Distributive justice preferences are important because they can influence the policy orientations of political actors and can help create conditions conducive to policy change. Yet, these preferences have received relatively little scholarly attention in countries that are not included in major cross-country surveys such as Turkey. This article examines Turkish distributive justice preferences across four key social policy sectors: education; healthcare; old-age pensions; and unemployment insurance. The analysis draws on 2019 data from an original nationwide survey (n = 2,272), designed by a research team including the authors and implemented by a professional survey firm using multistage stratified random sampling. Our findings confirm that, as in mature welfare states, distributive justice preferences vary across social policy sectors in the Turkish case. However, the equality principle is strongly favored in three of the four areas, while equity is preferred only in old-age pensions, possibly reflecting policy feedback effects. In the context of high inequality and low social and institutional trust, we introduce distrustful egalitarianism as a concept to capture egalitarian preferences driven more by distrust of official allocation mechanisms than by purely ideological commitments to equality. These findings highlight the need for further research in middle-income countries with less mature welfare systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about changes to almost every aspect of life. Courts were no exception, with the pandemic dramatically increasing the use of virtual court hearings. This paper explores virtual hearings and their impact on therapeutic approaches to judging, which prioritise connection and engagement between judicial officers and participants. While particularly drawing on the experience in Australia and the United Kingdom, the paper draws on broader international research to identify the potential challenges of seeking to conduct therapeutic judging online, but also areas where the virtual environment might improve participants’ therapeutic experience. Further research on this topic is likely to be fruitful, as virtual court hearings become a more entrenched part of court practice. We therefore canvass areas for future research, to enhance the therapeutic potential of the judicial role in a virtual environment.

Widely found at archaeological sites across the Roman Empire, the appearance in the late 1st c. BCE onward of the red gloss ceramic referred to as terra sigillata signals important transformations in the socio-economic organization of production and consumption for provincial societies. Nonetheless, relatively few studies have explored diachronically the ways in which the appearance of terra sigillata may have impacted local lifeways compared with the uses of earlier ceramics. This article explores these issues in the context of Roman Mediterranean Gaul, focusing in particular on the region of eastern Languedoc, by comparing, in both discard and funerary contexts, the differential uses of black gloss ceramics from the 3rd to the 1st c. BCE with later terra sigillata vessels. The evidence discussed here suggests that the appearance of terra sigillata was important in reifying more individual-centered social relationships in dining and other aspects of daily life.

This article investigates how autocratizing regimes instrumentalize the cultural domain to manufacture consent, assert societal dominance, and socialize oppositional actors into authoritarian logics. In contexts of competitive authoritarianism, memory politics becomes central not only to the incumbent’s efforts to legitimize power and construct hegemonic narratives of citizenship, identity, and history, but also to the opposition’s attempts to propose alternatives. Drawing on fieldwork, curator interviews, and audience responses, the article analyzes two large-scale centennial exhibitions held in İstanbul in 2023 and 2024 that offer contrasting portrayals of the Turkish Republic – one Islamist–authoritarian, the other liberal–Kemalist. Despite clear ideological differences, divergent aesthetic approaches, and distinct target audiences, both exhibitions rely on exclusionary, state-centric framings that inhibit critical or pluralist engagements with the past. The article argues that this convergence signals a deeper transformation: the autocratization of the cultural field, wherein even oppositional institutions internalize authoritarian norms and practices. In this context, history is staged as spectacle – either triumphant or nostalgic – narrowing the cultural imagination, consolidating incumbent power, and diminishing spaces for meaningful contestation.

With the rise of digital and online technologies, subtitling practices once reserved for traditional media to regiment language are now available to ordinary netizens. This article explores the nature of these practices and the publics they project in digital media, focusing on a viral remix video that uses on-screen text to ridicule a Hong Kong government official for his Cantonese-accented Mandarin. Through parodic revoicing, the subtitles in the video mock the official’s linguistic blunders and create a series of incongruities to provoke humor intended for Cantonese-speaking Hongkongers. These subtitles, despite reproducing standard language ideology, bring into being a vernacular counterpublic organized around Cantonese and undermine the legitimacy of the public figures in the video. This article not only prompts us to reconsider the commonly assumed link between standard languages and national publics but also reveals subtitling practices in participatory media as potential sites where ideological reproduction and political resistance intersect. (Subtitling, counterpublic, Mandarin Chinese, Hong Kong, China)

There are various types of nominal appositives. One is predicative, as in She invited Lulu Moppet, an old friend, to the party; one is specificational, as in She invited an old friend, Lulu Moppet, to the party; and a further type is equative, as in She invited Reginald Kenneth Dwight, Elton John, to the party. This paper argues that each type of nominal appositive comes from a reduced copular clause of a certain kind. Such a copular clause is base-generated as the complement of a categoryless functional head, like a low conjunct or a modifier. The combination of the reduced copular clause and the functional head is merged with, and categorized by, the matrix clause. Thus, a nominal appositive is not base-generated in the same proposition-denoting expression where its anchor occurs. Explicit steps of derivation for building a nominal appositive construction are proposed. The proposed syntactic derivations rule out unacceptable positions of nominal appositives. The research explores the general syntax of non-argument-taking relations.

Many theorists tie social norms to attitudes, such as expectations towards others, perhaps along with conforming practices. Challenging this view, we instead ground social norms in a social norming process, an often non-verbal social communication process that ‘makes’ the norm through mutual expressions of support. We present the process-based account of social norms and social normativity, and distinguish social norms from social pressures, social practices and Lewisian conventions. The process-based view brings social norms closer to legal norms, by tying them to ‘expressive acts’, just as laws and contracts arise through acts of voting or signing, not through mere attitudes.

This article investigates how the Ottoman–Habsburg rivalry was materialized in Istanbul’s urban fabric, c. 1530–1606. Tracing the itinerary Divanyolu → Elçi Hanı → Topkapı Palace, it reconstructs a ritual geography in which routes, lodgings and thresholds converted diplomacy into spatial governance. Drawing on protocol notes, narratives and images, it shows how orchestrated confinement, staged spectacle and reciprocal visibility structured ambassadorial experience: envoys were lodged under watch in the Elçi Hanı, processed along a ceremonial corridor and received in a palace that magnified authority by withholding it. Combining visual, textual and architectural analysis, the article demonstrates how power was materially and symbolically enacted and ambassadors became both spectators and exhibits. Rather than treating the city as backdrop, it reads Istanbul as an instrument that translated rivalry into movement, vantage and constraint, situating the Ottoman capital within a wider Mediterranean economy of representation, comparison and control.