The purpose of the seminar was to bring together scholars from within linguistics and disciplines such as psychology to explore what short-form social media is, how we might practically and ethically collect and analyse short-form social media data, and what analytic possibilities are on offer for a linguist interested in examining this type of data. The seminar, held at the University of Nottingham on 11th September 2024, was well-attended, with around twenty people joining in-person or online. It ran for a single day and was split into a morning of plenaries and lightning talks about personal research interests, and an afternoon of interactive sessions which sought synergies between those research interests.

Readings of the history of penal expertise trace its rise to the late nineteenth century and its decline to the late twentieth century, with the crumbling of the welfare state. Despite stark differences along Whiggish and Foucauldian lines in evaluations of that history, a consensus has emerged that the penal-welfare complex peaked around mid-century, dependent on correctional experts. Most studies of that phenomenon have focused on the institutionalization and “treatment” of “problem” populations while neglecting the role of penal expertise in critiques of capital punishment. When Britain and Canada undertook major inquiries into the death penalty in the 1950s, they turned to the world’s foremost expert on the subject: sociologist Thorsten Sellin. Yet, these government-appointed studies devalued his academic capital in favor of the lived expertise of police. By examining the contestation of Sellin’s sources, methods, and conclusions, this paper puts the chronology of penal welfarism and its experts into question. Not simply a case of ill-informed opinion prevailing over criminological evidence, the dismissive treatment of this penal expert highlights the need to apply a more capacious understanding of contending forms of expertise at numerous points in penal history, rather than setting the devaluation of penal expertise in the recent past.

Although conditional cash transfers are a cornerstone of Latin American welfare states, little is known about the public opinion dynamics that sustain or challenge their long-term viability. Drawing on original, nationally representative surveys conducted in 2022 in seven Latin American democracies (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru), this article examines public support for cash transfers toward children across three dimensions: existence (yes/no), breadth (who should receive them) and adequacy (benefit levels). Across all countries, we find widespread support for such transfers, challenging the notion that only universal policies can create broad social support. However, preferences for expansion vary significantly across countries, with only partial alignment with existing coverage: support is highest in countries with extensive and minimal program coverage. Logistic regression models reveal that gender and household composition (living with children and being of reproductive age) are strong predictors of individual preferences, in addition to ideology and income. These findings contribute to existing scholarship by highlighting the role of gender and household composition in shaping social policy preferences.

British bioprospecting in the last decades of imperial China was propelled not merely by natural history and commerce, but significantly by China’s evolving foreign relations under international treaties. This article unravels the legal dimension of British naturalists’ collecting activities in late Qing China, challenging indiscriminate associations of their presence with imperialist or illicit plunder of natural resources. While the Sino-British treaties did not explicitly address plant collecting, they authorized British naturalists, as travelers, to move from Guangzhou to treaty ports and subsequently, under passports, into the interior. In practice, their expeditions encompassed both licit travel and illicit transgressions; and plant collecting was either officially acquiesced to or incorporated into the general regulation of travel for pleasure, coupled with lax inspection of plant outflow. From 1863, initially under British influence, Qing authorities even legalized international trade in tea seeds and plants, thus diminishing their control of a species economically vital to China. However, an international legal consensus on sovereign resource rights remained absent. The evolving legal environment for the botanical connection between the British Empire and late Qing China preceded the integration of natural resources into the agenda of international law, nuancing understanding of the politics of nature.

In soundscape composition, environmental sounds form a ‘language’ that highlights the voices of the environment for everyone’s contemplation. Ideally, they create an atmosphere and space of listening that allow us to grapple with and perceive more deeply the ecological imbalances, social inequalities, cultural gaps, and political issues in which we find ourselves. With the help of compositional examples, the author traces ways in which soundscape compositions can be a forum for ‘speaking back’ in protest, making oppositional voices heard while simultaneously exploring artistic-poetic expressions for a deeper listening engagement with the sonic complexity of environmental sounds and the meanings they carry within them. Furthermore, the author considers whether and how a soundscape composition can be a relationship-builder between environment and listener: can it be an agent for listening to the land, to the natural world, in ways that make urgent and necessary changes of human behaviour possible?

Festive culture is often analysed as a manifestation of spontaneity, creativity, popular culture, and humour, as well as an opportunity to express territorial identity. However, these rituals and their artistic expressions can also manifest hateful and contemptuous discourses toward national and cultural minorities, as observed in some European carnival celebrations. In the case of Valencia, from the Francoist dictatorship onwards, the festive culture was controlled by a political and social elite right and extreme right group, which instrumentalised the celebration as a political tool. Thus, these phenomena can be observed with the proliferation of hate speech against social and political minorities as Catalan and Valencian nationalists, depicting them as animals, traitors and enemies of Valencian and Spanish identity and exposing them in public space to shame them. This phenomenon was radicalised at the end of 2015 with the mobilisation of the Spanish right and far right to counter the left and nationalist government of the city, despite the Fallas’ adherence to UNESCO principles to promote understanding and dialogue between cultures and nationalities.

We examine the relationship between partisan social media messages and voters’ support for undemocratic transgressions against the president and Congress. Our survey experiments in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia randomly exposed respondents to partisan messages about contentious and consensus issues such as inflation, abortion, crime, and protests. We then assessed whether these messages increased support for undemocratic transgressions. Our findings reveal distinct inter-party differences: opposition voters were more inclined to support presidential impeachment, while incumbent voters were more predisposed to dissolve Congress. However, contrary to our initial pre-registered hypotheses, exposure to partisan social media messages did not consistently augment these tendencies. This implies that while voters often endorse undemocratic measures in line with their partisan leanings, such preferences are not heightened by exposure to partisan discourse on social media.

Task-based language teaching (TBLT), an instructional approach for promoting real world communicative language use, has gained substantial attention among researchers and educators of additional languages, traditionally referred to as second languages (L2) and foreign languages (FL). Existing research on TBLT and tasks, predominantly conducted with adult learners, has primarily examined how meaning-focused tasks enhance (or do not enhance) learners’ communicative abilities in the target language and how different task implementations yield different outcomes (Ellis, 2017).

Research syntheses have demonstrated that pronunciation instruction works, which means that whether instruction is effective is no longer an open question. Instead, contemporary intervention research has shifted to investigating how instruction can be further optimized, asking targeted questions about the instructional features that catalyze learning. In this paper, I examine the concept of instructional optimization, focusing on anticipated effect sizes (gains). I outline a four-pronged empirical approach to provide robust data for designing optimal pronunciation interventions. First, I describe the need for replication studies, which provide insight into the precision and stability of effects across distinct research samples and contexts. Second, I advocate for a systematic approach to study design. In such an approach, which is closely tied to the principles of replication, one or two variables are manipulated at a time, leading to a set of maximally comparable studies that lend insight into the impact of specific variables. Third, I explain the need to situate instruction within a longitudinal perspective to examine how robust and durable instructional gains are. Finally, I turn to adaptive approaches, where the surface format that instruction takes is highly variable and responsive to learner needs while the adaptive decision tree that generates the form is fixed and replicable.

This paper engages with recent work on formalization in economics to develop a new perspective on mathematization. Boylan and O’Gorman draw on foundations of mathematics to argue that classical mathematics is inappropriate for economics; intuitionistic foundations and constructive mathematics should be used instead. The use of real analysis would be blocked and equilibrium results undermined. I argue that their line of thought faces several challenges; however, I then draw on their analyses and the philosophy of applied mathematics to propose a novel approach in which questions about mathematization are properly understood as questions about the contextual aptness of relevant idealizations.

Though critic Paul Scudo predicted in 1850 that the French romance would be ‘more respected by posterity than many weighty scores’, the once-ubiquitous song genre has all but disappeared from modern recitals and musicological histories. While the reasons for this erasure are undoubtedly multifaceted, I argue that the loss of the vocal performance practices that animated the genre played a significant role. Specifically, French singers in the domestic sphere – commonly labelled ‘romance singers’ and exemplified by figures like the tenor Richelmi – cultivated an entirely different vocal production than the one popularzied by Gilbert Duprez and typically heard in classical singing today. This technique, known as the timbre clair (clear timbre), was produced using a rising larynx and a lowering soft palate, resulting in a bright, thin, delicate, and even slightly nasal sound that became a hallmark of early and mid-nineteenth-century French singing. Moreover, composers and audiences expected singers to adopt a declamatory approach when performing romances, to constantly vary the colour of their voices for expressive effect. By so doing, performers imbued these seemingly simple songs with a sophistication and nuanced meaning not readily apparent in the scores themselves. This study of timbral aesthetics – which, I suggest, ought to be more seriously explored in modern performance contexts – undercuts conceptions of the genre as vacuous or meaningless and sheds light on an essential aspect of the nineteenth-century French sound world.

This article examines the institutional evolution and professionalization of the state police in Prague during the final decades of the Habsburg monarchy, arguing that the transformation of the Prague State Police between 1893 and 1910 represents a proactive effort in modern state-building. Drawing on reports from the Prague Police Directorate and the Bohemian Governor’s Office, it analyzes how recurring episodes of mass violence—specifically the unrest of the early 1890s, the riots of December 1897, and the nationalist disturbances of 1908—exposed the structural vulnerabilities of a security apparatus designed for routine policing rather than mass politics.

The article highlights a significant shift in administrative strategy: the movement away from a reliance on military intervention, which was increasingly viewed by civil authorities as a “double defeat” that undermined the legitimacy of the constitutional state. Instead, police directors such as Georg Dörfl and Karel Křikava successfully advocated for a robust, civilian-controlled force characterized by increased manpower, modernized equipment, and the establishment of a dedicated reserve for professional training. By 1910, the Prague Guard had largely expanded, reflecting a fundamental reconceptualization of urban order where protest was accepted as an unavoidable feature of political life to be contained by professional civilian forces rather than crushed by the army.