, measurement, and multi-level designs, positioning the review as mechanism clarification that imposes conceptual order on a fragmented literature, rather than as field-level consolidation.

This paper discusses the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election in the context of past contests. It shows how this election manifested the trends since the 1990s: an increasing distrust of the existing political parties, including those created in that decade and the growing support for independent candidates. Such candidates follow their own line of thinking, free from party ties, and appeal to voters in ways that resonate with public skepticism toward party politics. The analysis highlights both continuity and change in Tokyo elections and underscores broader patterns in Japanese political development.

This article re-evaluates the late seventeenth-century operatic culture of the Savoy court in Turin through the lens of newly examined archival material, the Avvisi di Torino preserved in the Medici archive in Florence. These handwritten newsletters, covering the years 1688–99, offer unprecedented insights into the musical and theatrical life of the Savoy capital, a court that stood at the crossroads of the Italian and French traditions. Previous scholarship has often overlooked this period or has relied primarily on printed librettos that provide only a partial view of operatic production. By integrating the avvisi with other sources, this study reconstructs the repertory, organization, and sociopolitical function of operatic spectacles under Victor Amadeus II of Savoy.