The paper explores the impact of microfinance on multidimensional constructs of empowerment and the catalysts thereof. The reference point for analysis in the paper is the women microfinance borrowers’ self perception about their life transmutation as well as that of household power configuration. Unlike other recent research papers on the topic that focus on women’s economic empowerment, this paper focuses on both economic and socio-cultural empowerment. The paper is based on both primary and secondary data. Qualitative primary data were collected from women beneficiaries of microfinance in Bangladesh. This paper argues that microfinance can be a useful empowerment tool that can transmute women’s economic position and power relationships, but only when combined with financial literacy. It concludes that financial literacy is more important than access to credit and should be the focus of all future microfinance programs.

Since the 2008 economic crisis, social service providers worldwide have reported funding cuts, while the need for some social services has been increasing. This paper examines the combined and longer-term effects of such divergent developments on the nonprofit social services sector. The empirical analysis uses Austrian administrative data on six subfields of the sector covering the years 2003–2017. We investigate significant changes in the trends of four growth indicators applying interrupted time series analysis. We find that the 2008 economic crisis is associated with persistently lower growth rates in Austria’s nonprofit social services sector. The magnitude of this dampening effect differs across subsectors. Additionally, our findings suggest an increase in market concentration. Hence, the study discloses a long-term scarring effect of the economic crisis on Austria’s social services sector, raising doubts on the sector’s future resilience.

Open Access has been around for many years. The only new developments of pressing interest are primarily related to UK university and research management bureaucracies. It is unlikely that the laws of copyright – which protect academic and other authors in various ways – will disappear, and certainly not overnight. Commercial publishers will find a business model that sustains them, and experimentation in novel forms of information dissemination will continue. Current rights in intellectual property are of course subject to critique and change, but internet access to information has not and will not suddenly dissolve the basic economics of information production and consumption.

How can computational social science (CSS) methods be applied in nonprofit and philanthropic studies? This paper summarizes and explains a range of relevant CSS methods from a research design perspective and highlights key applications in our field. We define CSS as a set of computationally intensive empirical methods for data management, concept representation, data analysis, and visualization. What makes the computational methods “social” is that the purpose of using these methods is to serve quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods social science research, such that theorization can have a solid ground. We illustrate the promise of CSS in our field by using it to construct the largest and most comprehensive database of scholarly references in our field, the Knowledge Infrastructure of Nonprofit and Philanthropic Studies (KINPS). Furthermore, we show that through the application of CSS in constructing and analyzing KINPS, we can better understand and facilitate the intellectual growth of our field. We conclude the article with cautions for using CSS and suggestions for future studies implementing CSS and KINPS.

Hans Asenbaum's open-access book The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age takes on some of the biggest questions in feminist and radical democratic theory. It asks, how we should understand who we are, and what implications our answer to that question has for democracy.

While Paul urged practitioners of Christ-worship to abandon their old gods and replace them with Christ—a demand later re-issued by Justin, Tertullian, and other spokespersons—this study suggests that such an “abandon and replace” ideal would not normally have been followed. Relinquishing old gods when turning to Christ posed risks compared to other methods of embracing new gods. Furthermore, in antiquity, abandoning old gods was neither necessary nor common upon adoption of new deities. In light of these observations, my study highlights underexplored modes of embracing Christ in the Roman principate, and argues that a plurality of Christ-followers maintained connections with the Roman gods. I suggest that interpretatio Christiana and various other forms of adding Christ to existing religious practices were likely embraced by a prominent number of Christ-followers prior to Constantine.

The promise of algorithmic decision-making (ADM) lies in its capacity to support or replace human decision-making based on a superior ability to solve specific cognitive tasks. Applications have found their way into various domains of decision-making—and even find appeal in the realm of politics. Against the backdrop of widespread dissatisfaction with politicians in established democracies, there are even calls for replacing politicians with machines. Our discipline has hitherto remained surprisingly silent on these issues. The present article argues that it is important to have a clear grasp of when and how ADM is compatible with political decision-making. While algorithms may help decision-makers in the evidence-based selection of policy instruments to achieve pre-defined goals, bringing ADM to the heart of politics, where the guiding goals are set, is dangerous. Democratic politics, we argue, involves a kind of learning that is incompatible with the learning and optimization performed by algorithmic systems.

Based on data on 67,000 articles published in 100 high-impact journals in the twenty years between 2000 and 2019, I analyse the scientific contribution of European political science scholarly communities in the global context. The scholars contributing to the global scientific production are largely concentrated in a few countries, with the US and UK alone accounting for more than half of the articles published in high-impact journals. However, the tendency is towards increasing diversity in the geographic basis of the international scientific production; and European countries are central to this change. Contributing to international collaborative publications has been a key engine of the increased scientific production of scholars based in Europe. This was a generalised global tendency, and a spectacular one for certain national scholarly communities. The network analysis of international collaborations points to the consolidation of three clusters within a growing and increasingly dense network. The US, followed by the UK, are central to a global cluster of collaborations. European countries are primarily clustered in two groups: a larger and growing cluster; and a smaller but even more integrated, highly productive and connected cluster of scholars based in seven northern European countries. All bibliometric indicators consistently point to a generalised growth in the output and internationalisation of the scientific contribution provided by the European political science community.

Media reporting and academic research into young climate civil society organisations (CSOs) often focus on organisations using direct, confrontational and often controversial actions, but to what extent is this a true picture of young climate organisations? This paper examines the differences between young and old climate and environmental CSOs in the Netherlands. Drawing on niche theory, it uses set-theoretic typology building to examine the ways in which 39 young and old Dutch CSOs construct configurational organisational niches by narrowing down their membership and issue, using innovative strategies and developing stable financing sources. It finds that although there are significant differences between young and old CSOs in how they narrow down their membership and issues, their strategies are not significantly different: in other words, a focus on civil disobedience alone does not paint the whole picture of young climate groups.

The rise of conservative religion in the West threatens the enduring positive contribution of religion to civil society, if conservative churches, as often assumed, indeed generate more bonding than bridging social capital. Against this background, this study explores the civic engagement of evangelicals in the Netherlands. Two research questions are addressed: (1) To what extent are Dutch evangelicals more involved in religious than non-religious volunteering as compared to mainline Christians and non-church members? and (2) Which decisive factors determine the religious and non-religious volunteering of Dutch evangelicals as compared to mainline Christians and non-church members? Results show that these orthodox Christians are more involved in religious than in non-religious volunteering. Their religious volunteering is determined by their church attendance, Bible reading and social embeddedness in their congregation, while their non-religious volunteering is impeded by their mono-religious orientation and social embeddedness in their congregation and by the volunteering of their parents.

Multiple-identity organizations possess identity characteristics that belong to different and potentially conflicting value systems. How exactly these identities are projected in such an organization’s external communication has hardly been investigated. Here, we present a method that provides a systematic way to analyse the projected identity of multiple-identity organizations. A quantitative content analysis of the annual reports of a Dutch multiple-identity organization shows the presence of its utilitarian and ideological identity through the years 1998–2016. Results suggest that the relatively strong emphasis on the ideological identity of the organization is not in line with the identity perceived internally. Contextual knowledge about changes in the leadership, stakeholders’ demands, and the annual turnover provides a more thorough understanding of the research results. This study shows the volatility of identity, and it supports the presupposition that multiple-identity organizations are flexible in adapting their identity to changing circumstances.

There is limited scholarly research that broadly examines the representation of older adults and ageing through an ageism lens in print and online newspapers, including national, state and local publications. Drawing on ageism and stereotype theory, this research examines how older adults and ageing are represented in Australian newspapers. Data were collected over a 16-week period, during which 2,652 statements relating to older adults or ageing were extracted from 804 media publications. A summative content analysis approach was employed, involving the quantification of key concepts followed by an interpretive analysis to identify underlying themes and codes. The findings revealed that approximately 42.0 per cent of statements portrayed older adults and ageing negatively, while only 6.5 per cent were positive. Dominant ageist and stereotypical representations centred on themes of vulnerability, frailty, incapacity and injury or illness. As populations continue to age, it is critical that scholars persist in analysing and challenging dominant media narratives that shape how older people are framed. Furthermore, audience reception studies are needed to examine how such representations are interpreted by the public, thereby deepening understanding of the media’s role in shaping societal perceptions of older adults and ageing.

This article considers the legal status of the prohibition on gender-based violence against women. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) does not contain a prohibition on violence against women as such. However, the CEDAW Committee found in its General Recommendation 19 that the definition of discrimination against women in Article 1 CEDAW includes gender-based violence against women. As general recommendations are not binding, it is often suggested that, aside from the regional treaties on the issue, the prohibition exists only under soft law. By contrast, this article argues that the prohibition exists also under hard law. Whether the definition of discrimination against women in Article 1 CEDAW includes gender-based violence against women is a question of treaty interpretation.

The article contends that, in line with Article 31(3)(b) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the subsequent practice of States Parties in the application of CEDAW has established their agreement that discrimination against women in Article 1 includes gender-based violence against women. It argues further that General Recommendation 19 served as the catalyst for this subsequent State practice. The article also explores the relationship between treaties and customary international law and contends that CEDAW has generated rules of customary international law, namely that gender-based violence against women is prohibited and that there is an obligation on States to exercise due diligence to eliminate it. The large number of States Parties to CEDAW has not proved an obstacle to the generation of these customary rules.

This contribution focuses on volunteer initiatives that seek to assist refugee status holders in Rotterdam. It studies initiatives that are still in the process of fine-tuning their focus, grappling for funds, searching for volunteers, and seeking collaborations. The article lays bare the inequalities that such aspiring initiatives can be premised on and produce. In analyzing moments in which the label of ‘volunteer’ is rejected—or instead celebrated or transformed—this article demonstrates that the elastic representation of volunteering clashes with callous boundaries between ‘being only a volunteer’ and ‘doing something together.’ These boundaries are heartfelt by the organizers of these aspiring initiatives, who often have a refugee background themselves. By understanding inequality in volunteering in relation to debates about active citizenship, this article seeks to examine the workings of the glass ceiling that hinders the organizers of volunteer initiatives to transition into a position they consider more credible and professional.

We construct moduli stacks of stable sheaves for surfaces fibered over marked nodal curves by using expanded degenerations. These moduli stacks carry a virtual class and therefore give rise to enumerative invariants. In the case of a surface with two irreducible components glued along a smooth divisor, we prove a degeneration formula that relates the moduli space associated to the surface with the relative spaces associated to the two components. For a smooth surface and no markings, our notion of stability agrees with slope stability with respect to a suitable choice of polarization. We apply our results to compute elliptic genera of moduli spaces of stable sheaves on some elliptic surfaces.

We review our recent ConfliBERT language model (Hu et al. 2022 [ConfliBERT: A Pre-Trained Language Model for Political Conflict and Violence]) to process political and violence-related texts. When fine-tuned, results show that ConfliBERT has superior performance in accuracy, precision, and recall over other large language models (LLMs) like Google’s Gemma 2 (9B), Meta’s Llama 3.1 (7B), and Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 (14B) within its relevant domains. It is also hundreds of times faster than these more generalist LLMs. These results are illustrated using texts from the BBC, re3d, and the Global Terrorism Database. We demonstrate that open, fine-tuned models can outperform the more general models in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall, and at a fraction of the cost.

Paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould introduced punctuated equilibria (PE) to the scientific community in 1972 (Eldredge and Gould 1972). Since then, the concept has been debated and tested, misunderstood and clarified, applied, extended, and integrated into evolutionary thought. To celebrate PE’s semicentennial, we and Paleobiology’s editors have produced this special issue. Our goal has been to bring together paleontologists, evolutionary biologists, and historians of science to reflect on the concept of PE, how it has been tested, the underlying mechanisms for stasis and punctuated change, and the broader impacts of PE for paleontology, biology, and macroevolution. In this introduction, we highlight the key components and implications of PE, briefly review the history surrounding its emergence and reception, and outline how PE expands evolutionary theory. We explain the organization of the papers included in this special issue, providing brief summaries to guide the interested reader. Finally, we conclude with a call for paleobiologists to “rediscover” PE and consider how the concept and its implications can be applied to their own work. In this endeavor, we are aware that a great many authors have contributed significant data, insight, and perspective to these issues over the years. As our purpose in this introduction is not to provide a comprehensive review, we do not cite and recognize them all individually, but we applaud all of those who have weighed in on this important topic.

Dans la foulée des différentes vagues de mobilisation et de contestation des années 2010, les théories de la démocratie radicale ont permis de réfléchir à nouveaux frais au rapport des mouvements sociaux à la démocratie en les associant à un idéal d’insurrection populaire. Or, il découle de cette association une conception particulière de la conflictualité politique qui est susceptible de renoncer aux promesses pratiques et normatives de la démocratie. S’agissant de dépasser cette conception de la conflictualité politique et de réaffirmer la spécificité de l’apport démocratique des mouvements sociaux, cet article entend étayer l’hypothèse d’une institution insurgeante de la démocratie en soutenant que les mouvements sociaux contribuent par leurs pratiques contestataires à produire et à transformer l’ordre démocratique.

Telomere length is a biomarker of ageing, with shorter lengths associated with a higher risk of age-related diseases and mortality. Oxidative stress and inflammation predominantly contribute to telomere shortening. Diets rich in antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties may help preserve telomere length. Nuts and seeds contain antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients and bioactive compounds. Their consumption is recognised as protective against age-related conditions. The objective of this review is to evaluate the role of nut and seed intake on telomere length in humans. A systematic search was conducted in four databases from inception to 12 March 2024 to identify observational and interventional studies assessing nut and seed intake and measuring telomere length as an outcome in adults (aged ≥ 18 years). Data from the included articles were extracted by one reviewer and verified by another reviewer. Out of the nine observational studies included, three reported positive associations between nut and seed intake and telomere length. None of the four interventional studies included reported a significant positive effect. Meta-analysis was not performed due to high variability in reporting telomere length measurements. The evidence is insufficient to confirm a beneficial role of nut and seed intake on telomere length. Adequately powered long-term intervention studies are needed.

Muscular dystrophy (MD) encompasses inherited myopathies characterised by progressive skeletal and cardiac muscle degeneration, chronic inflammation and metabolic dysfunction. While emerging therapies show pre-clinical promise, few reach clinical translation, highlighting the need for supportive interventions to improve function and quality of life (QoL). Nutritional strategies may offer such benefits; however, limited data exist characterising diet in MD or associations with functional outcomes. This study assessed diet, nutritional status and associations with muscle strength, function and QoL in MD adults. Adults with MD (n 39; FSHD = 8, LGMD = 9 and Other = 22) and matched Controls (n 17) completed two 3-d food records, strength/function assessments and QoL questionnaires. Between-group differences were analysed using t tests or Mann–Whitney U and associations using Pearson’s r or Spearman’s Rho (P < 0·05). Compared with controls, individuals with MD consumed more energy (89 % v. 35 % exceeded RDI, P = 0·023), but less carbohydrate (–21 %, P = 0·013), sugar (–31 %, P = 0·004), protein (–15 %), BCAA (–31 %, P = 0·049) and vitamin C (–43 %, P = 0·009). MD participants demonstrated reduced muscle thickness, strength, function and reported lower QoL and physical capacity (all P < 0·05). Protein intake positively correlated with strength and function (P < 0·05); branched-chain amino acids intake was associated with lean mass (r = 0·442, P = 0·02) and strength (r = 0·372, P = 0·036). Findings indicate adults with MD consume excess energy but insufficient protein and micronutrients, supporting the need for adult MD-specific dietary guidance to optimise musculoskeletal health and QoL.