The Hector Galaxy Survey is a new optical integral field spectroscopy (IFS) survey currently using the Anglo-Australian Telescope to observe up to 15 000 galaxies at low redshift ($z \lt 0.1$). The Hector instrument employs 21 optical fibre bundles feeding into two double-beam spectrographs, AAOmega and the new Spector spectrograph, to enable wide-field multi-object IFS observations of galaxies. To efficiently process the survey data, we adopt the data reduction pipeline developed for the SAMI Galaxy Survey, with significant updates to accommodate Hector’s dual-spectrograph system. These enhancements address key differences in spectral resolution and other instrumental characteristics relative to SAMI and are specifically optimised for Hector’s unique configuration. We introduce a two-dimensional arc fitting approach that reduces the root-mean-square (RMS) velocity scatter by a factor of 1.2–3.4 compared to fitting arc lines independently for each fibre. The pipeline also incorporates detailed modelling of chromatic optical distortion in the wide-field corrector, to account for wavelength-dependent spatial shifts across the focal plane. We assess data quality through a series of validation tests, including wavelength solution accuracy (1.2–2.7 km s$^{-1}$ RMS), spectral resolution (FWHM of 1.2–1.4 Å for Spector), throughput characterisation, astrometric precision ($\lesssim$ 0.03 arcsec median offset), sky subtraction residuals (1–1.6% median continuum residual), and flux calibration stability (4% systematic offset when compared to Legacy Survey fluxes). We demonstrate that Hector delivers high-fidelity, science-ready datasets, supporting robust measurements of galaxy kinematics, stellar populations, and emission-line properties and provide examples. Additionally, we address systematic uncertainties identified during the data processing and propose future improvements to enhance the precision and reliability of upcoming data releases. This work establishes a robust data reduction framework for Hector, delivering high-quality data products that support a broad range of extragalactic studies.

Despite extensive research on issue engagement, much remains to be learned. This article advances our understanding of issue competition in three ways. First, it examines whether political parties focus on the same issues in a setting with high electoral volatility, studying four Quebec elections from 2012 to 2022. Second, it assesses whether this trend is evident in both press releases and tweets. Third, it investigates why parties converge on the same issues. Findings reveal convergence levels in Quebec match other democracies and remain consistent across platforms. Ideologically similar parties are more likely to address the same issues. Two issue types are identified: peripheral, less visible issues and governance issues, consistently highlighted by all parties within a jurisdiction, reflecting a stable electoral agenda. These findings align with growing evidence that engagement dominates issue competition while demonstrating that convergence and divergence can occur around few key issues that remain relatively stable over time.

In this work, we carry out a rigorous analysis of a multi-soliton solution of the focusing nonlinear Schrödinger equation as the number, N, of solitons grows to infinity. We discover configurations of N-soliton solutions which exhibit the formation (as $N \to \infty$) of a soliton gas condensate. Specifically, we show that when the eigenvalues of the Zakharov–Shabat operator for the nonlinear Schrödinger equation accumulate on two bounded horizontal segments in the complex plane with norming constants bounded away from 0, then, asymptotically, the solution is described by a rapidly oscillatory elliptic-wave with constant velocity, on compact subsets of (x, t). We then consider more complex solutions with an extra soliton component, and we show that, in this deterministic setting, the kinetic theory of solitons applies. This is to be distinguished from previous analyses of soliton gases where the norming constants were tending to zero with N, and the asymptotic description only included elliptic waves in the long-time asymptotics.

A two-dimensional ‘basic structure’ of economic and cultural dimensions has often been used as a master frame to interpret party system change in Europe. This article questions whether such a common model of political dimensionality exists on the demand side as well. Using data from eight European democracies, this article shows that the dimensionality of voter attitudes is similar across Europe – that is, composed of comparable cultural and economic issue dimensions. However, the findings also reveal that the positioning of voters and socio-structural groups within this shared dimensional structure remains dependent on the national political context and the structure of the corresponding party system. Substantively, the study thus concludes that European political spaces are largely similar in their ‘dimensionality’ but more different in their ‘structuring’. By highlighting this distinction, the article expands extant knowledge of political structuration across Europe.

Reflections on the legacy of ‘Jacobin egalitarianism’ in post-Thermidorian France can be seen as following one of three strands: conservative, communist, or democratic. By shedding light on the democratic trajectory, this article addresses the historiographical imbalance that has disproportionately focused on conservative and communist perspectives. This study thereby pursues a renewed understanding of the relationship between the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the evolution of political economy. Through an analysis of Étienne-Géry Lenglet’s treatise, De la propriété (1798), the contexts and content of democratic political economy during the revolutionary decade are identified. Lenglet’s politics formed an intervention in the debates during the Directory on the dynamics of property, morality, the franchise, and the principles of modern polities. His thought exemplifies a Condorcetian egalitarianism that grappled with the dilemmas posed by the rise of commerce and standing armies. This analysis of Lenglet’s work challenges the notion that the radicals of the French Revolution operated outside of Enlightenment political economy: De la propriété was deeply rooted in Enlightenment and revolutionary rhetoric. Lenglet’s politics emerges as a crucial component of diverse reform projects that contradicts reified depictions of Enlightenment political thought.

This article examines the local production of statistics of workers recruited by the Portuguese colonial administration in Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau) during the last years when the Native Labor Code was in force. By enquiring the statistics produced by commissioners of post in the district of Cacheu in their monthly service journals, it consideres the purposes of the workforce statistics at a moment Portugal had just ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention on forced labor and compiling reliable statistical records became crucial. Examining statistical production and registration allows us to explore the expectations and tensions within the colonial state regarding the management of forced labor and the functioning of the colonial administration. Rather than a tool for controllling the African workforce, counting workers was a way of controlling and monitoring the performance of colonial administrators. Moreover, statistics could become part of a strategy of hiding and concealing less palatable aspects of daily colonial rule and labor recruitment practices. Indeed, the workforce recruited by the colonial state remained fairly invisible (and thus subject to abuse), be it due to inconsistent record-keeping or the lack of statistics on workforce recruitment altogether.

This article aims to analyse the historical, political, and socio-cultural significance of the Alash Orda movement in shaping Kazakh national identity and the quest for autonomy during the early 20th century. The research draws on a range of primary sources, including archival documents and speeches, as well as scholarly works by Kazakh and international historians. It analyses how Alash leaders developed a multifaceted political strategy to secure autonomy amidst the chaotic transition from imperial rule to revolutionary governance. Central to their approach was diplomacy: the Alash Orda government sought to establish ties with the Russian Provisional Government and A. Kolchak’s White Army, aiming to build alliances supportive of Kazakh autonomy. The movement also reached out to international organisations, seeking external recognition and assistance. Despite these efforts, the study demonstrates that Alash Orda ultimately failed to achieve lasting success in establishing a stable autonomous Kazakh state. Alongside this political narrative, the study highlights the cultural and educational initiatives of Alash Orda, particularly its promotion of the Kazakh language and national identity in the face of Russification policies.

The ‘Problem of Unconceived Alternatives’ – essentially the idea that we can never know when a radically different but better explanation is available – goes to the heart of what is involved in trying to understand the cosmos given our limited capacities for observation, and the challenges of interpreting the data. This article rethinks large-scale cosmological interpretation (in effect, ‘metaphysics’) as a process of modelling ‘protectorates’ of past experience in terms of ‘typicalities’ found in our own local range of empirical data, and then of making it available as a tool for understanding and prediction. Based on the role of examples and analogies (dṛṣṭānta) to build ontologies explaining the cosmos in the history of Indian metaphysics, it argues for a broadly structural realist account. When we ask whether something is a physical object, a material, a force, a field, or some other as-yet-unconceived kind of thing, we use best-fit models that are schematic of the structure of evidence, rather than descriptive of the thing in itself. Given this, Indian metaphysical history suggests strategies for finding unconceived alternative better explanatory models, by stretching the imagination towards novel schemas. In this light, the ‘problem’ becomes a ‘promise’ that unconceived alternatives with ever-better explanatory power await us, subject to more innovative, imaginative interpretations.

This paper investigates the dynamics of legislative politics within the unique political context of the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China. Drawing on recently collected data from roll-call votes and committee deliberations taken during the fifth and sixth legislative assemblies, this study shifts the focus from electoral processes and resolution proposals to an analysis of bill proposals with the potential to become law. The findings reveal a structural dichotomy between a large, cohesive pro-establishment faction and a smaller, more fragmented opposition, which contrasts with the findings of previous research that suggest a more balanced opposition. Further analysis of committee deliberations indicates that this stable dichotomy allows regime loyalists to voice dissent without appearing rebellious, enabling ruling elites to gauge and respond to constituents’ preferences on non-sensitive issues. This dynamic highlights the distinct legislative practices of Macau SAR under the “one country, two systems” framework.

What is happening in Gaza now is a total displacement of any form of normality. This displacement of the normal has been effected by a population-wide project of social reproduction. Every Gazan, including children, is solicited to reproduce life, to survive. At the same time, social reproduction in Palestine has always also entailed insurgent possibilities, where this form of labour has indeed sustained and reproduced Palestinian revolutionary action. From collective kitchens to local initiatives of care for children, to using drones as musical instruments to distract children from the deafening violence of its soundscape, social reproduction is iterated as both survival and insurgency. This short intervention tries to think through the question of how to make sense of social reproduction as capitalist oppression through the unwaged housework, and as colonial violence through the mass extermination of a population, without leaving behind its potential for insurgency?

Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) is universally received as sceptical of ‘whig’ teleology in historical accounts and, therefore, of politically charged narratives of history. This view stands in need of a basic correction. Butterfield’s work targets teleological accounts which involve a determinate conception of progress such as would arm a partisan politics. He calls this the politics of the ‘general proposition’. Nevertheless, he does defend a conception of progress involving an indeterminate concept. The historian finds, intimated in the detail of the past, that progress is the fruit of interactions between opposing parties. The imperative for the statesman in the present, then, is to facilitate such interactions. In short, The Whig Interpretation of History is a positive work of political thought. Looked at this way, Butterfield’s later, controversial work, The Englishman & His History, does not appear to be in contradiction with the earlier book so much as a polemical expression of it. The two books together present what may be called Butterfield’s politics of historiography. Histories which present progress as a straight line, to be co-opted by one party, encourage precisely the political action which impedes progress. Butterfield, in short, is still a kind of ‘whig’.