This piece recounts the efforts by NGO Sign of Hope (SoH) to rectify human rights violations in South Sudan, which manifested themselves as drinking water pollution by the oil industry. Committed to exposing and remediating this water contamination, SoH was able to prompt the automobile company Daimler’s CSR to engage in extended dialogue with the oil industry stakeholders in Unity State. Despite a tactful use of various methods ranging from cooperation to confrontation, SoH’s campaign did not lead the oil producers to reverse the harm inflicted on the people of Unity State. When SoH tried to hold these companies accountable, SoH had the impression that it was hitting an elastic wall. This piece identifies lessons which may help to counter corporate human rights violations and compensate for the weakness of CSR in fragile states and in the face of corporate irresponsibility.

Xenotransplant patient selection recommendations restrict clinical trial participation to seriously ill patients for whom alternative therapies are unavailable or who will likely die while waiting for an allotransplant. Despite a scholarly consensus that this is advisable, we propose to examine this restriction. We offer three lines of criticism: (1) The risk–benefit calculation may well be unfavorable for seriously ill patients and society; (2) the guidelines conflict with criteria for equitable patient selection; and (3) the selection of seriously ill patients may compromise informed consent. We conclude by highlighting how the current guidance reveals a tension between the societal values of justice and beneficence.

In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argues that morality pertains primarily to character, and that actions have moral content only to the extent that they signal good or bad character. I formalize his signalling theory of moral/immoral actions using simple game-theoretic models. Conditions exist under which there is a separating equilibrium in which actions do indeed credibly signal character, but conditions also exist in which there is only a pooling or semi-separating equilibrium. A tradeoff is identified between the signalling value of actions, and the consequentialist goal of incentivizing all character types to choose beneficial actions.

While the idea that Beethoven had African ancestry became popular in the 1960s during the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, its conception arose during an earlier moment: the global New Negro movement of the 1920s. Appearing in newspaper columns, music journals, and essays, Black American writings on Beethoven challenged white musicians’ claims to the canon of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. This article argues that the project of making Beethoven Black belonged to a greater and more ambitious endeavour to rewrite Western music history. Black musicologists sought to globalize the Western canon, and in so doing, critique its grand narratives. Locating Black musical idioms in eighteenth-century piano sonatas or conducting archival research on Black European figures such as George Bridgetower, their music histories challenged readers to re-examine just who, exactly, had contributed to the project of cultural modernity and on what grounds.

Global Musical Modernisms – the formulation heralds expansion into new arenas of music research.1 For while certain pairings of the component terms are familiar enough, the concatenation of all three is novel. In music studies, the most notable trend is the flurry of activity around global music history, with study groups in two societies historically focused on Western musics, and one focused on ethnomusicology.2 Global music history derives strength and in turn strengthens movement towards disciplinary convergence, or at least greater interaction – an important precondition for the study of global musical modernisms.3 There has also been renewed interest in musical modernism, though not so much, at least at first glance, in the direction of the global, and with less interdisciplinary synergy. By contrast, the global figures very prominently in what has been termed the ‘new modernist studies’, a field that coalesced in the late 1990s.4 As one indication, its global turn had gathered enough momentum for Oxford University Press to publish a handbook on ‘Global Modernisms’ in 2013, just three years after its handbook on ‘Modernisms’.5 Despite aspirations to coverage of modernism in all its forms, the field is populated predominantly by literary scholars, with minimal attention to music.