Based on the findings of a major oral history study, this article uses the personal narratives of Ulster Protestant migrants to illuminate some of the understudied cultural and human impacts of the Northern Ireland Troubles for postwar British society. Situating these impacts within the history of “internal decolonization” and the postwar implosion of “Greater Britain,” it shows how the Troubles fueled popular perceptions of Northern Ireland as an “imperial liability,” creating distinctive dilemmas of belonging for Ulster Britons settling in England during the period. Drawing on cultural and psychoanalytic approaches to oral history analysis, the article demonstrates how the “composure” of Ulster Protestant subjectivities in Troubles-era England involved attempts to narratively integrate the destabilizing impacts of cultural encounter with memories, emotions, and identifications extending from migrants’ formative experiences of growing up in the polarized sociopolitical world of Northern Ireland. In analyzing the interplay between these contexts and dynamics, the article sheds new light on the cultural legacies of the Troubles for British society, suggesting new ways of situating the conflict within the historiography of postwar Britain and presenting some alternative interpretive possibilities for writing the human history of the Troubles beyond the “flattening rubric of identity.”

This article explores the entanglements between educational and confessional history in early modern Europe, focusing on the conflict between the University of Vienna and the Jesuit College in 1553–1623. As part of a broader trend of confrontations between “old” universities and Jesuit colleges, the Viennese case stands out for two key reasons: 1) the university’s remarkable institutional resilience and 2) the overt confessional antagonism between the two institutions. The article examines both institutional and religious dimensions of the contest, highlighting the ambiguous role of the Habsburg rulers in its development. A strong commitment to the ideals of academic privileges and autonomy made the university resistant to Jesuit infiltration and led to the longest educational rivalry in Central Europe. Confronted with the Jesuit-led re-Catholicization efforts, the university remained strikingly persistent in preserving its confessionally neutral stance. This conflict offers a new perspective on complex confessional dynamics in the Habsburg monarchy.

Policymakers often cite a need to balance, or trade off, the protection and restoration of the natural environment on the one hand, and the extractive use of the environment for economic reasons on the other. This tension is inherent in the goal of ‘sustainable development’, which, despite providing a conceptual basis for Western environmental and conservation law, has also been criticized for legitimizing socio-ecologically destructive practices. This tension comes to the fore in the New Zealand government’s Fast-track Approvals Act 2024, which, to prioritize economic development interests, circumvents prior environmental and conservation law safeguards, as well as constitutional protection for the rights of Indigenous Māori. We undertook a contextual legal analysis of the fast-track legislation, demonstrating how it works to undermine conservation outcomes and Indigenous rights. Our findings hold particular significance for scholarly and policy debates about transnational environmental law, especially the contribution of Indigenous knowledge and law in a multi-level governance context. We argue that centring relationality in environmental law frameworks might help to shift away from binary approaches to environmental law, which trade off economic versus environmental and cultural interests.

This article examines the debate around transatlantic slavery in the German Enlightenment. The debate is considered in light of previous early modern notions of servitude, the interest in sympathy characteristic of the Enlightenment, and the emergent abolitionist movement. The article argues that emotion was central to German commentaries on transatlantic slavery so that, by around 1780, Enlightened Germans were expected to sympathize with the enslaved. This normative emphasis on sympathy preceded widespread support for abolitionism, which emerged only from the middle of the 1780s. The article further argues that the emotional import of slavery played a key role in both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist arguments. Abolitionists understood the feelings associated with the slave trade (and in some cases slavery itself) as reflections of its retrograde character. By contrast, anti-abolitionists praised sympathy with the enslaved as a reflection of European Enlightenment, but maintained that such feelings should be subdued to perpetuate Enlightened progress.

I aim to make progress on the following question: When is it morally wrong to risk harming another being? I will pay special attention to the use of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), but my points are relevant to other situations and beings. I focus on the motive or purpose for exposing a being to risk of harm. I argue that it is morally wrong to potentially harm a being for the sake of others’ positive well-being or for a purported good such as knowledge (that is, knowledge for its own sake). The practical ramifications include that there is a moral hurdle of justification for potentially harming another being, and the justification cannot be others’ positive well-being or a good such as knowledge. Essentially, if the use of a being can be morally justified, it needs to be justified based on reducing enough ill-being or unpleasantness. One should recognise the creation and use of beings as a moral issue and view any warranted potential harm as a regrettable lesser evil. If feasible, it is desirable to use alternative methods that carry less risk and do not involve potentially sentient beings.

In this article, it is argued that in the actual world, even if not in all possible worlds, sentience is both a necessary and sufficient condition for having moral standing. In arguing for this conclusion, the concepts of sentience and moral standing are explained. Five kinds of interest are then differentiated—functional, biotic, sentient, sapient, and self-conscious. It is argued that having sentient interests, rather than merely any interests, is what grounds moral standing. However, determining who has moral standing is only a beginning. Once we know whose interests we need to consider, we still need to know what interests need to be considered. We also need to know what considering those interests implies. Those questions are engaged in the remainder of this article.

With rising political polarisation, far-right digital spaces have become fertile ground for amplifying xenophobic discourse. Adopting a critical multimodal analytic approach to stance analysis, we examined anti-immigration posts and comments related to the US context in the QAnon+ Telegram channel from January 2021 to October 2022 to show that radicalisation in this context is not merely a matter of extreme opinions, but of the performative multimodal enactment of stance that drives ideological alignment. The anti-immigration discourse is dominated by attitude markers and boosters, while hedging and self-mention are scarce, reflecting a tendency towards affective intensity and ideological closure over deliberation or reflexivity. Emojis, as paralinguistic resources, co-perform stance by amplifying shared outrage and mobilising group alignment. The overall argument is that hate in radical digital publics is enacted through patterned multimodal and performative processes, explaining the mechanisms that make such spaces resilient to rational counter-argument and potent for collective extremism. (Anti-immigration, far-right, multimodal critical discourse analysis, group alignment, performativity, QAnon, stance-taking)

Standard game theory struggles to explain cooperation and coordination in collective action problems where rational strategies often fail to yield mutually beneficial outcomes. One response to this is team reasoning, which introduces group agency. Another is Kantian optimization, which retains individual agency but assumes universalization-based optimization. Some have proposed that Kantian optimization is best understood as a subtype of team reasoning, a member of the same theoretical family. This paper disputes that. By demonstrating that Kantian-style team reasoning does not necessarily lead to Kantian equilibrium, the paper concludes that Kantian universalization does not fit within the group agency framework.

The number of people living alone in northwestern European cities has grown rapidly since the 1960s. Why did this happen, and to what effect? This article explores the causes and social, political and spatial consequences of this demographic transition, hypothesizing that it has fundamentally reshaped social life, housing politics and the design and use of buildings and spaces in modern urban societies. The article underscores the need for urban historians to address the rise of one-person households during the second half of the twentieth century. It urges them to move beyond the urban crisis paradigm that still dominates this period to understand the profound and lasting effects of changing household structures. The article proposes a broad temporal and geographic scope for further research, using Amsterdam as a pilot study.

High-latitude environments subject residents to extreme seasonal variations in light. This qualitative study examined how civilians living at high northern latitudes experience and manage sleep, mood and time across winter darkness and summer light. Twenty-eight adults residing in Scandinavia, Estonia and Canada completed an in-depth online, open-ended survey. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we identified a lived ecology of seasonal strain spanning physiology, emotion and temporal experience. Participants described winter as heavier sleep with difficult awakenings, inertia and flatter affect and summer as shallow, fractured sleep and a “wired” restlessness. Evening-type (“night-owl”) individuals reported greater strain across both seasons: winter mornings felt biologically unworkable, whereas summer nights never properly “started.” Crucially, people also reported changes in how they experienced time itself. Under unstable photoperiods, “day” and “night” became things to make rather than to feel: weeks “blurred” without deliberate anchors, prompting intentional “temporal scaffolds” such as fixed wake times and mealtimes, blackout in summer, morning light in winter, seasonal rituals, scheduled outdoor exposure, and, for some, temporary relocation. We interpret these accounts within circadian alignment and social zeitgeber frameworks and extend them by specifying temporal experience, not just sleep or mood, as a key outcome of environmental light. Implications include chronotype-aware screening in primary care, normalising circadian and temporal hygiene in public messaging, and embedding light scheduling and routine-based supports within fatigue-risk management for isolated, confined and extreme operations. The findings provide an ecological description of civilian adaptation at high latitude and generate testable predictions for future quantitative and operational studies.

Ecological restoration is increasingly recognized as essential for combating the biodiversity and climate crises. However, restoration activities can also produce or exacerbate social and environmental injustices. This article explores the extent to which the European Union’s 2024 Nature Restoration Regulation (NRR) enables ‘just ecological restoration’. Drawing on the three dimensions of environmental justice – distributive, recognitional, and procedural – we assess whether the NRR adequately includes justice considerations. Our analysis finds that while the Regulation includes several justice-relevant provisions, many are implicit and lack enforceable guarantees. Disparities in expected costs and benefits raise concerns over distribution, limited safeguards may exclude marginalized communities, and participation mechanisms vary across Member States. The potential of the NRR to foster fair and inclusive restoration depends largely on how Member States implement their national restoration plans and whether the European Commission provides clear guidance and support to ensure socially responsible action.

Neural organoids derived from pluripotent stem cells have sparked ethical debate because, it is claimed, they could be sentient, or could develop sentience. We critically assess three routes for defending such a possibility: analogy with known sentient organisms, inference from neural function using leading theories of consciousness, and foundational philosophical commitments. Current cortical organoids lack nociceptors, sensory integration, and behavioral repertoires necessary for analogical arguments; they also fall short of the structural differentiation presupposed by most empirically grounded consciousness theories, rendering existing neural metrics unreliable. Even if constitutive panpsychism were accepted, the moral relevance of any putative micro experiences would remain undetermined. Precautionary appeals, therefore, hinge on how the term “possible” is interpreted. We argue that regulatory or experimental restrictions are warranted only once there is a non-trivial empirical likelihood that a given organoid type can generate valenced experience. Given present technological limits on size, complexity, and vascularization, that threshold has not been reached, nor is it likely to be met in the near to medium term. This claim is contingent on the current state of research, but we believe it to be justified. Our analysis clarifies conceptual ambiguities surrounding organoid sentience and offers a principled framework for proportionate precaution.

This paper revisits the longstanding debate over the nature of suffering, focusing on the divide between subjective and objective accounts. I defend a Personalist conception of suffering, rooted in an Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing, that recognizes suffering as both universally human and deeply personal. On this view, suffering is neither a purely sentient, inner experience nor reducible to external conditions, but a disruption of flourishing that arises when love or justice is violated or absent—and that calls for a communal response. Understood through this lens, suffering, I argue, invites a shared practice of meaning-making—not as sentimental optimism but as a form of grounded hope: realistic, responsive, and attuned to the dignity of both the sufferer and those who accompany them. Even when suffering cannot be cured or fully comprehended, it can be met with deeper engagement, mutual responsibility, and a reaffirmation of our commitment to a life lived in relation and shared purpose.

From the late nineteenth-century onward, Orientalism became a crucial vehicle for articulating non-normative sexualities in Europe. This phenomenon was especially significant in Spain, where several prominent composers were not heterosexual and where national identity was intricately linked to the country’s Islamic past. This article examines the sublimation of homosexuality in a corpus of Symbolist Orientalist works by leading modernist composers: Manuel de Falla, Adolfo Salazar, Ernesto Halffter, and Gustavo Durán. These compositions played a pivotal role in articulating sexual otherness among the educated classes in Spain and beyond, particularly within the circle of the English Hispanist John B. Trend and certain Parisian milieus. This essay provides a musicological analysis of the significant cultural phenomenon of homoerotic Orientalism in early twentieth-century Europe, with a particular emphasis on Spain – a subject increasingly explored in literary and art-historical studies but still largely overlooked in musicological discourse.