This article focuses on perceptions and attitudes of ethnic minorities toward nation-building processes in Kazakhstan. It provides important insights on how ethnic minorities position and perceive themselves after more than thirty years of nation-building. The article draws on a survey (N=4,000) and semi-structured interviews conducted in 17 regions of Kazakhstan. It concludes that despite some variations in perceptions toward civic and ethnic identities, in general, ethnic minorities positively evaluate the nation-building processes in Kazakhstan. The evidence suggests that ethnic identity continues to play an important role in self-identification of ethnic minorities, while civic identity is important to a limited degree. The study also shows that there is variation across different ethnicities in terms of salience of ethnic and civic identities.

I discuss two colloquial Italian idioms expressing respectively emphatic negation and objection, col cavolo (lit. ‘with the cabbage’) and un cavolo (lit. ‘a cabbage’). Despite superficial similarities, they represent two very different strategies at syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic level. Col cavolo belongs to a class of non-verbal polar predicates selecting a clausal complement and expressing the speaker’s degree of strength of sincerity towards the proposition (Repp 2013). Col cavolo expresses high commitment to ¬p: it is base-generated in the left periphery, as confirmed by its limited polarity-licensing abilities and impossibility of agreement with a TP-level negative PolP. Instead, un cavolo is a metalinguistic objector (Martins 2020), an echoic responsive move (Farkas & Bruce 2010); it originates as a vulgar minimiser and can function as an ‘utterance minimiser’, predicating minimal relevance of the associate and rejecting it globally rather than reversing its truth conditions. Finally, I compare col cavolo with similar cross-linguistic expressions, and offer a generalisation for left-peripheral negators: those participating in a movement or agreement chain with the TP-level PolP have full semantic and polarity-licensing capabilities, while base-generated ones, being non-local to the lower proposition, only license weak polarity items and yield double negation with a lower negative PolP.

Buchak’s risk-weighted expected utility considers not just the probability of an outcome, but also the probability of getting a strictly better outcome, when weighting the contribution that outcome gives to the evaluation of a gamble. It uses a risk-weighting function $R$ sending probabilities in $\left[ {0,1} \right]$ to decision weights $\left[ {0,1} \right]$. I adapt this to allow weights in any real interval. Finite intervals yield nothing new, but if the interval is infinite, then the resulting rule can incorporate maximin or maximax preferences (or both!) while still satisfying stochastic dominance. There are advantages to working with marginal risk-weighting, $R$’s derivative, $r$.

The promise of digitalisation in achieving Universal Health Coverage in postcolonial contexts is undermined by the realities of insufficiently resourced public healthcare systems. In response, private health insurance is often seen as essential to healthcare delivery. The provision of this private health insurance is increasingly mediated through digital infrastructures, with providers leaning into the promise of data-driven behavioural economics to provide better and more efficient services. While an increasing number of studies focus on digital health, in this paper, we particularly focus on the less-explored question of how datafication – under the veil of shared value, and enabled by forms of legal access – reproduces inequalities. Using the case study of Discovery, a financial services company in South Africa providing health insurance, we analyse how a social value and data-driven behavioural economic model of health insurance commodifies health and wellness. We argue that legal infrastructures are central to this commodification. Through a socio-legal critique of digital health, our article makes an original contribution to broader debates on enduring postcolonial social inequalities by illustrating how infrastructural injustice manifest through datafication.

Inspired by a discourse-centred commodity chain analysis (Thurlow 2020), this study investigates beefy landscapes materialized in three organic grocery store chains in Germany. Organic food stores produce meat-intensive texts that may contradict their widely promoted and mediatized claims to sustainability, complicating the pleas for reducing meat consumption which is essential to limit global warming. Focusing on organic beef, with the largest climate footprint of any protein source, the study looks into semiotic material detached from scientific findings on environmental issues and composing an alarming part of the globalized clean food discourse that masks unsustainable realities. By putting forward cows as icons of organic cattle farming and the effortless convenience of preparation, while erasing environment-related impact categories, beef consumption is perpetuated. The article ultimately shows that our ‘meaty routines’ (Sundet, Hansen, & Wethal 2023) are deeply rooted in environmental escapism as we follow the hype to eat right. (Organic beef, Anthropocene discourse, semiotic landscape, discourse-centred commodity chain analysis, (Social) Life Cycle Assessment)

Why are some legislators more effective than others in fragmented presidential systems? I argue that in Brazil’s fractionalized party system, legislative member organizations (LMOs) supply policy and political information that parties often lack, enabling lawmakers to advance bills. I test this claim using novel legislative effectiveness scores (LESs) for sponsors and rapporteurs in Brazil’s lower chamber. Quantitative results show that LMO affiliation is associated with higher effectiveness, but only in highly structured organizations. Public security LMOs boost both sponsorship and rapporteurship, while agribusiness LMOs increase rapporteurship effectiveness. Weakly organized LMOs show null effects. Party affiliation matters, but parties do not consistently provide information and coordination. Qualitative data identify two mechanisms by which strong LMOs operate: placing aligned members in key positions and leveraging expertise to shape agendas and voting cues. These findings recast effectiveness in Brazil as a function of cross-party informational networks rather than parties alone and identify scope conditions under which LMOs matter in other multiparty presidential democracies.