There is a certain sigh of relief—a sense of coming home—when encountering a concept that deeply reinforces a scholarly path that you have been on for over a decade, especially when that concept is better articulated than anything you have ever produced yourself. It was that home that I found in Vinciane Despret’s Living as a Bird. My mind perked up when I read, “if we are to sound like economists, there is also a price to be paid,”1 and then really connected with a sentence where she explains that in addition to being particularly punishing to read, studies of bird territories and territorialization, which are rooted in a clean, quantitative economics approach, have certain things that fail to be said, due to an “element of negligence.”2 Finally, she turns to a quotation by Bruno Latour that rang wonderfully true with a sense of where I have lived over the last several years:

Ventilation emerged as an efficient technique to reduce the health impact of dust and gas in workspaces around 1900. However, this technical solution to a major sanitary problem collided with the human factor. When, in 1894, French law imposed shop-floor clearance during lunch to facilitate aeration, workers resisted the injunction as a disturbance of their daily eating routine. Authorities relied on labour inspectors to find solutions to contentious situations. The 1901 union-led strike in the high-fashion district in Paris propelled the issue to national attention. Striking women demanded the strict enforcement of the aeration rule. The executive obliged, but the newfound zeal subsequently rekindled antagonism towards the regulation. Reversing their claim, women workers launched a community-based petitioning campaign to return to pre-strike tolerance. Rumours of another walk-out by seamstresses, triggered by the enforcement of the regulation in 1902, precipitated a governmental volte-face. Authorities apprehended the power of the street and the threat of public disorder. Government yielded to the women's influence. A more relaxed version of the decree – it did not automatically require the evacuation of workspaces – appeared on 29 November 1904. It had taken ten years, and a zigzagging trajectory, to overcome the unanticipated consequences of purposive legislative action. The new rules proved to be very solid: they remained in place until Covid-19 pushed the government to temporarily authorize eating at one's workplace to prevent the spread of the virus in canteens and restaurants.

Dublin at the turn of the nineteenth century had limited permanent employment opportunities compared to Belfast, and for poor families financial instability manifested in limited life expectancy. This article focuses on young adult cohorts in Dublin city. By cross-referencing names and addresses from death records with census, court and prison records, it casts new light on the lives of the city's most disadvantaged people. It applies a digital humanities framework and uses historical Geographical Information Systems to explore patterns in cause of death, and to reveal more about household income, casual labour, women's work and community networks. We contend that the cautions about the occlusion of commercial sex work in historical data should be extended to the lowest strata of the working classes more generally and that it is only through granular analyses that the fine lines between poverty and destitution can emerge.

Plastic litter is introduced into the oceans from land-based sources located in many countries around the world. Marine plastic pollution may therefore be attributable to multiple states, resulting in shared state responsibility. This article discusses the issue of shared state responsibility for land-based marine plastic pollution by examining (i) primary rules of international law concerning the prevention of land-based marine plastic pollution; (ii) secondary rules of international law on this subject; and (iii) possible ways of strengthening the primary rules. It concludes that the barrier for the invocation of state responsibility may become higher in cases of shared state responsibility. Three cumulative solutions to this problem are proposed: elaborating the obligation of due diligence, strengthening compliance procedures, and interlinking regimes governing the marine environment and international watercourses.

This article explores the national identity argument in unsettled times by using the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case. It uses a longitudinal survey among Jewish Israelis to examine whether the pandemic influenced levels of national identity and solidarity and whether it altered their relationship. The findings indicate a clear reduction in levels of solidarity, national attachment, and national chauvinism over time. They also show that the positive connection between national attachment and solidarity grew stronger, while the connection between national chauvinism and solidarity became weaker and insignificant. These findings provide complex evidence for the national identity argument.

This study explores variation in the use of English-origin verbs in Quebec French. These lexical borrowings are usually integrated grammatically into the receiving language (Poplack, 2018), as in il va crasher and elle m’a ghosté in Quebec French. However, a new lexical insertion strategy for English-origin verbs has been observed in the past few years: verbal borrowings can lack overt morphological integration, as in il va crash and elle m’a ghost. This article examines the use of English-origin verbs in Quebec French from a variationist perspective by focusing on 1) possible correlations between speakers and how they evaluate the different lexical insertion strategies, and 2) the social factors that constrain the use of morphologically unintegrated English-origin verbs. Results from quantitative analyses based on 675 participants indicate that young Quebecers from Montreal with a high level of proficiency in English are the ones who use this morphologically unintegrated form the most and evaluate it more positively. This unintegrated form poses a theoretical problem according to Poplack’s (2018) theory, for which nonce borrowings are morphologically and syntactically integrated into the receiving language.

This article seeks to enhance our understanding of the nature of socialist internationalism, in particular by considering the place of the nation in its functioning and essence. For this purpose, the concept of inter-nationalism is used to study the particular case of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) during Spain's Second Republic. In the first section, we focus on the meeting of the executive of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) in Madrid in 1931, and the subsequent May Day celebrations in the city. In the second, we analyse the use of internationalism by the PSOE in the debates on the decentralization of the Republican state. This article will argue that the PSOE made use of internationalist events to further the internal and external consolidation of the Republic, and its own position in government. Furthermore, internationalism served to uphold the unity and unique qualities of Spanish politics and culture. These considerations enable us to point to both the political and cultural dimensions of the PSOE's identification with Spanish nationalism, and to assert both the nation's importance in socialist internationalism and its role in socialist political culture during the interwar period.

From the age of empires to the apartheid regime in South Africa, pass laws have defined the scope of the mobility of subjects by relying on a paper document, the pass. This essay focusses on the pass document to understand the governance of mobility in the Indian ocean. In doing so, it shows how the pass document in its various forms through many centuries in fact, illuminates a form of inter-legal governance through which racialized life came to be constituted via convention and statute.

This article examines the extent to which overseas Chinese educators at Confucius Institutes (CIs) in Thailand act as representatives and practitioners of Chinese national identity. Though working for the state, CI teachers promote Chinese language and culture according to their own perceptions. In this paper, participatory observation and in-depth interviews were employed to assess how CI teachers in Thailand articulate their Chineseness and national identity. The findings show that (1) banal national sentiment was an important expression of the CI teachers' national identity, in terms of psychological attachment and ingrained behaviors; (2) pragmatic identity politics are used to distinguish various contributors to the CI; (3) the materialization of Chinese national identity recontextualizes the country via national symbols and cultural activities. The intricacy of the everyday activities of CI teachers illuminates the trans-nationalization and localization of Chinese national identity, which constitute the “doing” of the nation that the imaginary Chinese community in Thailand represents not just a government-endorsed national identity but also the CI teachers' creation of tradition.

This article aims to strengthen the link between history and theory by contributing to the scholarly conversation on “an integrated historical social science.” By examining the case of Qing China, it introduces a historically oriented and theoretically informed research agenda and toolkit for studying state making through the interactive lens of political sustainability and critical crisis. Using two historical upheavals as a prism, this article shows how destructive crises can have the unintended consequence of facilitating empire building and fostering political sustainability. Furthermore, it draws on theoretical insights from political science and sociology to construct a general framework for measuring the sustainability of political development and explaining the complex role of great crisis. This interdisciplinary model not only sheds new lights on the causative role of event, conjuncture, and structure but also enriches existing approaches to comparative historical analysis in general and state making in particular.

In his article, Thomas Rissfeldt argues the compatibility of palliative care with euthanasia and assisted suicide.1 By his account, many working within the field of palliative care feel that euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are incompatible with palliative care. Wrongly, according to the author, since (1) the aims of palliative care and euthanasia/assisted suicide are not different, (2) euthanasia and assisted suicide are compatible with the fundamental role of the physician as healer, and (3) euthanasia and assisted suicide do not necessarily constitute patient abandonment.2

August 16th, 2022 marked the 10th anniversary of the Marikana Massacre in Rustenburg, South Africa. This was the worst incident of mass killing by police since the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 in the heyday of the Apartheid regime. In the first days of August 2012, workers at Lonmin plc, a platinum group metals mining company, went on a wildcat strike demanding a minimum salary of 12500 Rand, circa 800 USD, per month and protesting against the poor living conditions they and their families where subjected to in the Marikana vicinity, an area 100 km north of Johannesburg where the mine is located. As days passed, tension escalated leading to the killing of ten people, including three non-striking workers, two security guards, three striking workers, and two police officers. Various attempts to facilitate negotiations with striking workers were turned down by Lonmin management. Instead, Lonmin managers actively engaged in communications with senior political leaders, police officers, and state mining officials to frame the situation as one that required strong and decisive police intervention.1

David Dranove and Lawton Burn’s new collaboration Big Med: Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America provides readers with a comprehensive tutorial on consolidation in United States healthcare markets over the past 40 years. Although the book is most explicitly aimed at those who look around and wonder how we arrived at a healthcare landscape dominated by giants, anyone with a serious interest in the prices of U.S. healthcare will want to have this rigorous and timely treatment on their bookshelf.