Clinical linguistic diversity extends far beyond ‘specific language’ disorders, such as acquired aphasia or specific language impairment (SLI), to a large range of mental disorders that are not language-specific. As cognitive impairments are involved in the latter, models with an integrated approach to language and cognition can be useful for understanding and classifying the variation in question. The aim of this paper is to specify such a model, called the Bridge model, which views linguistic cognition as resting on two partially pre-linguistic pillars: (i) perceptual categorisation and (ii) social-communicative interaction. Grammar acting as a bridge crossing between them mediates the lexicalisation of perceptual categories and, based on these, new forms of social interaction and communication conveying thought structured by grammar. This model allows to conceptualise mental disorders as different ways in which this integrated linguistic-cognitive phenotype can deviate from its normal course. We illustrate our general model for the specific instance of language variation within autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

In the summer of 1894, Claud Cardew, then at British Central Africa, asked his brother in England to send him a violin. In tracing the violin's trajectory from metropole to colony, this article combines two inquiries. It probes, firstly, the emotional vocabulary surrounding Claud's request, and secondly, the technology underpinning the British Empire mail. Closely reading the Cardew family letters alongside postal documents, the author argues that for Claud, the violin's delayed arrival triggered a tangled nexus of anxieties, stemming from both the colonial racial hierarchy and the changing expectations surrounding modern technology. Much like the cultural connotations carried by the violin itself, efficient mail delivery denoted racial superiority. Furthermore, the empire mail gained significance in the minds of British users for its racially loaded function as potentially mitigating colonizers’ anxiety in the face of outnumbering locals. Yet the violin's failure to arrive when expected led to mounting anxiety, as claims for colonizers’ dominance cracked in the face of unstable postal communications. The story of Claud Cardew's violin thus offers a framework that may be used to unravel similar emotional entanglements surrounding Western technologies set to work within empire.

This article explores how the meanings individuals ascribed to kin-state citizenship change in the long term. Previous research has looked at the real-time acquisition of citizenship and established three dimensions of meanings individuals ascribe to citizenship: identity, instrumental, and legitimacy. Building on the case of Croats from Herzegovina (BiH), who acquired citizenship back in the 1990s, the article demonstrates how meanings individuals ascribe to citizenship change over time across each dimension—subject to the perception of inclusion into the kin-state, type and the extent of opportunities kin-states provide, as well as the routinization of citizenship practices. By disaggregating each dimension further, the article extends the understanding of kin-state citizenship and shows how individuals respond to the policy implementation’s overall dynamics by aligning the meanings they ascribe to citizenship. Therefore, future work should look more closely at the interplay between state policy dynamics and its impact on individuals.

In contrast with the distorted and romanticized images reproduced by far-right narratives, we argue in this study that the constructive ideals of “nation” held by Italy’s Giuseppe Mazzini and Turkey’s Ziya Gökalp, from two later examples of European nationalism, could fit into what might be called a “proto-modernism” within nationalism theories. It is proposed that both Mazzini and Gökalp went through ideological transformations that made them firm opponents of German Romanticism and ardent believers of the Enlightenment, as shown in their non-exclusionary approaches to nationalism. They both rejected essentialist (religious, ethnic, racial, etc.) rationales for the backwardness of their respective countries and maintained the necessity of constructing nations that would initially provide civic equality among citizens and then aim at normative equality among nations at the civilizational level. In that sense, our analysis finds four fundamental similarities between Mazzini and Gökalp with regard to their national ideals: loyalty to the principles of the Enlightenment, national self-determination, civic-legal equality among citizens, and normative equality among all nations.

From the year 2000 on, Chechen official international relations – called “paradiplomacy” – have centered around legitimacy-building, security cooperation and investment attraction, priorities set by the republic’s first official, pro-Russian president, Akhmat Kadyrov (in office 2000–2004). Kadyrov’s successors, Alu Alkhanov (2004–2007) and Ramzan Kadyrov (2007–to date) developed Grozny’s international engagements further, introducing new partners – such as China – and new dimensions to the external action – such as militarization. At each step, Grozny operated between full autonomy and collaboration with Moscow, involving itself in high-level diplomacy and furthering Moscow’s agenda abroad, primarily in the Middle East. In this article, I argue that Chechen paradiplomacy is an instrument for the inclusion of Chechnya into the governance structures of Russia’s federal order. The argument rests on two premises: Chechnya’s paradiplomacy is framed by the Kremlin’s proactive support and coordination, and Chechnya’s paradiplomacy is closely connected to the Kremlin’s security priorities. Since reincorporation, Chechen paradiplomacy has not been an addition to Russian federal relations but an intrinsic part of the post-2000 political arrangement between Grozny and Moscow. To empirically ground this argument, I trace the evolution of Chechen paradiplomacy across the three post-incorporation presidencies, ending in 2020.

The problem of women's access to self-defence has been internationally recognised. This paper presents original empirical data on women's use of self-defence in practice alongside critical feminist analysis of the requirements of self-defence under Scots law. The empirical findings confirm that women are rarely successful with self-defence at trial level and the doctrinal analysis further demonstrates that self-defence does not adequately reflect women's experience of violence, especially sexual violence, and instead continues to reflect male experiences of (public) violence. It is intended that this research will form part of a larger developing evidence base, the type of which has been called for (Fitz-Gibbon and Vannier, 2017) and can be used to support reform in this area. As such, it represents a significant contribution to socio-legal work that has considered the issue of women's access to criminal defences.

Climate change has become significantly pronounced in the Arctic over recent decades. In addition to these climate effects, the environment has experienced severe anthropogenic pressure connected to increased human activities, including the exploitation of natural resources and tourism. The opportunity to exploit some of the natural riches of Svalbard was promptly grasped by the Soviet Union well before the 1940s. In this paper, we present the story of Pyramiden, a mining settlement in central Svalbard. The Soviet town experienced its golden age in the 1970–1980s but fell into decline in the late 1990s which corresponds well with the overall economic and geopolitical situation of the Soviet Union. The impacts of past mining activities and related urban infrastructure development are illustrated with the use of historic aerial photographs. The most pronounced changes in the terrain configuration were connected to adjustments of the river network, construction of roads, water reservoirs, and obviously mining-related activities. The natural processes overwhelmed the city infrastructure rather quickly after the abandonment of the town in 1998, though some traces of human activities may persist for decades or centuries. Nowadays, Russia has been attempting to recover the settlement especially through support of tourism and research activities.

Most people have the intuition that, when we can save the lives of either a few people in one group or many people in another group, and all other things are equal, we ought to save the group with the most people. However, several philosophers have argued against this intuition, most famously John Taurek, in his article ‘Should the Numbers Count?’ They argue that there is no moral obligation to save the greater number, and that we are permitted to save either the many or the few. I argue in this article that, even if we are almost completely persuaded by these ‘numbers sceptics’, we ought not to just save the few. If the choice is simply between saving the many or the few, we ought to save the many.

This paper intervenes in critical socio-legal/post-colonial scholarship on human rights directed at how religion is constitutive of race and shapes who and what is regarded as ‘human’ and entitled to rights. It focuses on the Indian post-colony and legal persecution of the Tablighi Jamaat, a global, quietest Islamic movement, by the Hindu Right government during the Covid pandemic. It analyses how religion structures race in Hindu nationalist discourse to transform the Muslim into a perpetual outsider and an existential and epistemic threat to the Hindu nation and rights of the Hindu racial majority. The discussion connects to the epistemic anxiety generated by the alternative worldviews presented by this racialised ‘Other’ that shape legal consciousness and rights interventions globally. In complicating how anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia are integral to the transnational histories of race and race-making, the analysis triggers a rethinking of human rights interventions and the epistemological closures they enact.

This paper explores the significant – albeit little-known – impact that physicist Albert Einstein's theory of relativity had on the development of the science of linguistics. Both Max Talmey, a physician who played a key role in the development of early twentieth-century constructed-language movements, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who is closely associated with the notion of ‘linguistic relativity’, drew on their understanding of relativity to develop their ideas (and, in Talmey's case, also on his personal relationship with Einstein). Linguistic relativity, which posits that humans’ linguistic categories shape their perceptions of nature, has often been tied to ‘relativism’ in the social sciences and humanities. In contrast, Talmey's commitment to reformulating the language of Einsteinian relativity – especially through a constructed language he built in the 1920s and 1930s – emphasized the significance of ‘invariance’ simultaneously in the scientific doctrine and in the language in which it was discussed. The semiotic flexibility of Einstein's ‘relativity theory’ as it was widely (and wildly) appropriated outside the small community of theoretical physicists enabled the two opposing moves, while obscuring the historical linkage between physics and linguistics for both.

The author studies the 19th-century Slovak National Movement as a manifestation of the ethos of plebeian resistance against the “laws of progress” of the century in question, according to which small ethnic groups and nations were to be assimilated for the sake of the further development of more advanced nations and their cultures. A significant role in the formation of the ethos of plebeian resistance was played by Slovak folk culture, the historical context of Great Moravia, the solidarity and support of other Slavic nations living in the Habsburg monarchy, and, above all, the moral qualities of Slovak patriots. Among the most significant manifestations of this ethos was the codification of Slovak, which contributed to the formation of Slovak national identity and national ideology, the 1848–1849 Slovak Uprising, and the development of the Slovak national movement in the 1860s continuing into the mid-1870s. The aim of the 19th-century Slovak national movement was to achieve an equal position of the Slovak ethnic group among the other nations and ethnic groups living in the Habsburg monarchy, which would give rise to the free development of its creative powers and abilities as well as to the pursuit of ethical, humanistic ideals in the lives of its members.

This paper interrogates the depoliticising effects of a seemingly neutral regulatory drive at the heart of the World Health Organization (WHO)'s promotion of traditional medicine. Emerging at WHO in the late 1960s against a political backdrop of decolonisation and pan-Africanism, traditional medicine has continued to be promoted in subsequent decades, culminating in the latest global Traditional Medicine Strategy (2014 to 2023). Yet WHO's promotion and acceptance of traditional medicine have also become increasingly conditional upon its standardisation and regulation – something that appears fundamentally at odds with traditional medicine's heterogeneity. Drawing on insights from critical law and science and technology studies, we suggest that such a process at WHO has done more than simply disqualify the toxic and the dangerous. Rather, it has implicitly and explicitly marginalised and excluded those aspects of traditional medicine that deviate from scientific, biomedical ways of seeing, knowing and organising.

Between 1900 and 1939, Jewish Londoners departed the East End for the suburbs. Relocation, however, was not always the result of individual agency. Many Jews became the object of institutional strategies to coerce and persuade them to disperse away from inner-city areas. Simultaneous to this was the emergence of a dominant pro-suburban rhetoric within and beyond Jewish cultural circles, which aimed to raise aspirations towards middle-class lifestyles. This striking suburban ‘urge’ amongst London Jewry, managed by the community's elite institutions and leaders, was far more than a phenomenon running parallel to wider British society. As this article argues, it was a decisive response to an insidious culture of intolerance and antisemitism.

In this article, I examine early religious literature in the Albanian language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which, in combination with ecclesiastical rivalries and a differential opposition to Ottoman rule, must have promoted an inherent cultural process of differentiation, especially between Greek-speaking and Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians. In particular, I argue that the contradicting motivations of political contradistinction, Enlightenment propagation, Orthodox evangelism, ecclesiastical confrontation, and missionary counteraction lead inadvertently to a boundary work of the social reorganization of linguistic and cultural difference.

This article discusses the difference between the construction of national and local identifications related to the new place of residence. It shows that local identification is more inclusive than national, and therefore may be a key to strengthening social cohesion. National and local identities can both be seen as forms of place identification (i.e., of spatial or territorial identity). The article builds on qualitative research on highly skilled migrants living in Wrocław, Poland. The empirical data shows that these migrants would rather obtain a city identification and call themselves Wrocławianie (inhabitants of Wrocław), and do not want, or only partially want, Polish national identity. Living in and experiencing Wrocław makes them feel like insiders, while experiencing Poland positions them as outsiders. While national identity is built around the difference between “us” and “them”, local identity focuses on gaining knowledge about the particularity of a place and therefore allows for acceptance of heterogeneity and is easier for migrants to obtain.