This paper explores the potential offered by a cinematographic approach to the study of museums, particularly science centres. By setting up an intermedial lens that maps between the museum medium and film – particularly the visitor experiences in museums onto a specific genre of museum film – correspondences between these media and their respective ‘grammars’ are analysed. After a brief overview of the relationship between museums and film in the twentieth century, a language of documentary film suitable for museum film is introduced based on the film theory of Jon Boorstin, who also directed a film on the Exploratorium in San Fancisco, which adapted post-war insights in communication design as developed by the Eames Office. Reviewing five documentaries about the Exploratorium shows that only Boorstin’s museum film could adequately convey the museum experience to others, thus going beyond intermediality to enable a transmedial transfer. How this film emerged through the cooperation of the Exploratorium with the Eames Office and national funding agencies is presented in some detail in order to show that the intermedial lens can work both ways, allowing for the transmedial application of film analysis to the museums themselves.

This paper uses Old Spanish as a case study to argue that verb-second (V2) syntax is not monolithic but instead involves a split between external merge (EM) and internal merge (IM) into the C-system. Building on Holmberg’s (2020) findings on Swedish, it demonstrates that the enclitic and proclitic patterns in Old Spanish finite main clauses serve as diagnostics for whether a V2 constituent reaches the preverbal field via EM or IM, reflecting a broader distinction between formal V2 and scope/discourse-related V2. The high frequency of enclisis in Old Spanish suggests a predominance of EM-driven V2, in contrast to Holmberg’s assessment of Swedish, where EM-driven V2 is claimed to be more restricted.

The paper proposes a mixed model of V2 syntax, integrating EPP-driven merge into Spec-FinP (Haegeman 1996) with interpretively motivated Criterial movement (Rizzi 2006; Samo 2019). Residual V2 reflects the resilience of the interpretive component, with its assumed Spec-head configuration (Poletto 2000) reinterpreting verb movement to Fin0 as movement to the Criterial head. The model provides a new perspective on the interplay between formal and interpretive aspects of V2 syntax, with implications reaching beyond Old Spanish.

We compute the Fukaya category of the symplectic blowup of a compact rational symplectic manifold at a point in the following sense: suppose a collection of Lagrangian branes satisfy Abouzaid’s criterion [Abo10] for split-generation of a bulk-deformed Fukaya category of cleanly intersecting Lagrangian branes. We show (Theorem 1.1) that for a small blowup parameter, their inverse images in the blowup together with a collection of branes near the exceptional locus split-generate the Fukaya category of the blowup. This categorifies a result on quantum cohomology by Bayer [Bay04] and is an example of a more general conjectural description of the behaviour of the Fukaya category under transitions occurring in the minimal model program, namely that minimal model program transitions generate additional summands.

Political scientists often assume that women had no political rights before the twentieth century. Archival records show that this is not the case and reveal an unlikely group of politically active women: Catholic nuns. Using novel data for more than 150 assembly meetings between 1493 and 1789, I demonstrate that ecclesiastical women exercised political rights systematically across France, despite a patriarchal church and monarchy. Ecclesiastical women had political rights because they were economic actors with a stake in state finances and local affairs. Theoretically, I argue that early representative practices ought to be viewed as a tool used by rulers to increase compliance with governance activities. Accordingly, rulers had an incentive to afford rights of representation to those actors on whose compliance they depended: most often, these were economic actors, including some women. From this perspective, select women’s inclusion should have been the default in many early representative institutions. This logic extends beyond ecclesiastical women in France, turning on its head the taken-for-granted assumption of women’s historical political exclusion.

Examining an all-but-forgotten episode of large-scale protest at the 1970 annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Copenhagen, Denmark, this article asks how officials at the World Bank understood and reacted to such protest. How did they characterise the protestors’ demands in the moment? Why and how did they feel the need to respond, and what strategies did they use to do so? And what does that response tell us about how officials at the World Bank understood about the relationship between development and social upheaval? Using heretofore unexamined institutional records, this article argues that already in 1970, World Bank officials were deeply concerned with public opinion about their institutions in both the developed and developing worlds—and therefore found themselves having to reckon with the riots that threatened to derail not just their meetings, but their mission.

Cosmic-ray transport in turbulent astrophysical environments remains a multifaceted problem and, despite decades of study, the impact of complex magnetic field geometry – evident in simulations and observations – has only recently received more focussed attention. To understand how ensemble-averaged transport behaviour emerges from the intricate interactions between cosmic rays and structured magnetic turbulence, we run test-particle experiments in snapshots of a strongly turbulent magnetohydrodynamics simulation. We characterise particle–turbulence interactions via the gyro radii of particles and their experienced field-line curvatures, which reveals two distinct transport modes: magnetised motion, where particles are tightly bound to strong coherent flux tubes and undergo large-scale mirroring; and unmagnetised motion, characterised by chaotic scattering through weak and highly tangled regions of the magnetic field. We formulate an effective stochastic process for each mode: compound subdiffusion with long mean free paths for magnetised motion, and a Langevin process with short mean free paths for unmagnetised motion. A combined stochastic walker that alternates between these two modes accurately reproduces the mean squared displacements observed in the test-particle data. Our results emphasise the critical role of coherent magnetic structures in comprehensively understanding cosmic-ray transport and lay a foundation for developing a theory of geometry-mediated transport.

One of the most attention-grabbing (and frequently studied) aspects of the international medical congresses held in Europe around 1900 concerns the scientific topics debated at them. However, how did these congress participants effectively interact with each other in these international meetings, when most physicians did not share the same language? This article centres on a theme that has not been sufficiently explored: the challenges of multilingualism in a globalising world of medical science amid growing imperial tensions and cosmopolitan ideals. Analysing the congresses held in Rome (1894), Moscow (1897), Paris (1900) and Madrid (1903), I redefine the meaning of cosmopolitanism as a crucial social framework that facilitated predictable and amicable ways of interaction between participants. At the same time, I argue that multilingualism and the frequent misunderstandings arising from language diversity have played a significant role in reshaping the ‘centre–periphery’ relations of scientific communication. As physicians from different national and linguistic backgrounds struggled to communicate in them, language became a key element to understand the politicisation and nationalisation of science at the turn of the century.

This paper examines associations between maternal exposure to a radio programme, Bhanchhin Aama (Mother Knows Best), and the programme’s most promoted maternal and child nutrition-related practices, using the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) from 2022. We limited our sample to mothers of children less than 2 years (n = 1,933). The primary exposure variable was whether the mother listened to the Bhanchhin Aama radio programme. The five primary outcomes were: maternal dietary diversity, maternal use of modern family planning methods, exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) of children less than 6 months, dietary diversity among children 6 to 24 months, and participation in growth monitoring and promotion among children 0 to 24 months. Descriptive analyses followed by logistic regression models, adjusted for potentially confounding factors and clustering, were conducted. Maternal exposure to Bhanchhin Aama was associated with nearly 70% higher odds of meeting both maternal (OR: 1.67; p: <0.001; CI: 1.26–2.21) and child minimum dietary diversity (OR: 1.70; p: 0.005; CI: 1.18–2.45), as well as 83% higher odds of a child participating in growth monitoring and promotion (OR: 1.83; p: 0.001; CI: 1.28–2.63). No associations were found for use of modern family planning methods and EBF. These findings suggests that radio programmes may be an effective tool to improve some maternal and child nutrition-related practices. Further research is needed to understand why certain behaviours are modifiable from this type of intervention versus others that are not and for which population groups this intervention would be most effective.

Political decentralization is often undermined by elite capture of the local state. In unequal contexts, contemporary accounts highlight that local executives lack de facto political authority because they are sidelined by unelected elites. This article investigates one purported institutional remedy: direct elections. Direct elections are promoted as a tool of democratic deepening that empowers local executives by disrupting elites’ hold on political institutions. Exploiting a quasi-experiment in rural Maharashtra, India, I find that direct elections increase the de facto authority of local executives. However, I find no evidence of disrupted elite dominance. Instead, I argue that direct elections shift the mode of elite capture from informal to formal channels. I use over two years of qualitative fieldwork, original survey and administrative data, and a vignette experiment to substantiate these claims. This study underscores the limitations of reforms to bring democracy “closer to the people” in contexts of entrenched elite dominance.

Education is thought to be an essential tool for building social cohesion in an ethnically diverse society. This paper evaluates the effect of exposure to a more diverse student body on trust, tolerance, and patriotism in one country where the government has made explicit efforts to use schooling to foster social cohesion: Kenya. In the wake of electoral violence in the 2007 elections, Kenya’s government expanded the number of ‘national schools’, schools with required regional diversity quotas, from 18 to 103. We leverage the policy change to compare 984 secondary students in schools that differ in their use of a diversity quota. We measure friendship with outgroup members, trust, tolerance, and national identity. Our findings indicate that national school students are more likely to have inter-ethnic friendships and are associated with a higher prioritization of civic national identity over subnational identities. We find that diverse friendships act as a mediating factor for increased trust and tolerance.