Using new interpretations of oral traditions written in older documents, this article changes the origin of complex societies and larger kingdoms. Showing that the Kingdom of Kongo, presently believed to be the origin of large kingdoms actually achieved it status by conquering an existing kingdom, called Mpemba, the author reassigns both the date and origin point of kingdom level polities there. The author further points to new interpretations of documentary evidence to demonstrate that Mwene Muji and Kulembembe, located to the east and south of Kongo were also early large scale polities at a date as early as Kongo.

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.

This article examines the Puerto Rican legal mobilisations for the right to access public information through the lenses of activist-scholarship. Based on ethnographic research with Puerto Rican scholars, lawyers and civil society organisations, the article explores how they have used the legal system to demand greater transparency and accountability from the Puerto Rican government and the Federal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB). First, it engages with the efforts of Proyecto de Acceso a la Información, a law clinic and civil society organisation initiative aimed at securing access to public information, transparency and accountability in government. Second, it reflects on Sembrando Sentido’s efforts, an anti-corruption and transparency civil society organisation, to draft and enact a series of anti-corruption laws. These case studies illustrate how activist-scholarship shapes Puerto Rican society by using legal tools to challenge colonial legality and resist the imposition of neoliberal policies that exacerbate inequality and corruption.

This article investigates the role of constitutional texts in memorialising historical guilts and traumas by delving into an unconventional and hitherto unexplored comparison: the Italian Constitution’s final Provision XII against the reorganisation of the fascist party, and the Indian Constitution’s Article 17 against caste-based untouchability. Both Constitutions, written in the same years, encoded their respective hurtful and traumatic pasts into their fundamental laws through these provisions, which explicitly mandated criminal legislations. After reconstructing the two very different contexts from which these constitutional provisions emerged, the article examines the very similar ways in which the two Constituent Assemblies incorporated historically motivated, criminalising clauses in their respective texts. It subsequently analyses the difficulties that legislators in both contexts encountered as they had to pass penal legislations emanating from the Constitutions, as well as the restrictive and contradictory interpretations of these legislations provided by the judiciary. By means of an original incursion into comparative constitutional history, this article contributes to a wider reflection around the interplay between historical traumas, constitutions, and mandates within them as a form of criminalisation of painful pasts.

This article assesses the impact of the discovery of bacteriophages, which emerged from an investigation into a 1915 outbreak of bacillary dysentery in France, on influenza virus research. Specifically, it details the way in which the phages became a vehicle for importing certain assay techniques into the study of influenza and other viruses that cause infectious diseases in humans and other animals, thereby enabling the scaling up of vaccine production for these diseases. Very soon after his 1917 report of the discovery of bacteriophages, Felix d’Herelle developed an assay technique based on their ability to form countable plaques on solid media when incubated along with the dysentery bacteria. This basic technique was further refined by Macfarlane Burnet in the late 1920s. Still later, in the wake of a 1935 influenza outbreak in Australia, Burnet applied the principles of serial dilution and plaque counting, honed during his work on the phages, to develop a technique for cultivating influenza viruses in fertilised eggs and assaying them by counting the pocks induced on the chick embryo membranes. The ability to grow and assay these viruses proved crucial in developing the first successful vaccines against influenza. In the 1950s, bacteriophage assay techniques were once more carried over to the assaying of viruses on cultured cells by Renato Dulbecco and Marguerite Vogt. The importance of quantification in science, as well as the ability to apply the results of investigations in one area of biology to another, relatively unrelated field, is also discussed.

This paper examines the intersection of socio-legal research and activism through my ethnographic work with the Tulipas do Cerrado collective, a group of sex workers in Brazil. It explores the dynamics of knowledge production and the transformative potential of collaborative research that prioritises the reflections and experiences of marginalised communities while recognising the importance of legal expertise. Drawing on the concepts of ‘whoring the knowledge’ and ‘whoring the law’, the article highlights how sex workers reclaim their narratives and creatively navigate legal frameworks, demanding that researchers enhance both academic and activist relevance of their endeavours. First, I discuss relevant literature on ethnography within sex workers’ activism, introducing recent key studies on Brazilian sex work as examples of having the knowledge whored. Then, I detail the ethnographic approach employed in my research, which was inspired by the preceding three studies. Ultimately, the work analyses how reciprocal engagement between sex work activists and scholars is a consequence of a demand that researchers adopt a bolder and more creative way of thinking and living. Furthermore, from a socio-legal perspective, these exchanges present an opportunity to rethink the role of law within these communities and to foster concrete social transformation. I propose the concept of ‘whoring’ the law, suggesting that both activists and socio-legal scholars can identify and build new pathways for dealing with the law.