The financialisation of eldercare has become an internationally widespread phenomenon with significant implications. Previous literature has shown how finance-controlled providers (FCPs) initially launch their eldercare services throughout urban areas, but we know little about the ways that these providers subsequently expand their services. Focusing on nursing homes in Swedish eldercare, our aim with this paper is to develop new knowledge about the expansion strategies guiding FCPs. Deploying a Bourdieusian field perspective to analyse rich document data from Sweden’s three largest FCPs, we found that they sensed ‘booming opportunities’ following demographic trends among older citizens and economic difficulties within municipalities. However, we also find that FCPs perceived ‘looming challenges’ deriving from labour shortages and profit debates in the public sector, indicating demographic trends and economic difficulties were tough to leverage as opportunities. FCPs attempted to overcome such challenges through expansion strategies centred on acquiring eldercare providers and – most notably – building nursing homes. Our findings advance the literature on eldercare financialisation by highlighting how FCPs, in devising expansion strategies, not only adopt financial tools but also incorporate field perceptions. These strategies are ultimately utilised by FCPs to expand their positions as policy actors throughout welfare states that have undergone market-inspired reforms.

Performers have enacted Beethoven in ways that disclose overt similarities in the ways through which they conceptualize both the composer’s music, and their own ambitions in performing it. This article looks at the pianist Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) who became known as ‘Van II’ not for his compositions but rather his performances. The focus the late nineteenth-century demand for autobiographic readings, and their blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction, sets the scene for Rubinstein’s role in the creation of a Russian obsession with the performance of Beethoven’s piano works. Rubinstein’s fame for being a ‘son born of Beethoven’ continued well beyond his death, and set a precedent for other pianists to look to his Beethoven legacy to fashion themselves as what Stefaniak has termed ‘revelatory interpreters’ of the composer. The resulting Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis resulted in a counterpart obsession that peaked in the late-Soviet landscape of the mid-twentieth century. The article turns to the case of Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964) to give a sense of how this active myth-making reflected itself in the construction of a performance narrative by a pianist who had never seen or heard Rubinstein but who felt compelled to enact the language, metaphors, and physical trope of the Beethoven-Rubinstein synthesis. It suggests how, in Neuhaus’s case, enacting the Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis perhaps underpinned aspects of his own pianism (such as the concept of intonirovaniye (a way of intoning sound) as a manifestation of revelatory interpretation) in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A-flat major Opus 110.

Recent decades have seen a renewal of interest in panpsychism as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness. This has, in part, also driven an increase in interest in classical Indian philosophical traditions among analytic philosophers of mind. Many of these cross-cultural studies pertaining to panpsychism (and cosmopsychism) have focused on one particularly influential school of Indian philosophy, Advaita (non-dual) Vedānta, the most famous proponent of which is Śaṅkara. In this work, we would like to consider the view of another influential philosopher and the school that developed based on his view – Rāmānuja (eleventh century CE) and Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism) Vedānta. We argue that a cosmopsychist-panentheistic metaphysics that is motivated by Rāmānuja’s views offers a solution to the hard problem that is preferable to other comparable views and could form the basis for a panentheistic conception of God that is compatible with the reality of the freedom of human selves.

This article explores Turkey’s exclusion from enlargement scenarios in European political discourse in the new geopolitical era, which imposes important external pressures on European integration. It utilises the concept of “Geopolitical Othering,” which concerns the discursive constructions of the European identity through boundary-drawing practices that portray the Other as a threat to European security and stability. By doing so, the article aims to complement recent studies on Turkey’s growing role as a third country rather than an enlargement candidate, while clarifying another facet of the complexities in EU–Turkey relations, which extend beyond the persistent normative obstacles to Turkish accession. The article illustrates its theoretical arguments with two case studies on EU–Turkey relations, focusing on the 2016 EU–Turkey Statement on irregular migration and the 2018–2020 Eastern Mediterranean Crisis. It demonstrates how Turkey’s specific foreign policy choices over the past decade, including certain cooperative arrangements with the EU, paired with its geopolitical rivalries with the Union, have caused the EU to associate Turkey with certain existential threats. This perception, in turn, has contributed to Turkey’s discursive dissociation from the EU enlargement process, especially during the last Commission term, which coincided with the intensification of a geopoliticised identity discourse within the EU.

We have investigated the modified Jeans instability and gravitational collapse in uniformly rotating, anisotropic quantum plasmas, including the effects of intrinsic magnetisation, viscosity tensor and Ohmic diffusivity. The closure of the Chew, Goldberger and Low and quantum magnetohydrodynamic fluid models describes the dynamical properties and modified dispersion characteristics of the system. The modified Jeans instability criteria and Jeans wavenumbers for the onset conditions of gravitational collapse are obtained, which are significantly modified due to spin magnetisation, quantum corrections and rotation of the system. Strong magnetisation and electrical resistivity are found to enhance the growth rate of Jeans instability, making the system more gravitationally unstable. The magnetic field shows both stabilising (in weak magnetisation limit) and destabilising (in strong magnetisation limit) influence on the growth rate by affecting the gravitational collapse mechanism of dense stars. The growth rate of pressure-anisotropy-driven firehose instability is destabilised due to pressure anisotropy, rotation and spin magnetisation effects. The results are discussed in order to understand the Jeans instability and gravitational collapse of low-mass strongly magnetised white dwarfs.

This article explores the concept of the ‘Trump effect’, defined by a technological disconnection and evaluated through alterations in export specialization among various economies. It scrutinizes if there were any shifts in the techno-nationalist trends of the EU, China and the US in terms of domestic value-added exports in technology sectors after 2017. The research covers the period from 1995 to 2020 and utilizes a fluctuating difference-in-differences approach. The findings suggest that technological global value chains (GVCs) were minimally affected by Trump’s policies, showing scant evidence of significant disconnection in the economies under study. Consequently, the research underscores the robustness of GVCs against the measures taken by the Trump administration.

I explore and defend the unusual view that the replacement of matter taking place in the human body undermines egoistic reasons, and that we therefore have little or no basis for long-term egoistic concern. I begin by arguing that you should not have egoistic concern for a replica, i.e. a person resulting from a complete and sudden replacement of matter. I then argue that when it comes to egoistic concern, replication is not relevantly different from the slower and more gradual form of replacement found in human metabolism: if the former undermines egoistic reasons, so does the latter. I grant that the resulting view is, in some respects, hard to accept, but I conclude that we should at least treat it as a serious possibility.

The money-burning game (MBG) is widely used to study anti-social or destructive behavior. We extend the design of the MBG to separate three motives that could lead subjects to burn their partner’s money – spite, reciprocity, and inequality aversion. We detect that reciprocity is the dominant reason: Most of our subjects would only burn their partner’s money if they believed that their partner would burn theirs. This finding has important implications for the interpretation of the behavior of the game.

Youth unemployment has been a primary concern for the European countries, especially after the 2008 Great Recession. In 2013 a Recommendation of the Council of the European Union established the Youth Guarantee (YG) as a political commitment to ensure that all young people receive a high-quality offer of employment, training or continued education within 4 months of becoming unemployed. To financially support the implementation of the YG in European countries and regions, the EU turned to the European Social Fund and created the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI). The YEI used regional disparities as a guiding criterion for the allocation of resources, but it has not been assessed at the regional level. We fill this gap by assessing the impact of the YEI on the labour market and educational outcomes of young people in EU regions that received funding between 2014 and 2018. The findings demonstrate that the YEI had a positive impact on youth opportunities in EU regions, supporting labour market integration and the return to education and training.

This paper renews the contemporary and enduring salience of archaic and discredited concepts of spatiality and physical geographic determinism, but historicises, repurposes and reworks them: it is an essay in critical and decolonial palaeo-territorialisation. Concreteness may well have been misplaced, but place – and space – might not have been altogether mis-concretised. Rethinking the global is an opportunity to step back and think about macro-scales and macro-scalarity more broadly. This paper exhumes and decolonially/critically reappropriates Carl Schmitt’s Großraum concept (re-examining, along the way, if not quite rehabilitating the Meer und Land thesis and Mackinder’s ‘geographical pivot’ (Mackinder 1904)) as a heuristic device to explore the overlooked scales of continents and continentality in the genealogy of a global geographic imaginary that is as much geotectonic as geo-historical. ‘The Global’ would then come to signify pre-eminently – or perhaps has always signified – as the intercontinental rather than the international: a space or set of spaces in some ultimate sense conditioned by the configuration of the planetary crust yet nonetheless produced through historical processes. We may never have been global, but we have been (inter)continental for the last half-millennium. State sovereignty, (racial) capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, public international law, fascism, communism and neoliberal globalisation have all been projects or formations – directly or indirectly, by design or accident – producing, pursuing, exploiting, organising and ordering continental Großräume. Contemporary regional trade blocs, regional international governmental organisations, regional human rights systems, military alliances and even putative civilisational divides all reflect the perdurable continental horizons of our ostensibly global imaginary.

A new, ground-up narrative of the Buddhist Mobilization of Huế in central Vietnam in the summer of 1963 highlights the voices of its participants – the ‘People of the Pagoda’. Drawing on local records and personal narratives, the article explores the process of how the ‘People of the Pagoda’ forged a collective identity from daily activism and protests for religious equality. Months of various nonviolent collective actions – in the form of demonstrations, hunger strikes, and self-immolations – developed a strong, broad community within the distinctive spaces of Buddhist temples. The article emphasizes the relevance of culture, morals, emotions and identity in the Buddhist Mobilization’s enduring impacts on personal awareness and community networks. In contrast to much top-down, politically-oriented, and Sài Gòn-centric scholarship on this event in Vietnam War historiography, this essay examines the mobilization as a social movement in its own right and seeks to restore Huế’s significant historical role as the birthplace of this movement.

Psychiatrists and anthropologists both rely on observation, discourse analysis and access to participants’ internal and external worlds. Ethnographic fieldwork, a key method in medical anthropology, offers a powerful tool to establish a robust evidence base of how to address mental health inequalities in ethnic minority communities.

Human milk oligosaccharides offer unique benefits for infant growth and development. Buffalo milk, characterized by a mild flavor and high nutritional value, has attracted considerable interest. To characterize the oligosaccharide profile and composition of buffalo milk, we conducted qualitative and quantitative analysis of milk oligosaccharides at the early- and late-lactation stages of crossbred (Nili-Ravi × Murrah × local) buffaloes from Guangxi, China. The results revealed a total of 97 oligosaccharides including 17 novel oligosaccharides, with concentrations of 416.6 ± 25.86 and 368.3 ± 10.29 mg/L in milk from early- and late-lactation stages, respectively. The most abundant oligosaccharides were 3’-sialyllactose (3’-SL), difucosyllactose (DFL), 6’-sialyllactose (6’-SL), and a newly discovered compound, 2142. The oligosaccharides in crossbred (Nili-Ravi × Murrah × local) buffaloes demonstrated greater diversity than those found in the milk of other dairy animals, highlighting its potential as a high-quality nutritional resource for adults and infants.

What shapes fossil-fuel investment and divestment decisions? What are pension funds’ climate-related considerations? And how do conceptions of portfolio risk influence these issues? Danish pension funds constitute a rare and understudied cohort of investors who have undertaken comparatively progressive fossil-fuel investment decisions. Simultaneously, diversification and market rationality have frequently been invoked as obstacles to divestment and active ownership. Using the Danish experience, this article conducts an archaeological analysis of the concept of portfolio risk, unearthing the various ways in which it has shaped fossil-fuel investment decisions. The analysis identifies five key aspects through which the concept has hampered Danish pension funds’ active ownership and fossil-fuel divestment decisions (sector diversification, externalities, market rationality, dispersed ownership, and passive index investing). The article argues that these discursive aspects have reinforced a passive tendency within finance capitalism to bolster the status quo, thereby supporting prevailing market actors and the continued extraction of fossil fuels.

After World War II, Japan was severely degraded, and its people were generally devastated. For the country’s very survival, the beleaguered Japanese people sought to rebuild economically and reputationally. During this postwar period, Japanese business, union, and government leaders grappled with lagging progress and the necessary abandonment of prior transwar social and business arrangements. They sought new strategies to stimulate advancement in the wake of a governmental vacuum, labor unrest, and the threat of communism. In this context, Moral Re-Armament (MRA) took root in some areas of Japan during the period when Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew from $102 billion in 1945 to $420 billion by 1961. MRA introduced Western-oriented societal values, intended to help nurture individual and societal change, including collaborative relations between unions and management. Of the first eight Japanese prime ministers after World War II, six either worked openly with or endorsed the MRA movement.