This survey reflects on a creative workshop which the authors ran for the ‘The State of Urban History: Past, Present, Future’ conference (July 2023). ‘Making manifestos for urban history’ was an experiment to encourage small group work and co-operative outputs in a conference setting, allowing for an atypical ‘many-to-many’ model of participation. During the session, five groups each produced a manifesto poster addressing issues that they thought were important for the future of urban history. The survey sets out the form the workshop followed, considers those who were involved and comments on how successful the workshop was in fostering conference community and active learning. Feedback recorded at the end of the session indicated that it was indeed successful in both these areas. Overall, the workshop demonstrated that when urban historians work together across generations and continents, they produce work of real value, which is resilient and sustainable.

This paper investigates correlations between theme vowels and argument structure in Serbo-Croatian. Specifically, we focus on two different theme vowels, -i- and -ova-, isolating ‘minimal pairs’, that is cases where the same base combines with the two theme vowels to derive different verbs. Starting from two online corpora of Serbo-Croatian, we created a comprehensive list of -i-/-ova- minimal pairs. For all pairs in the list whose both members were attested at least 50 times in the corpora, we randomly selected 50 tokens per verb and annotated them for transitivity. A statistical comparison of -i- and -ova- verbs according to the proportions of transitive uses was carried out. The findings show that -i- verbs are much more likely to be used transitively than -ova- verbs. This finding corroborates the view that theme vowels are associated with argument structure properties and challenges the idea that they are universally ‘ornamental’ pieces of morphology without syntactic/semantic import. Based on these and supplementary (non-corpus) data, we claim that -i- derives transitives and unaccusatives, while -ova- derives unergatives. We propose a model couched in Distributed Morphology whereby these two theme vowels are treated as instantiations of different ‘flavors of v’.

The survey examines the past, present and future of the urban history field in Britain, mixing memories and reflections. I trace the global turn of that field and the challenges it brings. One argument concerns the impact of a global scale on the methods and the explanatory frameworks used. A second concern is the role of economic history and economic frameworks of analysis in the writing of urban history, and I advocate their continued relevance.

This study explores the impact of power dynamics – represented by linguistic privilege, learning environment, and identity formation – on translingual practices in Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) writing education. It focuses on a specific case involving Chinese language learners at a Sino-US joint-venture university in China to elucidate these dynamics in a real-life context. The findings revealed how societal expectations, internalized power dynamics, and prevailing language ideologies nurtured perceptions of a diminished Chinese identity and influenced students' language preferences and engagement in CSL writing. The article argues that the decolonization of writing education necessitates critical awareness of power dynamics and the challenges they pose to monolingual ideologies. It also proposes pedagogical strategies to incorporate power dynamics into translingual practices by emphasizing the need to embrace language diversity and fluidity, facilitate translingual identity formation, and employ reflective practices. By raising awareness of power dynamics in translingual practices, educators can empower students to confront the linguistic status quo, promote linguistic justice, and cultivate a more equitable CSL writing education.

This article focuses on four digital resources for researching nineteenth-century women in music. Two are over two decades old and hail from the German-speaking world: Musik(vermittlung) und Gender(forschung) im Internet (MuGI) and the Sophie Drinker Institut online lexicon. The remaining pair are emerging digital resources based in the United States: Art Song Augmented and the Boulanger Initiative Database (BID).

As a vernacular dwelling form, the historical hutong districts in Beijing have represented local people’s traditional ways of living and thinking. However, in recent decades, such urban memories have dissipated as the old cityscape has gradually been overwritten by modernist, international-style designs. To ensure that locality and identity are not forgotten, this article examines the potential role of fiction films as a form of digital ‘lieux de mémoire’ (sites of memory), which not only archives but also evokes nostalgia for memories lost in urban transition. This interdisciplinary study rereads the extensive modernist transformation of Beijing’s historical hutong area through the lens of film (1940s–2010s), and thus brings a humanized, historical insight into this vernacular cityscape by focusing on reviving and strengthening the fading urban qualities.

Islamic veiling has attracted a remarkable degree of international and domestic attention in the current political climate. In the popular and political climate, the argument for social cohesion (or living together) is frequently invoked to justify bans on wearing Islamic veils. For example, the social cohesion argument was widely used in parliamentary debates leading up to the bans on wearing Islamic full-face veils (such as burqa or niqab) in France and Belgium. In response to the French and Belgian bans, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that a ban on wearing Islamic full-face veils is justified on the grounds of living together, rulings that many academic circles have criticized. Yet in this extensive commentary on the bans of Islamic veiling, one important question remains unanswered: Is social cohesion (or living together) a valid argument for banning the wearing of Islamic veils? The author explores this question through the lens of the European human rights framework and analyzes the ECtHR’s approach to French and Belgian anti-veil legislation enacted on the grounds of social cohesion.

This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula in the United States and the imperial networks necessary to acquire the data and specimens that underpinned this part of medical education, which established hierarchies between human races and their relationship to the natural environment. It shows how, in a world increasingly linked by trade and colonialism, medical schools were founded in the United States and grew as the country developed its own imperial ambitions. Taking advantage of the global reach of empires, a number of medical professors in different states, such as Daniel Drake, Josiah Nott and John Collins Warren, who donated his anatomical collection to Harvard Medical School on his retirement in 1847, began to develop racial theories that naturalised slavery and emerging imperialism as part of their medical teaching.

This article conducts an exploratory multidimensional (MD) analysis of four interactive online registers, namely newspaper comments, tweets, web forums and text messages, originating from four South Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and two Inner Circle (Kachru 1985) English-speaking countries (UK and USA). A principal component analysis (PCA) has been performed on the interactive registers using linguistic features tagged by a modified version of the MFTE tagger (Le Foll 2021a). The dimensions resulting from the PCA show that nominal, literate and informational features are generally more common in the South Asian data – which represent varieties belonging to the Outer Circle (Kachru 1985). Additionally, different features are used for expressing persuasion or opinion compared to the two reference varieties.

Although not studied by the generative approach (Shlonsky 2017), the embedded Wh- in situ clause nevertheless belongs to the French language spoken in a large amount of areas, and, we believe, to “français tout court” (Blanche-Benveniste & Jeanjean 1987): until now, it has mainly been studied in Quebec (Lefebvre & Maisonneuve 1982; Blondeau & Ledegen 2021) and in Reunion Island (Ledegen 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2016; Ledegen & Martin 2020), but it has recently been massively attested in the Multicultural Paris French project in the suburbs of Paris (Gardner-Chloros & Secova 2018) and Strasbourg (Marchessou 2018). These new data could be read as a language contact, as a recent linguistic change, or as a long-established “popular” structure (Guiraud 1966), different analytical hypotheses that will be detailed in this study. These recent data also argue in favour of the methodology of ecological corpora, obtained within the framework of a strong acquaintanceship and located at the pole of communicative proximity (Koch & Oesterreicher 2001). The examination of various existing corpora will reveal the structural functioning of the structure and contrast the corpora following the modes of interaction, the oral or written medium, as well as on the chronological axis.