From the 1890s to the 1920s across the American Midwest, newspapers reported arrests and altercations in ‘Cocaine Alleys’. Not all of these arrests involved people under the influence of drugs, but the term nevertheless became a non-geographic cultural construct highlighting readers’ fears about racialized drug use. By describing low-income Black women as ‘queens’ central to these spaces, newspapers mingled gender, race, criminality and drug use. The ‘Cocaine Alley Queen’ stereotype applied to Black women obscured the reality of White women’s greater propensity to recreational and medical narcotic addiction. As Black migrants moved from Southern states to Northern Midwestern industrialized cities, this reporting trend appeared in cities with higher Black populations than the state average. Newspapers created an intersectional, geographic identity that collected fears and stereotypes about drug use and Black communities when narcotics were accessible, and reformers sought to discipline Black, urban, female working-class bodies and impose middle-class behaviours on them.

This article takes up the notion of ‘difficult heritage’ to explore the management of industrial legacies in eastern Ukraine, with a focus on developments between 2014 and 2022. While acknowledging that industrial heritage is not ‘difficult’ in the same way as inherited sites of genocide or internment, I contend that it too was ‘contested and awkward’, unsettling attempts to rebrand and reimagine the region in line with shifts in national memory politics. As the environmentally damaging infrastructural inheritance of empire, which nevertheless also played a community-shaping role in the local context, industrial legacies were present in the landscape in ‘disruptive ways’, opening up social divisions and exposing cultural fractures. In this article, I explore how local artists and activists responded to the condition of state abandonment of this heritage, developing the analytical category of ‘critical care’ to describe processes of community-led preservation and creative repurposing at this time.

The right to roam – balancing inclusion and enclosure. In Norway, the right to roam is an old custom – a right to traverse and gather berries, herbs and firewood on uncultivated lands – dating back to the Viking Age. In 1957, this right was included in Norwegian laws, in the Outdoor Life Act (Friluftslova). The law transformed agrarian lands into areas for outdoor life and recreation, primarily walking and hiking. However, due to modernisation, the activities performed today are very different than those in the 1950s, involving many sorts of technical devices and installations, commercial activities and a different landscape. The law was a manifestation of the Norwegian outfields as a commons, but what is a commons for some can be an enclosure for others. This is the topic of this article: how the right to roam includes many and much but represents encroachment, displacements and enclosures and has created crowding, natural wear and tear and urges for management regimes. The article describes this as a balance between inclusion and enclosure. The article has two major parts: one presenting the academic discussion about inclusion and enclosure, the other discussing the implementation of the principle in Norway in light of this theory.

Music was important in John Stuart Mill’s life. He was an accomplished pianist and a talented improviser. His works include treatments of various philosophical aspects of music, including its metaphysics, its epistemology, the sources and nature of its value, and its aesthetics. Some of his ideas on musical aesthetics are still of interest. This applies to his distinction between those reactions to music that are based on associations with non-musical experiences and those that are based on properties of the music itself. It also applies to his concepts of poetic and oratorical modes of musical expression. In addition to his other achievements, he should be recognized as a philosopher of music.

This article examines institutional fragmentation among key organisations in charge of Biafra’s struggle for independence since the year 2000. The article argues that contrary to the mainstream explanations, which attribute the split to the differences in tactics between organisations (Duruji 2012) or their relations with the state (Kalyvas 2008; Cunningham 2014), organisational cohesion is largely absent due to the struggle for power and resources among the leaders in charge of the organisations. Supported by the in-depth interviews with key informants, we treat Biafran secessionist organisations as business models through which leading politicians act as political entrepreneurs and engage in predatory rent-seeking practices to maximise profits and power through the institutions that represent the collective struggle.

Resilient Zulu moral economy compelled Natal’s sugar planters and white settler state to introduce Indian indentured workers since 1860. As concerns over productivity in a weak colonial economy informed this decision, meticulous management of labor time crucially shaped the treatment of migrant Indian indentees. Moreover, systemic violence in capital’s life processes formed the culture of work-discipline in the plantations and in other industrial sectors. Subsequently, as contract expired Indian indentees acquired relative economic mobility compared to Africans, they appeared in Zulu critiques of Natal’s settler colonial order. Ironically, dispossessed Zulus reproduced colonial logic of time management while discussing the comparative economic success of Indian “newcomers.” Zulu critiques of colonial labor management also complemented the racial exclusivity of migrant Indians. Analyzing the complex workings of capital, labor, and race in nineteenth-century Natal, this article explains how capital’s life processes shaped violent conflicts in the intimate domestic space of working-class lifeworld.

The study explores the engagement of Russophone Ukrainians with educational policies that increase the status of the Ukrainian language, the standardized tests of Ukrainian, and the subject tests that could be passed in Ukrainian. It argues that this centralized unitary language policy has received support from Russophones. It does so by analyzing the language choices of Russophone students when taking standardized tests in various subjects, as well as admission policies and discussions of relevant policies in local media and social media of the Russophone city of Kharkiv. It shows that following the introduction of standardized tests, the value of Ukrainian has increased across various actors: students have been choosing Ukrainian more, universities have valued Ukrainian in the admission process, and local citizens have defended the status of Ukrainian, relying on decolonial rhetoric. It shows that the decolonial framing of the Ukrainization policies resonated with Russophones enough for them to support them, and not to result in a backlash.

This article explores the history and development of British manifestations of a Black diasporic anti-colonial anti-fascist political tradition that stretches across the twentieth century. It centers the experiences and reflections of Black activists and intellectuals in Britain, exploring their efforts to theorize about fascism as a manifestation of white supremacy. The article explores what we can learn about British society and political culture by returning to the overlooked and excluded experiences of Black British activists and intellectuals—in particular, their theoretical and physical encounters with what they called British “fascism” from the 1930s to the 1970s. Journeying from interwar anti-colonial Marxist political writing, Black periodicals in the 1950s and 1960s, to the publications of the British Black Power movement, the article ultimately argues that these encounters confront historians of modern Britain with a different and generative way of thinking about British racism and British fascism in relational terms.

On 27 October 2021, Cambridge University’s Jesus College commemorated the historic return to Nigeria of the bronze statue of a cockerel called “Okukur.” This was looted from the ancient Kingdom of Benin in 1897 by British colonizers. The college resolved to relinquish ownership to the Oba, who is the cultural, religious, and legal head of Benin. On 23 March 2023, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari decreed that the “ownership of the artefacts… is vested in the Oba.” The genesis of this order was controversies about the ownership, control, and management of returning objects. This article analyzes the role of the traditional institution of governance in the socio-legal politics of cultural heritage restitution in Nigeria. Building on the traditional leadership’s claims on the returned artworks, it explains the need to use the momentum of restitution to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of the national and international legal systems to protect cultural heritage.

The main objective of this article is to examine history textbooks as sites of discursive contestation regarding the treatment of the 1986 Jeltoqsan protests, a pivotal moment in post-independence Kazakhstani collective memory. This research analyzes the multilayered and inter-discursive domains of Jeltoqsan across the History of Kazakhstan textbooks published between 1992 and 2024. It focuses on four key contested themes between official narratives and those of protest mourners and sufferers: the portrayal of Dinmukhamed Qonaev, whose dismissal sparked the protests; the role of former President Nursultan Nazarbaev in handling the aftermath; the framing of Jeltoqsan as either an ordinary event or an uprising for significant political change; and ethnic or non-ethnic dimension of the protests. The findings reveal discursive competition and conflict in articulating the official and protestor narratives.

Few village-born social movements have influenced international relations as much as the campaign against Myitsone Dam in Burma (Myanmar). This village-born resistance led in 2011 to the suspension of a major Burmese and Chinese infrastructure project. This suspension became a symbol of democratization in Burma and a much-discussed setback of Chinese development-investment abroad. However, research literature on the Myitsone Dam has tended to conflate the local rural resistance with the broader ethnic Kachin and Burmese anti-dam movements. In contrast, this study focuses specifically on the local villages directly affected by the project, exploring their diverse stories and responses to the mega-project. Combining diverse published sources with ethnographic fieldwork and interviews done since 2010, it tells a story of displacement, resistance, social divisions, and complex relations with outsiders. This is a two-part article series. Another article – Part 1 – explores the Myitsone Dam’s rural story from its earliest days until the mega-project’s fall. This article – Part 2 – examines what has occurred after the mega-project’s suspension. It explores local village experiences after most residents had been resettled into relocation villages, from 2010 until now. This story begins with a bomb attack against the project and traces the village struggles until a post-coup gold mining boom.

This study discusses the intersection between Black/African Digital Humanities, and computational methods, including natural language processing (NLP) and generative artificial intelligence (AI). We have structured the narrative around four critical themes: biases in colonial archives; postcolonial digitization; linguistic and representational inequalities in Lusophone digital content; and technical limitations of AI models when applied to the archival records from Portuguese-colonized African territories (1640–1822). Through three case studies relating to the Africana Collection at the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, the Dembos Collection, and Sebestyén’s Caculo Cangola Collection, we demonstrate the infrastructural biases inherent in contemporary computational tools. This begins with the systematic underrepresentation of African archives in global digitization efforts and ends with biased AI models that have not been trained on African historical corpora.