In the newly fluid territory between jazz, rock, performance art, and the avant-garde in the late 1960s, members of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) in Paris initiated experiments in improvised electronic music. This article focuses on two iterations of a group centred on Alain Savouret, Pierre Boeswillwald, and Christian Clozier, who were either students on the GRM’s 1968 course at the Paris Conservatoire or researchers at the GRM. The article follows the group’s development from a practice of ‘live musique concrète’ with hand-built electroacoustic devices, tape effects, and synthesizers to a pluralist improvisation that engaged collaborators from free jazz and European and non-European folk traditions. This history results in two lines of argument: the first concerns the relationship between new electronic instruments and new modes of performance around 1970, while the second concerns the promise of electronic music as the site of a cross-cultural fusion of genres and traditions.

We present research from Visual World eye tracking to show that, contrary standard assumptions in the formal semantics literature, the English past tense does not reliably trigger entailments of completion on accomplishments in neutral contexts. We contrast it with the perfect construction in English (both present and past tense versions) which does reliably draw attention to the result state; furthermore, we tested the simple past in more narrative contexts (using adverbial clauses to create a narrative sequence) and found that this did not induce a stronger resultative interpretation. We discuss the formal proposals for analysis of these tense/aspect forms in the language, and the consequences this new data has for theories of the tense/aspect system of English.

This article compares paid parental leave policies across nineteen Latin American jurisdictions, examining their effectiveness in promoting equality in caregiving. Despite notable expansions in social protection, and constitutional recognition of shared parental responsibilities in countries like Ecuador and Mexico, the region has not kept pace with global trends towards equitable leave entitlements. While most countries offer paid maternity leave, paternity leave remains minimal or symbolic, with two nations – Cuba and Honduras – offering none. A persistent gender imbalance remains in leave allocation, where fathers’ entitlements are often secondary or tokenistic. Drawing on a new dataset as of January 2025, the article evaluates how current policies support or hinder the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities while emphasising the importance of legal reform to drive social change. By centring fatherhood in policy discourse, the article calls for more inclusive and equitable reforms to ensure that all parents can participate meaningfully in childcare.

This article examines the ways in which sexual and reproductive health themes appear in the Birmingham Black Oral History Project. As a community Black oral history project, it did not set out to collect memories of sexual or reproductive health. Despite that, the collection offers rich insights into the underexplored place of sexual and reproductive health within Black British histories. The article argues that archived oral history interviews should be “reused” as part of that historiographical exploration. It analyses the ways in which dominant interest in questions of “illegitimacy”—interest that had colonial roots—led to memories of sex education, courtship, and access to abortion in mid-twentieth-century Jamaica. Through a case study analysis of one interviewee—Carlton Duncan, father to the first “Black test tube twins”—the article concludes by arguing that being attentive to interviewee composure makes more visible the availability of narratives and cultural discourses through which interviewees could narrate or shape their sexual and reproductive health histories. As a whole, the article offers a new lens on postcolonial British history by analyzing the racist stereotyping that endured across the postwar period, especially in relation to Black sexuality and fertility.

The article addresses the paradox of the Russian legislation on nonterritorial, aka “national-cultural” autonomy – the lack of utilitarian ends and functions combined with a high domestic public demand for it. The author seeks to explain the case as simulation, or activities for the sake of demonstrating activities without definite substantive purposes. The analysis reveals that the relevant law’s goals and justifications voiced by the stakeholders were merely a combination of socially acceptable opinions unrelated to result-oriented action. These opinions were part of a common-sense worldview based on group-centric and essentialist vision of ethnicity and on neoliberal postulates, such as the need to foster bottom-up initiative and self-organization, the rejection of governmental social obligations, and the need for strict regulatory mechanisms securing fair relationships among the players. A brief comparison with a similar case in Europe reveals that simulation can take place in other contexts related to nonterritorial autonomy. Thus, a focus on simulative action must be a promising approach for research concerning the imaginaries of groups as entities and actors.

This paper uses the link between markets and the meeting of needs to argue the ostensible tension between market exchange and community can be overcome. It argues this can occur within a market economy with the following features, and that these features can be stable. First, individuals use as their motivation to act competitively in response to market signals the very social benefits that this behaviour brings about. And second, market control and regulation turn market competition from a high stakes into a low stakes (but still serious) friendly competition.

Brazilian sculptor Ernesto Neto’s gigantic artwork ‘Our Ship Drum Earth’ was featured in Lisbon for five months in 2024. Taking the form of a ship, the piece played on and critiqued the omnipresent nautical emblem of Lisbon’s iconography that celebrates the ‘Age of Discovery’ as sacrosanct history of Portugal. The installation contained percussion instruments from diverse cultures around the world, making reference to the musical traditions that were encountered and forged through Portuguese colonialism. During the exhibition, visitors were invited to freely play the instruments, forging musical hybridities that might represent new, convivial possibilities for global conversation. The ship also hosted several performance events featuring predominantly immigrant ensembles from ex-colonies of the Portuguese Empire. In this article, I argue that, through performance, the sculpture accumulated new meanings, providing a foundation to experimentally and collaboratively respond to Neto’s invitation to musically construct decolonial futures arising from the postcolonial present.

This article explores how ontological insecurity shaped Cold War collaboration between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and Turkey, and how their shared anti-communist anxiety produced lasting far-right consequences. Drawing on newly examined archival documents, it argues that communism was not merely a geopolitical or ideological threat but an existential danger to the state’s self in both countries. In response, the FRG and Turkey built a security partnership that extended into diaspora governance and intelligence coordination, often empowering far-right nationalist networks as bulwarks against leftist mobilization. These covert strategies – particularly the cultivation of far-right Turkish actors within Germany – were rationalized at the time as necessary countermeasures but ultimately contributed to long-term radicalization and blowback. By applying the framework of ontological security, the article reinterprets Cold War alliance dynamics as driven as much by existential anxieties as by strategic calculations. It concludes that contemporary German efforts to confront Turkish far-right extremism – such as the designation of the Grey Wolves as a security threat – risk obscuring this deeper legacy, producing a form of selective amnesia that externalizes a problem the FRG helped create.

The Cominform resolution was a turning point in the history of Yugoslavia. In the context of the Cold War, the conflict between Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc also had serious consequences on a global level, representing the first major split in the international communist movement after World War II. However, echoes of the split within the million-strong Yugoslav overseas diaspora have not drawn much scientific interest, despite the diaspora’s extensive involvement in the socio-political situation in Yugoslavia throughout the 20th century. The goal of the article is to study the Tito-Stalin split as an international crisis of enormous significance through the local politics of diaspora to better understand its nature and impact. The influence of the diaspora’s host countries’ communist parties must be emphasised in order to understand why most Yugoslav emigrants in the west supported Cominform, as shown through the analysis of sources originating from archives in Australia, New Zealand, Croatia, and Serbia.

The question we tackle in this paper is why some indefinite nominal expressions are licit in Romance despite the absence of number marking on the determiner and on the noun, an unexpected option in Romance languages, which are number marking languages (Gil 1987). We focus on the invariable DE found in some Francoprovençal varieties and compare it with partitive articles (PAs) in French/Francoprovençal. We propose that invariable DE and the DE component of PAs explicitly express semantic number, more precisely cumulative reference, and that DE can hence satisfy the requirement of D° to encode number/quantification information (following Delfitto & Schroten 1991). DE combines with an overt or covert ILLE component in a separate functional head (Num°/#°; morphosyntactic number), resulting in PAs and bimorphemic-DE, respectively. As a result, DE is semantically and morphologically equivalent to PAs, except for a non-overt component with DE. Our analysis further shows that the mass/count distinction is not morphologically encoded in Romance but rather a byproduct of the two oppositions plural/singular (morphosyntactic number) and cumulative/atomic reference (semantic number).

The Ming dynasty’s survival depended on locating and employing men with the ability to direct military forces, and contemporary observers were deeply concerned with the nexus of command, troop morale, and dynastic fighting capacity. This essay focuses on the years following the Tumu Crisis of 1449, a time when dynastic authorities were particularly alive to issues of military ability, and it draws on the perspectives of two men, the Minister of War, Yu Qian 于謙 (1398–1457), and another more junior official, Ye Sheng 葉盛 (1420–72). The essay offers a snapshot of how military ability was defined, cultivated, assessed, and rewarded. Further, it suggests that, read carefully, the writings of Ye Sheng and Yu Qian not only offer insight into the views of elite civil officials but also shed light, however faint and wavering, on military labor and working conditions for those who fought and commanded for a living.

The paper examines BBC television programmes that feature museum spaces of science and technology, contextualizing the development of this programme type in the 1950s and 1960s with science (and history-of-science) broadcasting. In 1971, the BBC televised a ten-part series devoted to UK science and technology museums. Within These Four Walls, the central case study, featured episodes filmed at the Natural History Museum, the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Institution and the Science Museum, among others; its televisual tour guides included prominent science broadcasters – Patrick Moore, George Porter and Eric Laithwaite – as well as curators and scholars of the history of science, such as Joseph Needham. The paper explores, using intermediality as an analytical category, how the museological conventions of curated gallery displays and tours have been adapted and transposed to television. In doing so, it reflects on the historiographies that emerge from this intermedial product (a series of televised museum tours), arguing that they should be interpreted in the cultural context of the early 1970s. It concludes that the presentation of historical authenticity through intermedial constructions of place, objects and performances conferred what Thomas Gieryn has dubbed ‘truth spots’ on history-of-science narratives for audiences.