This essay inaugurates One British Archive, a new series in the Journal of British Studies. This short essay describes the little-known archive, libraries, and museum of Stonyhurst College in England. Stonyhurst represents a continuation of the College of St Omers, a Catholic institution started in continental Europe in the sixteenth century, when Catholics were routinely prosecuted in England. This transnational quality of British expatriate communities in Europe is reflected in the collections. The modern preparatory school contains not only the records of St Omers but also the papers and books of numerous local families and school children that passed through its doors. The current archive, libraries, and museum are thus a treasure trove for anyone pursuing studies into Catholicism, book history, British education, and more.

Linguistic differences in staged or scripted performances matter, since language, or language-ing, is a critical component in structuring power and maintaining unequal social differences or challenging and complicating them. To investigate such scripted speech in the context of Indigenous characters, we draw on the semiotic processes of erasure and rhematisation as well as the newly proposed concepts of erasure marking and semiotic overlay. We examine a dataset of Australian television series with Indigenous characters that feature significant creative involvement by Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander individuals. Crucially, these series address mainstream, mixed audiences, meaning they must blend multiple perspectives to reach diverse viewers. We explore overt meta-discourses and subtle signs of linguistic characterisation to show how Indigenous screen creatives counter or challenge erasure and rhematisation by diversifying and complicating characters’ linguistic repertoires and bringing in Indigenous discourses and perspectives. (Semiotic processes, ethnoracialisation, decolonisation, Australia, mainstream media, Aboriginal English, language ideologies)*

This article builds on recent works which challenge the dichotomy between religion and modern urban planning. The article focuses on a case-study in the Alsatian city of Mulhouse during the nineteenth century. Over a period of 30 years, Catholic parishioners and clergy repeatedly petitioned the town’s Calvinist industrial and municipal elite for a church to be built in the paternalist cités ouvrières housing district, culminating in the eventual construction of the church of Saint-Joseph by 1883. Through a close analysis of the archival records of these petitions, the discussions they sparked and the shifting local and national political dynamics of the city, this article argues that religious groups used myriad tactics to engage in modern planning and that municipal authorities were won over by these tactics if they were politically expedient.

This research note contributes updated and extended point estimates of the ideological positions of Brazilian political parties and novel estimates of the positions of all presidents since redemocratization in 1985. Presidents and parties are jointly responsible for the operability of Brazil’s version of coalitional presidentialism. Locating these key political actors in a unidimensional left–right space over time reveals rising challenges to the institutional matrix, particularly since 2013. Ideological polarization among parties has sharply increased, presidents have become more distant from Congress, and the political center has become increasingly vacated. Coalitional presidentialism is being subjected to unprecedented ideological stress as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva begins his third term in office.

The Quran contains numerous references to evil and some of these indicate that the responsibility of some instances of evil, which I call self-inflicted evil, lies with human beings rather than God. This idea of evil leads to an exploration of two interconnected issues in philosophical and theological discussions, moral responsibility and desert, along with the related tension between freedom of action and divine determinism. The article delves into this tension as it appears from the Quran and prevailing standpoints in Islamic theology. I propose that the tension between freedom of action and divine determinism resists a satisfactory reconciliation, which ultimately affects the plausibility of the idea of evil as self-inflicted. I further propose that embracing the contradictions arising from verses expressing freedom and responsibility, on the one hand, and those indicating divine determinism, on the other, could be a viable approach for the theologian.

The late nineteenth-century harbour districts, or so-called ‘sailortowns’, are generally depicted as deterritorialized ‘enclaves’ of heightened globalized transience. However, these neighbourhoods were just as much shaped by semi-durable local labouring communities. This article studies lodging houses as facilitators of global and local entanglements in harbour districts from a socio-cultural perspective, with Antwerp in the late nineteenth century as a case-study. Analysing the spatiality, materiality, sociability and people of the lodging phenomenon, it reveals that next to the highly transient seafarers, sailortown accommodated a diverse yet largely local population of small entrepreneurs and their families right between transience and permanence.

This article compares how gender and pathologization were entangled in the laws on infanticide in Spain and the Netherlands in 1930–1960, as well as in court practices. Both countries knew lenient laws for women who killed their newborn babies. These laws themselves did not assume that these women were suffering from a mental disorder, even though they referred to emotional state. In Spain, where the notion of honor was more important in the law, from the 1940s a debate was held about the relationship between mental illness and infanticide laws in the context of the Franco regime's emphasis on pronatalism. While in Spain the institutional monopoly of the generalist forensic physician as preferred expert excluded psychiatrists, in the Netherlands forensic psychiatrists were more influential, and their role increased from the 1950s. The article argues that regardless of many differences in forensic and political culture in both countries infanticidal women were pathologized: in Spain mostly via some interpretations of the infanticide law, and in the Netherlands via forensic psychiatry. However, pathologization, we show, involved many lay actors such as lawyers, legal scholars, and probation services.

Although there are numerous studies showing the significance of clientelism in the electoral mobilization of the poor in Turkey, scant attention has been paid on the specific clientelistic strategies employed by the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) among the Kurdish population in İstanbul. Addressing this gap, this study focuses on the AKP’s clientelist politics among Kurdish voters in Bağcılar, a lower-income district on the European side of İstanbul. Drawing on fieldwork, this study argues that the AKP successfully mobilizes Kurdish voters through machine politics and relational clientelism, which are facilitated by co-ethnic brokerage and intermediary linkages. By analyzing different modalities of Kurdish brokers – Kurdish (male) entrepreneurs, Kurdish housewives and Kurdish associations – the study discloses the intricate dynamics of the AKP’s clientelist–machine politics at the local level. It reveals that the AKP’s co-ethnic brokers not only distribute material benefits but also cultivate enduring personal relationships with Kurdish voters, providing problem-solving networks for the Kurdish poor in everyday life. The AKP’s co-ethnic brokerage relations foster trust, care, solidarity, and affectivity among Kurds. The study concludes that the AKP employs both material and symbolic dimensions of clientelism to mobilize the Kurdish electorate in İstanbul.