This article examines civilian mobilization amidst the Donbas war, Ukraine. It focuses on ordinary residents of the frontline regions who voluntarily got together to address the humanitarian and military consequences of war in the environment of lacking state support. It explores the micro-level dynamics of mobilization, particularly the demographic profile of civilian volunteers, their motivations to join, and pathways to engagement. In so doing, it provides an account of how ordinary residents of seemingly passive regions – Southern and Eastern Ukraine – become active in times of crisis. Contrary to the mainstream accounts that credit civilian mobilization to the rise of patriotism in wartime, it demonstrates that local security concerns and affective reactions to the heightened precarity of others are crucial factors that propel collective action at the rear. In the case of Ukraine, the efficiency of wartime mobilization was increased through the structures that emerged during the proceeding Maidan protests, as well as preexisting private and entrepreneurial networks. By employing ethnographic tools of inquiry, the article interrogates the mobilizing potential of seemingly latent communities in times of crisis and contributes to the literature on wartime collective action at the rear.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has once again brought borders to the center of attention, as journalists, authorities, and scholars have grappled with the pandemic. The coronavirus outbreak, which began in late 2019 and early 2020 has caused tremendous personal, economic, and social upheaval. As many states decided to pursue the national interests and to close their borders to prevent the spread of the virus, this decision had major consequences for residents in border regions, for whom border crossing is an everyday practice. The article aims at exploring the discourse on the rebordering experience as constructed by local authorities and residents of two twin towns, one on the Polish-Czech (Cieszyn-Český Těšín) and one on the Polish-German (Słubice-Frankfurt/Oder) border. By applying a Discursive Historical Approach, we identified four main discursive strands which deployed diverse imaginaries.

This article illuminates ways in which memory of Ireland's Great Famine or ‘an Gorta Mór’ (1845–1852) shaped US music during the US Civil War (1861–1865). Among scholarship on Irish Americans in the Civil War, few sources substantively address lingering memories and trauma from the Great Famine. Yet, a significant amount of the estimated 1.6 million Irish immigrants living in the US in 1860, 170,000 of whom enlisted in the war, were famine survivors. Music's unique role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory in this transnational context. Adopting a concept of ‘private, secret, insidious trauma’ from Laura Brown and Maria P.P. Root, as well as understanding Jeffrey Alexander's ideas about cultural trauma as a sociological process, the article highlights a some of the ways in which famine memories emerged in music-making during the war. Case studies include a survey of US sheet music, the transnational performance and reception history of the song ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, and research on the life of the northern Union army's most successful bandleader, Patrick Gilmore, who left Athlone, in Ireland famine-ravaged West, as a teenager in the late 1840s. The approach is inherently transatlantic, accounting for histories that occurred in the United States, Ireland and the broader Atlantic world dominated by Britain. The essay illustrates how music can contribute to social history, ways in which the application of research on trauma can inform musicological work, and ways in which traumatic memories can emerge across time and distance, particularly in diasporic contexts.

The current debate over the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines once again highlights the many shortcomings of the modern intellectual property (IP) system, especially when it comes to equitable access to medicines. This essay argues that the (unspoken) conceptual center of struggles over access to new pharmaceuticals rests in the IP system's colonial legacy, which perceives the world as uncharted territory that is ripe for discovery and ownership. This vision of the world as a blank canvas, or terra nullius, sets aside any other models of ownership and devalues other traditional modes of relating to territory and nature. Several examples show the long-lasting exclusionary effects of this hidden legacy of colonial conquest in the field of public health, ranging from the spiraling price of insulin to the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to the negotiation of sharing mechanisms for virus samples. In all of these cases, the continuing marginalization of other interests by the IP system can lead to exploitation, without either the “sources” of materials, such as those from whom the samples were taken, or the recipients of the eventual product having any say in matters of price and access. This legacy of fundamental exclusion needs to be recognized and addressed in order to arrive at more equitable solutions to public health emergencies such as the current pandemic.

In the 1970s, both Denmark and Norway passed abortion legislation that is still the basis for the regulation of abortion in these countries. The legislation was fairly liberal with abortion on demand until 12 weeks of gestation and a permission system for later abortions. This article provides a brief history of the developments leading up to these political compromises and an analysis of the reasons why they have proved remarkably stable. It ends by looking at some factors that may now destabilize 50 years of stable compromise about abortion.

In spontaneous English, which clauses can deviate from traditional syntactic schemas by having a resumptive pronoun where a gap would otherwise be. Some researchers claim that such uses of which are not errors but rather a reanalysis. However, there is no consensus as to how which is being reanalyzed. Collins & Radford (2015) suggest that it behaves like a caseless relative pronoun; Sells (1985) and Kjellmer (1988) posit a subordinating conjunction behavior; Daalder (1989) posits a coordinating conjunction behavior; and Miller (1988: 116), Kuha (1994), Loock (2007) and Burke (2017) note that which can be replaced by both subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, but they do not commit to one over the other. Here, we present prosodic and syntactic data in which such uses of which behave more like a coordinating conjunction than like a relative pronoun or subordinating conjunction.

This article explores an instance of dialect levelling in South East England, the reversal of Cockney diphthong shift. We trace this reversal through an apparent-time analysis of 52 speakers from Debden, a community in Essex with East London heritage. Dynamic vowel analyses of word-list and passage data suggests a reversal of the diphthong shift towards SSBE targets which has occurred most abruptly in those born after 1992 potentially as a result of increased social mobility in this generation. We compare the results in Debden to previous findings in the south-eastern towns of Milton Keynes and Reading where apparent-time change was also observed away from a shifted vowel system and towards SSBE targets (Kerswill & Williams 2000, 2005). In diverse areas of South East England, a common process of levelling towards the pan-regional standard is present which is not occurring exclusively as a result of dialect contact or face-to-face interaction. Nonetheless, each community exhibits a distinct trajectory and timing of language change which can be attributed to different patterns of movement and resettlement and, in particular, access to social mobility and the retention of community networks.

This account of Sinology in the United Kingdom, in part incorporating personal reminiscence, starts with an analysis of the growth of the British library resources necessary to the practice of Sinology, followed by a sketch of the marginality in Britain in the early twentieth century of this type of scholarship. The changes brought about by the military requirements of World War II are seen as foreshadowing an era during which large-scale funding in Asian and other studies briefly allowed Sinology to flourish, after which a failure to understand the benefits of training in a non-spoken language reduced the opportunities for British students to the point where British Sinology is virtually extinct, and the willingness of scholars from elsewhere in Europe to engage with British university life is being sorely tried. The contributions of British Sinology, supported by Chinese and other incomers during its efflorescence, are briefly surveyed.

Despite the long Dutch presence in Taiwan (1624–1662) and the active trade between Batavia and China in the eighteenth century, the Dutch tradition of academic Sinology got underway only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the training of future officers for Chinese affairs in the Dutch East Indies was moved to Leiden. This training (often including an extended period of stay in China) remained the main task of Chinese teaching at Leiden until 1949, when Indonesia achieved independence. The earliest phase of Chinese teaching at Leiden has received an encyclopedic coverage in the work of Koos Kuiper. Scholars of the second generation who have received monographic treatment include J.J.M. de Groot and Henri Borel. The best-known Dutch Sinologist of the middle of the twentieth century was Robert Hans van Gulik who was not only a successful diplomat and highly original scholar, but also established an international reputation with his Judge Dee crime novels. His work has given rise to considerable scholarship in English and Chinese.

The tale of Korean Sinology is as dramatic as that of Korea itself, which has moved from being a faithful periphery of the Chinese civilization to a newly rising economic power in the modern world. This article begins with a survey of some distinctive features of premodern Korean scholarly works by the end of the Chosŏn dynasty from the perspective of Sinology. Then it moves on to modern scholarship, focusing mostly on the field of Chinese history, which I think is the most active and innovative among the several different fields in today's Korean Sinology. The history of Korean Sinology is a telling case study that illustrates how humanistic learning is deeply connected to fundamental aspects of a society's politics, economics, and culture at a given moment in time.

Scholars of American identity have typically concluded that Americans more widely endorse civic values than ascriptive ones in surveys, though IATs suggest that there are robust associations between race and American identity. In addition to this apparent contradiction, these studies share similar methodological limitations: the discrepancy between reported attitudes and real-world behavior. Though these methods are well-cited in the wider literature, attitudes are often conflated to be synonymous with behavior in American identity scholarship. I argue that it is necessary to study how Americans conceive of their national identity in different situational contexts. Using the complementary techniques of semi-structured interviewing and qualitative vignettes, I explore and compare the ways in which 10 American graduate students make sense of their national identity in a series of abstract and concrete settings. Results of a multi-method text analysis approach demonstrate that: 1) there are a multitude of components not currently being discussed or measured; 2) the invocation of American identity components depends on their setting; 3) the ways in which components are characterized are just as important as their invocation; and 4) the difficulty expressed by participants to define a singular American identity underscores the continued salience of the multiple traditions thesis.