Russia’s post-1991 nation-building project has been torn between competing interpretations of national identity. Whereas the other former Soviet republics opted for nation-building centered on the titular nation, Russia’s approach to national identity was framed by the fact that the RSFSR had been defined not as a designated national homeland but as a multi-ethnic federation. This, coupled with Russia’s definition as the legal successor of the Soviet Union, suggesting continuity and a history of uninterrupted statehood, has enabled a range of rivaling understandings of how to define the “nation.” Focusing on top-down official nation-building, this article examines how, against a backdrop of shifting political contexts, structural constraints, and popular attitudes, the Kremlin has gradually revised its understanding of what constitutes the “Russian nation.” Four models for post-Soviet Russian nation-building are identified – the ethnic, the multi-national, the civic, and the imperial. Over time, the correlation of forces among these has shifted. The article concludes that, despite some claims of an ethno-nationalist turn after 2014, the Kremlin still employs nationalism instrumentally: National identity has undoubtedly become more russkii-centered, but, at the same time, the Kremlin keeps the definition of “Russianness” intentionally vague, blurring the boundaries between “nation” and “civilization.”

When Sir John Franklin’s expedition ships, lost since 1845, were found in the Arctic in 2014 and 2016, respectively, they were referred to several times in the media as ghost ships. However, such a comparison is not new. In 1862, an article linking the disappearance of the Franklin expedition to that of a ghost ship in Antarctic waters appeared in a newly founded German geographic journal aimed at a general audience. The story of the ghost ship Jenny in the Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica would probably have been long forgotten had it not appeared again in this journal in English translation a century later. Since then, the story has appeared again and again in publications about mysterious phenomena, without succeeding in answering the question of whether such a ship ever existed at all. Instead of continuing to look for evidence of the actual existence of the ship, the following article not only presents the sources of the 1862 journal article but also examines how the story itself might have originated. In addition to a well-known legend about a ghost ship in the Arctic waters of Greenland, which will also be analysed in greater detail, oral tales and tradition about two almost forgotten voyages into Antarctic waters and a well-known one have probably also been incorporated into the tale of the ghost ship Jenny. All translations from German are by the author.

One of the young couples that exemplified the “perfect match” marriage in Qing history, Sun Xingyan 孫星衍 and Wang Caiwei 王采薇 left behind personal records that give us a glimpse into the intimate world they created, from intellectually stimulating post-marriage courtship, to mourning and pledge of fidelity when Wang Caiwei died. Analyzing this record in the contexts of the Qing literati glorification of “perfect match” marriage and the couple's familial and social lives, this article pieces together a personal story about youthful passion and love and considers questions about the shapes of emotion and marital companionship and the ways the young couple navigated emotional and social complexities in their pursuit of an ideal companionship.

By ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2018, Ireland has undertaken inter alia the obligation to implement ‘an inclusive education system at all levels and lifelong learning’, as required by Article 24. However, concerns have been repeatedly expressed about the practice of inclusive education in Ireland in terms of admission policies, funding, school choice and reduced timetabling. This paper investigates whether, and to what extent, the current approach to special educational needs (SEN) in Ireland complies with the aim of ensuring an inclusive educational system in which children with disabilities are valued and empowered. Ireland is an interesting case-study due to its history of marginalisation of children with disabilities and its relatively recent engagement with the concept of inclusive education. By using a socio-legal approach, drawing on qualitative interviews with key stakeholders in education combined with a legal analysis of relevant primary and secondary sources, it examines the current practices relating to the education of children with disabilities in Ireland.

In this article, the authors examine radiocarbon, histo-taphonomic, and contextual evidence for the deliberate curation, manipulation, and redeposition of human bone in British Bronze Age mortuary contexts. New radiocarbon dates and histological analyses are combined with existing data to explore the processes and practices that resulted in the incorporation of ‘relic’ fragments of bone in later graves, including evidence for the deliberate re-opening of previous burials and for funerary treatments such as excarnation and mummification. In some cases, fragments of human bone were curated outside the mortuary context. The authors consider what the treatment of human remains reveals about mortuary complexity in the Bronze Age, about relations between the living and the dead, and about attitudes to the body and concepts of the self.

This article focuses on Italian schools in Scotland during the Fascist ventennio. The Italian-Scottish case study will be helpful to understand one of the principal means, the schools, that the Fascist regime used from the early 1920s in order to preserve the Italian identity of second-generation Italians. From the first half of the 1930s, the schools also became one of the key channels for spreading Fascist ideology and propaganda. Nevertheless, in Scotland, the schools also had a social significance, as Italians began to gather and socialise through them as a community. Accordingly, the foundations and educational, social and political roles of the schools will be examined. The article offers an insight into a topic neglected by Italian and British scholars, despite the second biggest Italian diasporic community in Britain residing in interwar Glasgow.

This research project is aimed at identifying risk and protective factors of social withdrawal, by studying some areas of young people's psychological wellbeing. The study took place in a medium-sized town in the north-west of Italy. A total of 1,102 students participated in the study. An online survey was sent to all the students attending the second year of local high schools, then the results were combined with those from two focus groups involving young people and adults. The findings indicate that socio-cultural factors may be the reasons why social disengagement is so widespread. The societal pressure to be successful in every life domain may push young people, unable to conform, out of the competition. Bullying, negative school experiences and stress are associated with an over-investment of time on the internet, a harbinger of social isolation. This study's findings suggest the need to plan student initiatives, to identify the warning signals of the phenomenon.

By connecting seemingly scattered reforms and debates over the 1900s and 1910s, this paper outlines a longer process that eroded the institutional and ideological foundations of the imperial examination system (keju) that did not vanish immediately after the 1905 abolition. Under the title incentive program introduced in 1904, keju titles had been awarded to graduates of modern schools until the very end of the Qing dynasty. As the number of modern schools surged over the 1900s, the program led to an overexpansion of title holders, and ironically enhanced the scholar-official identity that was at odds with the discipline at the modern schools. To lobby for the abolition of the program, non-official reformers of education formulated a moralized critique against the keju titles, but no substantial reform had been undertaken before the 1911 Revolution ended the Qing dynasty. In the 1910s the same network of late Qing reformers launched an ideological war against traditional values that they saw as the ideological foundation of the keju. They constructed new concepts of education and vocation that spread through a powerful network connecting education, industry, and media. This “longer abolition” of the keju produced a prolonged effect on the visions of social order in twentieth century China.

In the late nineteenth century, the anthropology curators of the Smithsonian Institution consulted their cataloguing systems and storerooms, assessing specimens in order to determine which could be designated as duplicate specimens and exchanged with museums domestically and abroad. The status of ‘duplicate’ for specimens was contingent on conceptions of similiarity impacted by disciplinary classification praxis, with particular emphasis on object nomenclature and formal attributes. Using rattles from Haida Gwaii collected between 1881 and 1885 by James Swan for the Smithsonian Institution, this article explores how anthropology curators designated rattles as exchangeable duplicate specimens. It considers cataloguing and spatial arrangements, as well as changing populations and formal characteristics of rattles, in order to explore how similarity was operationalized in the museum to produce duplicate anthropological specimens.

This paper addresses a serious challenge to some recent semantic accounts of quotation: the existence of ‘non-constituent hybrid quotations’, as in Vera said she was ‘very happy and incredibly relieved’ by the supreme court’s decision. These pose a threat to theories that have to make the assumption that hybrid quotations must be co-extensive with syntactic constituents. Responses to the challenge have been proposed, first a quote-breaking procedure, and subsequently unquotation. I argue that these responses fall short of providing empirically satisfactory accounts of the phenomena. Other theories of quotation are not under threat of non-constituent hybrid quotations. I single out a particular family of theories, depiction theories, which have the added advantage of doing justice to the core mechanisms at the heart of quoting.

This paper examines the early years of decision making in the award of the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry, and shows how the prize became a tool in the boundary work which upheld the social demarcations between scientists and inventors, as well as promoting a particular normative view of individual scientific achievement. The Nobel committees were charged with rewarding scientific achievements that benefited humankind: their interpretation of that criterion, however, turned in the first instance on their assessment of the groundbreaking nature of the ‘science’, with the applied or practical ‘benefits’ of that discovery being treated as very much secondary factors in the award. Through an interrogation of the reports sent by the committees to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, this paper shows how committee members depended on a notion of ‘post-dated utilitarianism’ in reconciling potential tension between rewarding basic and applied science, and explores the ways in which the annual prize both shaped, and was shaped by, media perceptions of scientific virtue.

This study focuses on Catalan cabinet ministers in democratic Spain with a view to understanding what function they perform in the central government: regional ambassador or state agent? To this end, this analysis draws on a sub-dataset comprised of 22 Catalan cabinet ministers taken from a general pool of 220 cabinet ministers and 371 ministerial appointments from 1977 to 2021. Our findings demonstrate, first, that no Catalan cabinet minister has ever reached the position of Prime Minister and Catalans constitute a kind of ministerial “middle class” occupying intermediate positions in the cabinet. Second, the examination of career paths and publications of Catalan ministers shows that their role varied according to circumstances. Third, in this article we argue that those variations can be best interpreted as a delegation between principal and agent relying on two main variables, namely the type of party they belong to in Catalonia and the parliamentarian majority sustaining the party controlling the Spanish cabinet.

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union and China resurveyed their border in order to restart their long-stalemated border negotiations. These negotiations resulted in only a partial border settlement: the agreement was signed in 1991. By the end of 1989, nationalities openly expressing their wish to secede from the Soviet Union caused the Soviet government to slow down the negotiation process, and Moscow insisted on setting aside the most contentious sections. China’s nationalities issue had the opposite effect on Zhongnanhai: Chinese leaders wished to settle the entire Sino-Soviet border as quickly as possible. However, once the collapse of the Soviet Union became imminent, the Chinese saw advantages of delaying the negotiations on the disputed sections of the border. They calculated that would allow for China to negotiate with weaker, newly independent countries.

The study of media nationalism has had a curious history. Some of the “classic” studies of nationalism have placed the media at the heart of their work but say very little about media theory or research. More recently, studies of populism and nationalist parties have talked quite a lot about the impact of digital technologies but have very little to say about nationalism. This piece first provides a brief overview of some of these classic studies before noting how insights from the study of media, and in particular audiences, began to filter through to nationalism research in the 1990s and early 2000s. It then addresses both the discursive and digital turns that influenced wider debates around the relationship between media and nationalism over the past decade or so, before outlining the limitations of such work and possible avenues for future research.