The extent to which gender neutral and gendered nouns impact differently upon native French speakers’ gender representations was examined through a yes-no forced choice task. Swiss (Experiment 1) and Québec (Experiment 2) French-speaking participants were presented with word pairs composed of a gendered first name (e.g., Thomas) and a role (e.g., doctor), and tasked to indicate whether they believed that [first name] could be one of the [role]. Roles varied according to gender stereotypicality (feminine, masculine, non-stereotyped), and were either in a plural masculine (interpretable as generic) or gender neutral (epicenes and group nouns) form. The results indicated that the use of gender neutral forms of roles avoided a strong male bias found for the masculine forms, and that both gender neutral and masculine forms used equal cognitive resources. Further, stereotype effects associated with both gender-neutral and grammatically masculine forms were quite small (<1%). These results were highly reliable across both Swiss French and Québec speakers. Our study suggests that gender neutral forms are strong alternatives to the use of the masculine form as default value.

This essay considers the vexed relationship between belonging and identity. Belonging is not an objective or unreflective association but rather an emotional assertion of attachment. That emotional connection is an indispensable component of identity, which, as Joseph David argues in Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging, is a relationship charged with meaning. Accordingly, the distinction between belonging as a privately held sentiment and the politics of belonging overlooks the fact that the emotions associated with belonging define group membership. Belonging is not a private matter but an emotional relationship that shapes social life, reinforces a group’s identity politics, and finds expression in a group’s practices. Analysis of two case studies from ancient Judaism—the writings of Philo of Alexandria and the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls—demonstrates the emotional, social, and discursive dimensions of belonging and the role it plays in producing identity. Belonging is not a stable concept but is rather one that assumes different forms depending on the emotional orientation of the group and the particulars of identity politics. For Philo, belonging reflects a universalistic love for all humanity that helps shape an identity embracing Jewish practice and Greek virtue. By contrast, the Dead Sea sect’s antipathy toward all other Jews requires that a sense of belonging express not only love for fellow sectarians but also hate for all outsiders.

Joseph E. David’s Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging provides an erudite demonstration of how an analytical approach that directs attention to negotiations of belonging in exegetical and legal thinking can yield crucial insight into how social boundaries are defined and defended in throughout human history in a broad array of contexts. Among the examples he brings to illustrate premodern efforts to delineate belonging is Nahmanides’s interpretation of territory based commandments. David shows that Nahmanides made the radical claim that the covenant was firmly linked to the land, so that any people inhabiting the land were obliged to follow it, and complete compliance with divine law could be achieved only in the Land of Israel. This essay examines David’s discussion of Nahmanides’s interpretation of law in the Land of Israel and considers the implications of extending an analysis of conceptions of belonging into other corners of Nahmanides’s career as a commentator, community leader, and teacher.

This article deals with Sarah Wambaugh’s life and work concerning global territorial questions of border disputes and nationalities as well as minorities issues. Trained at Radcliffe College in the disciplines of international law and political science, Wambaugh engineered a somewhat unprecedented career for herself in diplomatic circles after the First World War, achieving a worldwide reputation as the foremost expert on plebiscites, especially in areas of post-war conflicts. By looking at three case studies, this contribution particularly emphasizes Wambaugh’s role as an extra-governmental analyst of these referenda at the intersections of gender and universal suffrage. Within the context of geographic demarcations, aspects of citizenship, national belonging or affiliation, and minority rights, palpably, were paramount. While integrating these parameters into her theoretical discourses, Wambaugh went a step further by also adding the element of the franchise for women as an imperative coefficient regarding the drawing of borderlines. Hence, the female voting corpus – in most cases of quantitative significance during the aftermaths of wars, due to the substantial decimation of the male population on battle fields – attained a pertinent part in referenda-based rights to self-determination, and Wambaugh paid credit to this fact in her activism and writings.

In Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging Joseph David offers an erudite and duly nuanced analysis of Judaism as the faith of a people bound by kinship and a faith grounded in religious law, of consanguineous and spiritual belonging. In the premodern period and prior to the onset of secularization, the relation of kinship and spiritual belonging was determined by religious law in dialogue with evolving social realities. With the eclipse of religious authority, as David astutely notes, the traditional codes of Jewish belonging were desacralized, allowing for competing ethical and social values, and visions of the good. To remedy the consequent fracturing of Jewish affiliation, David calls for a revalorization of Jewish kinship, focused on familial affection and mutual regard, which he celebrates as an ethos of care. To cast the ethos of care in purely phenomenological terms, however, courts a blurring of the ethical and axiological boundaries between ideological communities—Left and Right—that offer bonds of mutual care, solidarity, and distinctive visions of the good. Moreover, as regards Judaism, one might find contemporary institutional expressions of Jewish kinship, religious or otherwise, to be incompatible with one’s understanding of the tradition’s teachings and values and choose not to belong.

This paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. We argue that the symbolic value of each agricultural commodity, in entrenching the hierarchy of power relations and the institutionalisation of white control, mediated colonial responses to peasant production and concomitantly ‘peasant agency’. We use this case study to highlight the structural constraints on ‘agency’ and to explore how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa. The paper uses archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspapers, and journals from the Tobacco Research Board (TRB).

Science diplomacy can be defined as “the use of scientific collaborations between countries to address joint problems and to build constructive international partnerships for delivering effective scientific advice for policy making”. During the last 10 years, the Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research (INAR) has been active in finding ways to solve global Grand Challenges, particularly climate change and poor air quality in polluted megacities, and at the same time, better bridge research to international climate policy and science diplomacy processes. INAR has introduced Pan-Eurasian Experiment programme running since the year 2012 (www.atm.helsinki.fi/peex) to better address the scientific challenge to understand Atmosphere – Earth Surface – Biosphere interactions and feedbacks in the Northern Eurasian context. INAR has also launched a measurement concept called the Global Network of Stations Measuring Earth Surface and Atmosphere Interactions (GlobalSMEAR) and has hosted the European Centre of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences since 2015. Most recently, INAR has coordinated the Arena for the gap analysis of the existing Arctic Science Co-Operations (AASCO), 2020–2021, to promote research with a holistic and integrated approach in understanding feedbacks and interactions globally and locally at the Arctic and outside the Arctic environments.

We deploy a novel and radical approach to vulnerability theory to investigate Scotland's response to asylum seekers’ vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic and test Scotland's self-affirmation as a hospitable country. Our ethical vulnerability analysis enhances Fineman's vulnerability analysis by denationalising the vulnerable subject and locating her within our ‘uneven globalised world’. We further enrich this fuller version of vulnerability analysis with insights from Levinas's and Derrida's radical vulnerability theory and ethics of hospitality. We demonstrate how our ethical vulnerability analysis enables us to subvert the hostile premise of migration laws and policies, and thus fundamentally redefine relationships between guests and hosts so that the host is compelled to respond to the Other's vulnerability. We argue that this hospitable impulse yields a generous and absolute commitment to progressive social welfare provision for asylum seekers, which brings Scotland closer to fulfilling its aspirations to be a hospitable host by welcoming the Other.

In the early 1960s, when a majority of African countries were gaining independence, the training of personnel capable of implementing nation-building projects became imperative for new African governments, even though higher education opportunities on the continent remained scarce. In a context of competition with the former colonial powers and the USSR, the United States decided to set up scholarship programs for the training of postcolonial African elites. Through the analysis of one of these programs, the African Scholarship Program of American Universities (ASPAU), this article will show that in addition to the Cold War motivations of the US government, pan-African connections and university initiatives were essential in laying the groundwork for the project of educating Africans in the United States. It also highlights the too often overlooked role played by African leaders and academics in the concrete realization, reappropriation, and questioning of overseas training projects.