Hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century, yet the history of science has often treated them as stages for scientific practice, not as the play itself. Drawing on recent work in the history of science and of international relations, the introduction to this special issue suggests avenues for exploring the phenomenon of the international scientific conference, broadly construed, by highlighting the connected dimensions of communication, sociability and international relations. It lays out a typology of scientific conferences as a way of gaining an overview of their diversity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the international scientific conference is a central locus for understanding science as a social, cultural and political practice.

This article explores the influence of worker resistance to Taylorism on industrial relations in Sweden. By analysing archival material from workers at the Separator Corporate Group, the Metal Workers’ Union, and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, this article highlights the interplay between shop floor activism, discussions within trade unions, and central labour market relations. It demonstrates how rank-and-file activism compelled union leadership and the central labour market organizations to adopt a series of agreements in the 1940s aimed at addressing worker resistance to Taylorism.

Despite worker discontent, scientific management spread during the 1930s and 1940s. This eventually contributed to the Metal Strike of 1945, which had significant impact on labour–capital relations. According to the metal workers, scientific management, particularly time-motion studies, reduced their bargaining power by concealing labour processes and methods for wage determination, thereby allowing management a monopoly on knowledge.

Following the strike, negotiations between the Trade Union Confederation and the Swedish Employers’ Association resulted in the 1948 Work Studies Agreement. This agreement provided a platform for resolving conflicts and encouraging workers’ support of rationalization via the Work Studies Council. Worker resistance consequently drove Swedish labour market centralization, inadvertently promoting closer labour–capital cooperation.

This article argues, among other things, that although worker resistance failed to upend scientific management, it resulted in it being regulated within a corporatist framework. This highlights the important historical role local trade union activism has played in shaping labour market institutions and the broader political economy.

The Paris-trained, Japanese composer Michiko Toyama (1913–2006) was appointed as the earliest foreign-born visiting composer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), the first institutionally supported studio of its kind in the United States. Yet she remains virtually unknown to scholarship, despite a growing literature on women pioneers in electronic music. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and the interpretive study of music, this article studies the conditions under which Toyama has found little remembrance to date; and it conceptualizes Toyama's own ideas of modernity formulated over the massive cultural and geographical dislocations of her lifetime. Within an intensely lyrical compositional practice, Toyama thematized hallmarks of traditional modernism studies: self-reflexivity, estrangement, exile, and exoticism. Racist criticism during her lifetime dismissed her music as a belated mimicry of Western models. Yet the modernist qualities and themes of her work emerge as a consequence of her life lived in intercultural contact zones of uprooting – the very conditions that make ideas of the ‘modern’ possible.

Why does the ability of political leaders to control the bureaucracy vary? With strong meritocratic recruitment and tenure protections, Brazil appears an ideal case for successful bureaucratic resistance against political control. However, our analysis reveals how Bolsonaro overcame initial resistance by recalibrating strategies, ultimately dominating many key sectors of the bureaucracy. Drawing on over 100 interviews with public officials, we find that strategies of political control and bureaucratic resistance unfold in a dynamic, yet often predictable, pattern based on leaders' previous experiences and their ability to learn, adjust, and tighten their grip on the instruments of the state. The Bolsonaro administration transformed the regulatory framework and targeted individual state employees, reducing arenas of contestation and inducing public sector workers to remain silent, implementing the president’s policy preferences. We examine these control strategies in environmental agencies, their replication, and potential long-term consequences.

This linguistic ethnographic study offers a nuanced pedagogical account of the Arabic term sumud, or ‘steadfastness’, through a sociolinguistic analysis of decolonial modes of expression among Palestinian youth in Israel. I reflect on events during the 2021 uprisings in East Jerusalem, when Palestinian youth within Israel took to the streets in solidarity with Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza. Considering the Israeli education system's denationalization of the Palestinian community within its borders, I examine how Palestinian political ideals cultivated outside the formal educational system open new possibilities for political organizing and expression. I reflect upon interviews with members of the Haifa Youth Movement and a Palestinian hip-hop artist and his lyrics. Engaging with Stroud's theorization of linguistic citizenship, I show how pedagogy of sumud as a linguistic citizenship practice opens new semiotic spaces for Palestinian youth in Israel to resist the erasure of their identity. (Linguistic citizenship, sumud pedagogy, Palestinian youth, colonized education)*

The palatal nasal is one of French’s most variable consonants with attested variants including [ɲ] alongside [nj] and, less frequently, [n] and [ŋ]. Variation is conditioned by both linguistic (position in the word, lexical item, flanking vowels) and speaker variables (in particular, variety). Except for insights provided by the studies reviewed in Recasens (2013), little is known of the articulatory properties of French /ɲ/ including the degree of inter-varietal and -speaker variation or the proportion of coronal and velar depalatalized realizations. We present here an electropalatographic (EPG) study of two European (EF) and two Quebec French (QF) speakers’ /ɲ/ production in both word-medial and -final positions in isolated and contextualized words. Quantitative indices and qualitative investigation of the linguopalatal contact profiles reveal that the EF speakers produced a relatively anterior /ɲ/, differing minimally from /n/ followed by /j/. Whereas one of their QF peers produced uniquely backed velar realizations of /ɲ/, the other speaker had fronted alveolopalatal variants word-medially versus backed velar realizations word-finally, with the latter differing minimally from the /ŋ/ of jogging. These findings are consistent with pathways to depalatalization observed in other Romance varieties and call into question the phonemic status of the palatal nasal in French.

In this paper, I argue for Fit, a prudential version of the claim that attitudes must fit their objects, the claim that there is an extra benefit when one's reactions fit their objects. I argue that Fit has surprising and powerful consequences for theories of well-being. Classic versions of the objective list theory, hedonism, desire views, and loving-the-good theories do not accommodate Fit. Suitable modifications change some of the views substantially. Modified views give reactions a robust role as sources of well-being, and they accept that objects call for some attitudes but not others. I argue that objective list theories and loving-the-good theories require the most minimal changes to accommodate Fit, so we have a pro tanto reason to favor these views over alternatives.

Luchino Visconti is widely recognised as a high-culture director. However, in his films of the period 1943–63 there was a firm engagement with consumer culture and modernity in terms of themes, characters and references. This article explores this often overlooked dimension in Visconti's films by analysing a number of key sequences and moments that relate directly to consumption, consumer culture, leisure, modernity, Americanisation and youth culture. The analysis shows how these representations related to the ongoing changes in Italian postwar society and to incoming Americanisation in particular. My research is informed by the work of Gary Cross, Victoria De Grazia and Emanuela Scarpellini on consumer culture and contextualises how Visconti's referencing of consumer culture and modernity was received by the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano or Italian Communist Party).

Rationing and illegal food trade in Second World War Italy have received very little scholarly attention in comparison to the scale and impact they had on people's daily life. This article contributes to filling this gap, first by providing an overview of the dynamics that already in the early years of the war determined the development of an illegal system of food trade. It then considers the experience of the black market through two wartime diaries, one published and the other unpublished, written by women of opposite political views, both living in Rome and its outskirts. The analysis of the diaries considers women's attitudes towards the black market. The article argues that the Fascist propaganda of duty to the homeland, so intensively practised through domestic literature during the 1920s and 1930s, was again exploited in wartime in the discourse around the black market and hid the political responsibilities of the government.

What justifies differences in the acceptance of paternalism towards competent minors and older people? I propose two arguments. The first argument draws on the widely accepted view that paternalism is easier to justify the more good it promotes for the paternalizee. It argues that paternalism targeting young people generally promotes more good for the people interfered with than similar paternalism targeting older people. While promoting people's interests or well-being is essential to the justification of paternalism, the first argument has certain unfair implications in that it disfavours paternalism towards the worse off. The second argument caters to such fairness concerns. It argues that priority or inequality aversion supports age-differentiated paternalism because young people, who act imprudently and thereby risk their interests or well-being, are worse off than older people who act in similar ways. I suggest that both arguments are pertinent in evaluating specific paternalistic acts and policies.

Administrative tribunal judges determine rights and entitlements regarding bureaucratic decisions. In immigration appeal cases, they review negative decisions of permanent residency acquisition and family reunification. Based on an analysis of all immigration appeal decisions in Canada’s Quebec province over a period of twenty-three years, we find that tribunal judges confirm the bureaucratic decision in the vast majority of cases, noting the migrants’ inability to meet the annual income requirements, and rarely reverse the decision in favour of migrants. Documenting the marginal contribution of tribunal judges to promoting administrative justice, this article contributes to the debate on whether and how courts can advance immigrants’ rights.

A brief commotion arose during the hearings for one of twenty-first-century India’s most widely discussed legal disputes, when a dynamic young attorney suggested that deities, too, had constitutional rights. The suggestion was not absurd. Like a human being or a corporation, Hindu temple deities can participate in litigation, incur financial obligations, and own property. There was nothing to suggest, said the attorney, that the same deity who enjoyed many of the rights and obligations accorded to human persons could not also lay claim to some of their constitutional freedoms. The lone justice to consider this claim blandly and briefly observed that having specific legal rights did not perforce endow one with constitutional rights. Nevertheless, a handful of recent and high-profile disputes concerning Hindu temple deities and the growing influence of Hindu nationalist politics together suggest that the issue of deities’ rights is far from a settled matter. This article argues that declining to recognize deities’ constitutional rights accurately reflects dueling commitments in the Indian Constitution.