Dissemination of a scientific theory often follows a circuitous route. It is a widespread notion supported by eminent scholars that the noted linguist and religious scholar F. Max Müller is responsible for the dissemination of the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), and thus played into the hands of imperial interests. In this article, we argue that there were other stakeholders in the process of the widespread acceptance of AIT. In particular, Brahmo Samaj, a prominent socio-religious reform association in nineteenth-century India, also played a major role in the spreading of AIT. Prominent leaders of Brahmo Samaj, actively or passively, collaborated with Müller in that process. We closely examine the development of affairs during that time and attempt to establish that the development of a scientific theory is not a unilateral process, but rather strongly influenced by the socio-political environments of the time.

An important component of northern research in Canada has been a strong emphasis on local participation. However, the policy and permit landscape for community participation therein is heterogeneous and presents specific challenges in promoting effective partnerships between researchers and local participants. We conducted a survey of northern research stakeholders across Canada in order better to understand the benefits and challenges associated with research partnerships with a view to informing northern research policy and practice. We found that local engagement at the proposal and research design phases, the hiring of community researchers and engagement of local persons at the results dissemination phase were important factors affecting success. Respondents also indicated a lack of social capital (trust and reciprocity) between researchers and communities as placing a negative impact on science partnerships. Overall, researchers were perceived to benefit more from research partnerships than their community counterparts. Partnerships in northern research will possibly require further decentralisation of power to achieve the policy objectives of local community participation. This could be achieved, in part, by allowing non-academic principal investigators to receive funding, or by involving communities in research priority-setting, proposal review and funding allocation processes.

Maritime traffic is increasing in Arctic seas in the context of climate change. The rapid melting of sea ice led to the widespread belief that traffic was set to expand rapidly, challenging Canadian and Russian-claimed sovereignties over their respective Arctic passage, and underlining the risk posed by such a traffic in a risky but fragile environment. If projections on potential traffic for the medium term are probably exaggerated, the increasing traffic nevertheless challenges the adequacy of the regulatory framework.

In this essay, Archbishop Tutu explains how Christianity understands the inherent freedom, dignity, and human rights of each person to be a consequence of being created in the image of God. This idea contains radical liberative potential to challenge oppression and create structures for human flourishing. While Christianity has not always lived up to the liberative potential of its teachings, and too often has contributed to hatred, oppression, and violence, Archbishop Tutu argues, the power of religious voices remains essential in the struggle against oppression and for the protection of human dignity.

This article analyzes the historical sources and forms of human rights in Western legal and Christian traditions, and it identifies key questions about the intersections of Christianity and human rights in modern contexts. The authors identify nine distinctions between different conceptions of rights correlating with at least four types of jural relationships, and they argue that leading historical accounts of human rights attribute “subjective” rights too narrowly to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment legal thought. Earlier forms of classical Roman law and medieval canon law, and legal norms developed by Protestant reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped Western human rights regimes in historically important ways, anticipating most of the rights formulation of modern liberals. In response to contemporary scholars who criticize human rights paradigms as inadequate or incompatible with Christian faith and practice, the authors argue that rights should remain a part of Christian moral, legal, and political discourse, and that Christians should remain a part of pluralistic public debates about the appropriate scope and substance of human rights protections.

Preference-aggregation problems arise in various contexts. One such context, little explored by social choice theorists, is metaethical. ‘Ideal-advisor’ accounts, which have played a major role in metaethics, propose that moral facts are constituted by the idealized preferences of a community of advisors. Such accounts give rise to a preference-aggregation problem: namely, aggregating the advisors’ moral preferences. Do we have reason to believe that the advisors, albeit idealized, can still diverge in their rankings of a given set of alternatives? If so, what are the moral facts (in particular, the comparative moral goodness of the alternatives) when the advisors do diverge? These questions are investigated here using the tools of Arrovian social choice theory.

It is said that John Henry Newman was the “father of the Second Vatican Council” because of his work on doctrinal development and the claims of human conscience. Of the sixteen documents produced by the council, Dignitatis Humanae (“Declaration on Religious Liberty”) was recognized from the outset as a development of doctrine. Importantly, it was the second shortest of all the council's documents. Yet, for the past fifty years there has been lively debate about whether the development is consistent with previous church teachings and whether it is coherent on its own terms. This essay does not attempt to resolve all of the disputed issues regarding either consistency or coherence of the doctrine. Rather, I show, first, how and why Dignitatis Humanae was written in such a manner as to be surprisingly silent about its own place in the history of human rights as well as church teachings about church-state relations. Second, I attempt to interpret the silences in order to better situate ongoing debate about Dignitatis Humanae.

Reindeer racing is a sport that is unique to the Scandinavian and Russian Arctic countries. The paper is based on fieldwork carried out in Finnish Lapland in which the process of training race reindeer and the reindeer race competition is examined. It gives some insight into the cultural practices that are used by Finnish reindeer herders in Lapland to train reindeer to race and the relationship that is nurtured between the race reindeer and the trainer. This paper focuses primarily on two key ethnographic interviews from the field and uses additional fieldwork data to support the points of discussion. It gives insight into the concept of ownership and what is considered to be a ‘good’ race reindeer. The reindeer trainer's understanding of the semi-domesticated reindeer challenges the concept of what it means to be ‘wild.’ This is taken into consideration in an examination of the process of the further domestication and training of the reindeer to race. The research explored the nature of the racing environment, the uniqueness of the reindeer racing event and aspects that makes it traditional and appealing for both international tourists and spectators from the north.

Maiden (e.g. 2009a) shows that treating the paradigmatic distribution of root allomorphy in Romance verbs as morphomic, in the sense of Aronoff (1994), provides a coherent explanation for the diachronic behaviour of such allomorphy. The major templates for distribution (‘metamorphomes’, Round 2015) shared by most Romance varieties are also found in early French, but are not well represented in the modern language, which has developed new metamorphomes. By charting the diachronic development of metamorphomes in French, this study investigates the processes responsible for change to such templates. Overall, the French data point to segmental sound change as the central factor in change to metamorphomes: segmental sound change modifies the observable paradigmatic distribution of allomorphs, reducing the number of lexemes in which an existing metamorphomic template could be deduced, and increasing the number of lexemes across which a novel metamorphomic generalisation can be made. The loss of existing metamorphomes, and the rise of new ones, can be considered a single process, of metamorphomic templates changing shape as further paradigm cells attach to or defect from them. This process must be distinguished from changes in metamorphome shape due to the creation or elimination of paradigm categories for independent morphosyntactic reasons.