Over the last 20 years, many countries have experienced the rise of radical right-wing populist (RRP) actors that threaten democratic governance, including in Latin America. These actors have deployed a variety of discursive frames based on economic grievances and (perceived) changing social values. The 2018 elections in Costa Rica were part of this phenomenon: a right-wing populist outsider presidential candidate deployed several frames and earned the most votes in the first round of voting. We analyze support for this candidate to understand which sectors of society were galvanized by the deployment of economic, anti-establishment, and cultural frames. We find that economic frames had much weaker traction than anti-establishment and cultural frames and that opposition to same-sex marriage was the frame with the strongest galvanizing effect across a wide range of demographic groups, beyond the expected ones. These findings support extant scholarship demonstrating the effective politicization of cultural issues by RRP actors for electoral purposes.

Freyberg Place in Auckland’s central business district has emerged as a focal site for youth cultural gatherings. Within this space, university students have localised transnational popular culture, generating new cultural meanings, identities, and affiliations. Over the past decade, Hallyu, and K-pop in particular, has expanded significantly in Aotearoa, New Zealand. This study draws on personal accounts from university student K-pop fans of diverse backgrounds, with attention to their involvement in Auckland’s K-festival, random play dances, and the University of Auckland K-pop Planet club and its Konstellation dance crew. These narratives demonstrate how participation in K-pop activities facilitated adaptation to the residential, social, and academic challenges of university life, while simultaneously fostering peer networks and community belonging. Engagement in these events also enabled students to acquire leadership experience and transferable skills relevant to future employment. Face-to-face fan practices and embodied participation through dance provided an avenue for affective immersion, reinforcing identification with global fan networks. For these students, K-pop constituted both an alternative to Western popular music and a medium through which they articulated transnational identities, positioning themselves as globally connected cultural consumers.

Recent work in variationist sociolinguistics has argued for greater interactional accountability in analyses of linguistic variation. The present article contributes to this line of inquiry by exploring the interactional conditioning of a relatively new pronoun – man – in two datasets: (i) a corpus of speech and social media data from young people in East London recorded in 2016/17 and (ii) a more recent social media corpus of fifty English-language TikTok videos and their comments. Analyses reveal that man is principally used as a third-person singular pronoun (man said ‘one two five’) and less often as a first-person singular pronoun (man’s doing that voice recording thing) contra to previous findings. I argue that third-person singular man is most commonly used in so-called moments of ‘byplay’ in which the interlocutor is temporarily excluded from the discourse. In this context, man draws attention to the actions or comments of an interlocutor, typically for ridicule or emphasis. I then briefly consider the relationship of man to the pronominal use of bro (bro said ‘he’s going to heaven’) before speculating that the interactional potentials of man/bro could, potentially, promote their diffusion beyond the communities in which they first emerged.

Many institutions today promote “Global Asia(s)” and “Global Asian Studies” as both a method and an initiative. As a growing field, these institutions are committed to reimagining the studies of Asia through transnational, comparative, and boundary-crossing approaches. To map its contemporary landscape and identify emerging challenges, this study draws on interviews with ten directors from diverse institutions around the world, each engaged in Global Asia(s)/Global Asian Studies in distinct and pioneering ways. Despite varied contexts, these institutions share strong commitments – particularly a collective dissatisfaction with traditional models of Asian Studies and a common drive to transcend geographic boundaries, the East–West divide, and disciplinary silos. At the same time, local histories, community needs, academic traditions, institutional structures, leadership visions, and available resources shape divergent interpretations and implementations of Global Asia(s). Rather than advancing a unified model, this study emphasizes the field’s plurality and reflexive knowledge production process, arguing that its strength lies in this diversity and ongoing dialogue.

In 1970, Ted Williams – a medical missionary who had been running a small hospital at Kuluva in the West Nile region of Uganda for decades – was approached by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to help establish a major study on the possible role of Epstein–Barr Virus in the aetiology of Burkitt’s lymphoma (BL). At the time, there was intense global interest in BL, as the cancer promised to be the first shown to have a viral aetiology. IARC centred its project at Kuluva Hospital and in the West Nile district because of Williams’ unusually detailed and accurate records. Williams was a meticulous record-keeper, who relied on various methods of data collection, from collecting and comparing to selecting and sorting. His paper-based archives and recording practices provide a rare window onto epidemiological knowledge production in East Africa in the decades before computing reshaped medical record-keeping. By tracing the ‘sociomaterial paper trail’ of Williams’s work, this paper examines how persona, place, and paper intersected in the making of medical knowledge, and how the researcher’s persona shapes the kinds of epidemiological data that are ultimately produced.

Seafood gained prominence as a southern flavor in middle-period China. Among the southern products that piqued gourmets’ fancy, the pufferfish as a deadly delicacy presented a special case. How did it come to acquire its contentious reputation? This article traces the process that transformed it from a dangerous ancient killer to an alluring treat by the early twelfth century. Its shifting cultural stature was propelled by demographic and geographical reconfigurations, negotiations between northern and southern culinary traditions, and the literati effort to collect and classify natural knowledge. Along the way, diverse encounters and experiences with different pufferfishes were coalesced into one uniform category hetun (“river-piglet”), connoting at once danger and delicacy. The metamorphosis of the pufferfish demonstrated the interplay between literary, medical, geographical, and natural knowledge across genres in middle-period Chinese history.

This paper explores the implications of Jīva Gosvāmī’s (sixteenth century) Bhedābheda Vedānta for the contemporary philosophical debate on consciousness, thereby contributing to the broader and growing interest in the insights that Indian traditions may bring to current discussions in the philosophy of mind. More specifically, I develop here a metaphysical, coarse-grained partial reconstruction of Jīva’s thought, arguing that it can be interpreted as a distinctive form of priority cosmopsychism, which I term śakti-based Vedānta cosmopsychism. Needless to say, this involves both a terminological and a taxonomical task, as I seek to clarify how key aspects of Jīva’s thought can be articulated through the conceptual framework and vocabulary of contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In the final part of the paper, I turn to a more fine-grained analysis, examining the implications of śakti-based Vedānta cosmopsychism for central issues in the philosophy of consciousness, including the causal exclusion problem and the explanatory gap problem, here framed as the individuation problem. I also address some few objections, among them a cosmopsychist formulation of the Vedāntic problem of imperfection.

From 1948 until 1967, Israel banned German language films, plays, and vocal music. Largely forgotten today, this article unravels the shifting contours of the ban—the only formal ban ever instituted by Israel on Germany—and unearths its rationales. It does so by focusing on the government agency in charge of formulating and administering the ban, the Film and Theatre Review Board. The article makes four arguments. First, the ban sought to protect the feelings of Holocaust survivors specifically, and Israeli society generally. Traumatized by the Holocaust, Israeli censors wished to remove any reminders of Germany from the public sphere. Second, the fluctuations of the ban tracked diplomatic developments with Germany and the changing sentiments in Israel toward postwar Germany. Third, the ban contributed to a discourse of national dignity and honor, bolstering the argument in favor of an independent Jewish state. Finally, the ban positioned the Board as an entity that claimed to speak for Jews, downplaying demands by Israeli Jews who wanted to consume German culture. As such, the ban should be viewed as an act of nation building and as an important component in the construction of a new Israeli identity, distinct from and independent of the diaspora Jew.