The subject of this study comprises how Turkey’s EU membership is seen by HDP-supporter Kurdish voters in Turkey, as a non-EU country that has on-hold negotiations but still an ostensible vision for membership. There is a dearth of literature regarding Kurdish voters’ views on the EU, and this study, employing the focus group method, aims to address this gap by providing insights into the perspectives of Kurdish voters who support the HDP on Turkey-EU relations and their attitudes toward the EU. The study employs focus group methodology to assess whether the independentist demands that began to spring in Europe are also becoming popular among Kurdish voters. The primary finding derived from the focus group study indicates that the interviewees exhibited limited interest in both the EU negotiations and the EU’s handling of the Kurdish issue, and that the EU accession process failed to evoke significant enthusiasm among the interviewees. Meanwhile, developments pertaining to the Kurdish population in Syria and Iraq have generated a significantly higher level of enthusiasm when compared to the negotiations with the European Union.

This article interrogates the entrenched binary between modernism and realism in postwar Korean art through an analysis of the multifaceted practice of Shin Hak-chul (b. 1943). While often associated with 1980s minjung (people’s) art, Shin’s work resists reductive classification, exploring both modernist experimentation and realist critique. From the 1960s to the 1980s, his trajectory challenged the formalism of institutional modernism while reimagining the conceptual, affective, and material scope of realism. Examining his use of object-installation, photomontage, sculpture, and painting, this study shows how his work rendered the real as a convergence of material presence, perceptual immediacy, and historical consciousness. Central to the analysis is Shin’s Modern Korean History series (1980–1985), which exemplifies what I term “monumental corporeality”: a visual language of embodied memory and historical trauma. Situating Shin’s practice within both the Korean art world and broader postwar currents, the article advances an original, elastic historiography of contemporary Korean art – one attentive to how artists negotiated intersecting esthetic and sociohistorical imperatives amid rapid modernization. More broadly, it reframes realism as both a critical method and a transhistorical form within global debates over history, form, and representation.

Throughout the twentieth century, senior roles in UK public health were reserved for doctors. Local authority medical officers of health were replaced in 1974 by NHS community physicians and from 1989 by medical directors of public health. Over the last decade of the century, an increasingly vocal group of non-medical public health professionals sought to break the glass ceiling that restricted them from advancing to senior roles; although they received encouragement from some leaders within the Faculty of Public Health Medicine, there was also significant resistance from many members. A number of factors came together around the year 2000, which culminated in a ground-breaking decision by the English Department of Health to allow non-medical appointments as directors of public health and consultants in public health in the NHS, with the then Secretary of State memorably declaring it was time to ‘take public health out of the ghetto’. At the same time, the leadership of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine overcame opposition from some of its members and opened its training, examinations, and membership to non-medical candidates. By the early 2020s, half of the renamed Faculty of Public Health members were from backgrounds other than medicine as well as 90% of directors of public health in England. This paper explores the complex history behind this unprecedented opening of a medical specialty to non-medical membership, the factors that enabled it, and the continuing legacy of tensions and inequalities within an occupation that is both a medical specialty and a multidisciplinary profession.

Prognosis is an important aspect of any scientific culture. Speculation and imagination about future knowledge, social organization and technology pervade the practice of science and lend it aim and direction (or at least the appearance of direction). This article is about the development of prognosis in the fiction and popular-scientific writing of Jane Webb Loudon (1800–58), a writer familiar within the history of science for her publications in botany and gardening, if not for her romantic novel The Mummy!, one of the earliest examples of the genre later known as science fiction. I argue that Webb Loudon viewed scientific activity as declining and flourishing throughout human history, and that she anticipated the science of her time would ‘resuscitate’ knowledge and even political structures of past eras (like ancient Egypt). Following the work of Jim Endersby and other historians of science who have worked to reintegrate the role of fiction in our understanding of science culture, I argue that Webb Loudon’s efforts to promote and diffuse her understanding of science and its relation to the future (and past) ought be viewed as informing the cultural meaning of science in the nineteenth century.

Following Heath White, let ‘divine determinism’ denote the pairing of the following theses: ‘(1) the facts about God’s will entail every other contingent fact, and (2) the facts about God’s will are explanatorily prior to every other fact’. In the article, we develop a theological version of Peter van Inwagen’s so-called Direct Argument and show that, if sound, the Theological Direct Argument leads to the conclusion that divine determinism is incompatible with human moral responsibility. But, the soundness of the argument depends upon two inference rules, one of which, called Rule B, is controversial. So, in the third section of the article, we offer a novel, two-part defence of Rule B. This defence, in the first part, has to do with how truth, in a fairly trivial way, depends on the world. The second part of the defence has to do with the way that the logic of conditionals works. The upshot of this defence is that counter-examples to Rule B are impossible. Even so, should that defence fail, we also consider, in section four, a way of reformulating Rule B that, if successful, circumvents alleged counter-examples to the original statement of Rule B.

The topic of urban revolt in medieval Ireland has been overlooked by wider scholarship. This article offers the first detailed analysis of a revolt which occurred in Galway in the late fourteenth century. The basis of this study is a twentieth-century transcription made of an extract from a plea roll of the king’s bench in Ireland before the latter’s destruction in 1922, which records the judicial proceedings taken against one of the town’s rebels and provides an under-exploited (and not entirely reliable) narrative of the key facts of this rebellion. This article locates the actions of Galway townspeople within a wider European pattern of protest and rebellion in the second half of the fourteenth century and, more specifically, places the revolt in the context of contemporary political events in Ireland and England. The events in Galway should be viewed as a genuinely ‘popular’ revolt, challenging assumptions about the presumed loyalty of towns and cities in medieval Ireland to the English crown and its local representatives.

The question of how digital health is regulated has become increasingly important within debates on technology, inequality and global health. While digital health is frequently celebrated for its capacity to expand access, build resilient systems and advance equity, scholars have raised critical concerns about its role in reproducing asymmetries of power. The potential for reproducing rather than curbing inequality is particularly relevant for the Global South. This Special Issue of the International Journal of Law in Context interrogates the ways in which digital health infrastructures, regulatory frameworks and transnational data flows are constitutive of coloniality and neoliberal capitalism. Bringing together socio-legal, feminist and decolonial perspectives, the contributions examine regulation as a terrain in which vulnerabilities, exclusions and structural inequalities are reinforced. Against the celebratory rhetoric of innovation, this collection situates regulation as a key site for understanding the entanglement of digital health with broader histories of coloniality and capitalism.

This article analyses the representation of Spanish history in the operas ‘Fernand Cortez’ (1809) and ‘Pélage’ (1814), along with their ambivalent political uses and economic dynamics at the Paris Opéra during the transition from the First Empire to the Bourbon Restoration. It seeks to complement historiographical interpretations that often view these operas primarily as vehicles of Napoleonic or Bourbon propaganda, by examining the artistic careers of their authors – especially the composer Gaspare Spontini (1774–1851) and librettist Etienne de Jouy (1764–1846). A closer look at their personal and professional paths reveals a multi-layered space of symbolic conflict, shaped by disputes over reputation and competition for positions within the Parisian musical milieu. Drawing on archival and press sources, this paper studies the interplay between official political agendas and individual ambitions, considering how the self-serving staging of Spanish medieval and imperial history was incorporated into French narratives of power.

Urban tourism has expanded dramatically in recent decades, reshaping European cities economically, socially and culturally. Yet its roots run much deeper, as (early) modern urban centres – especially in the Low Countries – developed distinctive traditions of tourism and place promotion. This special issue highlights how civic boosterism, marketing innovations and inter-urban competition shaped these early practices. Bringing together new research on Belgium and the Netherlands, the special issue uncovers the actors, tools and narratives that fashioned urban tourism long before the late twentieth-century boom. Collectively, the contributions rethink the genealogy of urban tourism by analysing its ‘orgware’, ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ from the late eighteenth to twentieth centuries.

Revolutionary-era state constitutions reflected an unsettling tension in the history of American liberty. This article captures how revolutionary-era Americans accommodated moral liberty with religious establishment. Their notions of liberty were paradoxical, but it is possible to track their moral reasoning.

This article reassesses the history of reparations after World War I from the perspective of organized labour in early Weimar Germany. It does so by investigating trade union proposals to send German construction workers to Northern France in an effort to rebuild French villages damaged or destroyed in the war. The article argues that organized workers in early Weimar Germany rallied behind these proposals not only because they hoped that sending fellow workers abroad would contribute to international reconciliation, ease the overall reparations burden, and create employment opportunities, as previous research has suggested. Rather, it shows that Weimar’s “free” (that is, socialist) trade union movement supported the idea of “reparation through labour power” because its members were convinced that it would prevent the rebuilding of Northern France from becoming a playground for private builders. Analysing various German trade union sources, the article suggests that, by involving the country’s nascent Bauhütten movement, a network of building companies owned and controlled by organized labour, trade union functionaries hoped to turn Northern France into a laboratory for non-profit construction. In doing so, they sought to advance a broader transformation of the building sector from a profit-seeking industry benefiting a few wealthy builders into a public service that promoted the interests of workers and the wider community alike. By exploring these trade union proposals for the reconstruction of Northern France, the article also sheds light on a neglected episode in transnational labour history that witnessed the first timid attempts at trade union representation across borders.

This article examines the work of Emil Schlagintweit (1835–1904), one of Germany's most prominent nineteenth-century Tibetologists in order to challenge some common assumptions regarding Orientalist scholarship and its relationship to nineteenth-century nationalism and imperialism. Schlagintweit began to work on Tibetan religion and language in the wake of an expedition led by three of his brothers in the 1850s, and his work can provide important nuances to existing understandings of German Orientalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that German scholars did indeed emphasize rigorous analysis in line with the notion of Wissenschaftlichkeit, yet it also demonstrates that their work could go beyond this and rely on a wider array of methodologies and traditions. Interpretations which treat German Orientalists as fundamentally different from other European scholars should therefore be treated with caution. At the same time, the relationship between Orientalist knowledge and imperial realities remained ambivalent for scholars such as Schlagintweit.