This article proposes to centre economic inequality when introducing trusts to law students. The subject is reputedly tedious and gruelling. This can only be compounded, as economic inequality intensifies, by the experiential distance between underprivileged students and the world of trusts. Yet their career prospects, and potential contributions to reducing inequality, can benefit from understanding trusts. The need to engage students in learning the subject, therefore, warrants attention. This article offers a four-step method aimed at promoting engagement by introducing the subject within the context of the familiar social problem of drastic economic inequality. It constructs this method by drawing from Roger Cotterrell’s critical and socio-legal consciousness about trusts.

Contemporary accounts of Mithraism emphasize particular, shared modes of anthropogenic place-making: spaces laid out in distinctive, bench-lined arrangements, which may have been freighted with a surplus of cosmic symbolism that was actualized through the performance of ritual. Focusing on the site of Močići (Croatia), we argue that Mithraic place-making must instead be situated in a host of far more localized and material relationships that afford their own particular modes, experiences, and semiotics of worshipping the god. In the case of Močići, those relationships include local karstic geologies, particular lifeways and experiences of the landscape, and the ways that significances were woven around natural phenomena. The site encourages rethinking both contemporary conceptions of “Mithraism” and material- and place-based approaches to cult in antiquity.

This paper explores the mechanism and metaphysics of aesthetic experience according to the 10th–11th-century Sanskrit nondual Pratyabhijñā Śaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta. It contributes to the global history of aesthetics by showing how the same mechanism, apoha (exclusion), accounts for both art appreciation and artistic creation in Abhinavagupta’s work. Examining the technical elements of this mechanism from Abhinavagupta’s metaphysical works sheds notable light on the nature of commonization (sādhāraṇī+√kṛ/bhū), a key element of Abhinavagupta’s aesthetic theory. This paper also contributes to cross-cultural aesthetic theorizing by drawing on C. Thi Nguyen’s work on agency as an artistic medium to provide a framework for contemporary philosophers of aesthetics to approach Abhinavagupta’s theory.

Amidst the pedagogical anxieties of the late Qing and Republican China, Tong Xiegeng’s yizhi puzzle (1862) emerged as a creative response to a rigid educational system that privileged rote memorization and dismissed play. This article argues that the puzzle and its accompanying books represent a sophisticated, bottom-up attempt to redefine traditional Chinese education by transforming the classical texts into an interactive, child-centered experience. Through an innovative 15-piece puzzle and a series of books, Tong created a multimodal “edutainment” ecosystem. The study highlights the puzzle’s core pedagogical method: a synergy of text and image (tuwen jiehe) that shifted the child from a passive recipient of memorized text into an active constructor of meaning. Learning was achieved through hands-on, embodied play, internalizing classical knowledge rather than merely reciting it. By challenging the traditional dismissal of play (xi wuyi), Tong’s work prefigured a modern, child-centered pedagogy and stands as a powerful example of private cultural synthesis as a form of educational reform.

This article reviews Roger Cotterrell’s landmark paper, ‘Trusting in Law: Legal and Moral Concepts of Trust’. That paper identified a shift from a moral conception of trusteeship based on the notion of a settlor reposing personal trust in a trustee, to an amoral systems-based conception of trusteeship, in which personal entrustment is largely absent. This article examines contractualised trusts, containing widely drawn exemption clauses, which commonly underpin commercial arrangements. It identifies two developments which have the potential to limit the amorality of the contractualised trust. The first is a reaffirmation of the existence of a non-excludable core of fiduciary obligations. The other is an enhanced understanding of the trustee’s accountability, owed to the court as well as to the beneficiaries, for the due administration of the trust. The developments demonstrate that equity has the resources to overcome contractual overreach in trusts law.

This article brings Cotterrell’s legal concept of community based on trust-based interactions in social life to expand the critical horizons of economic sociology of law (ESL) in its analytical, normative and empirical aspects for law and development in Africa. Dominant law and economics approaches sometimes see informal economic activity as an aberration and/or an obstacle in development. This article proposes an alternative way of looking at informality in development in Africa through the lens of ESL. As part of wider social life, economic life is about social interactions in production, exchange, distribution and consumption while legal life is about social relations in and under the law. Furthermore, ‘legal and economic life shape and are shaped by each other, as well as by the wider social, and more-than-human, world’. This calls for a framework that reconceptualises law in ways that are inclusive of the many state, social, economic and other normative orders such as informal economic activity in African societies that are continually interacting as part of wider social life.

Global Englishes, and within that the field of English as a lingua franca, is a huge and expanding area of research and pedagogy. This paper provides a sample of our beliefs about productive areas of research. The nine tasks presented suggest the importance of research in the areas of intercultural and digital communication, especially through the adoption of trans theories such as translanguaging, transmodality, and transcultural communication. Furthermore, concepts such as communicative competence will need rethinking to match the multilingual, multimodal, and multicultural resources that appear in such communication. The implications for pedagogy are extensive, including a re-evaluation of models and aims such as the (ir)relevance of the native speaker, global citizenship education, translanguaging, and decolonial perspectives, and approaches to both oral and written communication. Accompanying any changes in pedagogic practices must be changes in how we think about teacher education as well as assessment. Pedagogic research is crucial as there is a need to address the persistent gap between “real-world” translingual, transmodal, and transcultural uses of English and monolingual, Anglophone-orientated English language teaching models and approaches.

This article examines the diplomatic conduct of Gelasio Caetani during his tenure as Italian Ambassador to the United States in the early years of Mussolini’s government, highlighting his influence and decision-making processes. It investigates the reasons behind Mussolini’s choice of Caetani as his representative in Washington and analyses the major issues he confronted, ranging from foreign policy to Italy’s war debt stemming from the First World War, which Mussolini sought to address. Drawing on Caetani’s personal archive and cross-referencing primary sources from other collections, the study offers a comprehensive and nuanced account.

This article draws on Roger Cotterrell’s framework for the sociological interpretation of the concept of trust to expound on, via examples from an empirical project in South Africa, methods for the empirical study of an informal environmental economy. Three distinct challenges encountered during fieldwork on the informal waste economy in South Africa are used to make a case for more robust empirical research methods – positionality, observation and the production of a documentary film, a non-traditional output. Each challenge concerns the relationship of trust between researcher and research respondent. The article concludes that these challenges can be addressed and managed via the appropriate socio-legal methodological framework. The article’s findings will have relevance for those embarking on an empirical study of the informal environmental economy, and for those interested in socio-legal methodology more generally.

We have used a modern, medium-sized hovercraft to further explore air cushion transport in Antarctica. Hovercraft travel over hard-blown snow at safe cruising speeds of 40–60 km/h requires about 50% of the fuel consumption for hovercraft travel over a flat ocean surface. The Griffon 2000TD craft used here has an endurance of >1000 km with a 1-tonne payload (personnel and equipment). However, this standard craft, designed for operations at sea level, is limited to altitudes below about 700 m elevation by the decrease in air density. The hovercraft provides accommodation, communication and first aid facilities for its crew in the event of any weather or operational issues. Two safety features of air cushion travel in Antarctica stand out: (1) low ground pressure per unit area (15% of a human), and (2) the ability to freely cross open ice cracks of dimensions of a metre or more. The total considerations of fuel economy, safety and environmental impact suggest the surface of hard-blown snow in Antarctica provides the optimum conditions for air cushion travel on planet Earth.