Drawing on two decades of collaborative legal ethnographic research with Indigenous communities, this article weaves personal narrative and lived experience to highlight working-class scholar-activism and embodied spiritual rituality as an act of resistance within academia. It critically challenges Western research ethics paradigms by emphasising ethics as a lived, relational practice grounded in rituality and interconnectedness rather than mere compliance. Through an audiovisual lens, it demonstrates how visual storytelling can embody and amplify more-than-human voices, fostering relationality and responsibility. The paper offers two key contributions: recentring the positionality of working-class scholars and recentring the agency of the more-than-human int he field of law as vital in knowledge production. While decolonial and Indigenous scholarship advocate for diverse epistemologies, they often overlook working-class perspectives rooted in societal justice. I argue that a heart-based resistance grounded in critical care, relationality, Indigenous ontologies and spirituality can foster transformative academic knowledge.

2024 marked ten years since the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) took effect. Firmly rooted in international human rights and humanitarian law, the ATT is the first legally binding instrument to regulate international arms transfers. It is a framework for national action to (i) contribute to peace and security, (ii) reduce human suffering caused by irresponsible arms transfers and (iii) promote transparency in the international arms trade. This piece exploresrecent developments in the ATT process that represent a pivot from building treaty infrastructure toward more expansive stakeholder engagement, increased information exchange centred on state practice and a sharper focus on the ATT’s human impact. Key new features are discussions on actual arms transfer decisions and the examination of the independent human rights responsibilities of industry that operate alongside government risk assessment obligations. Finally, this piece assesses the potential impact of these efforts on the achievement of the ATT’s humanitarian purpose.

In 1872, Hong Kong’s colonial government passed an ordinance prohibiting hawkers from crying wares in the parts of town where Europeans lived and worked. This was precipitated by a local discourse on ostensibly Chinese noise that took shape in the English-language newspapers that constructed Chinese people as intrinsically noisy and Europeans as noise averse. These ideas drew upon existing rhetoric produced in response to noise nuisance in London and a broader transatlantic discourse on the relationship between noise and civilization. The transformation of these ideas in Hong Kong established a model whereby Chinese people were producers of noise, unaffected by hearing it, while intrinsically quiet Europeans suffered from hearing noise. This process justified the differential treatment of space, enabling the creation of a privileged ‘European’ zone legally protected from ‘Chinese’ noise.

The question of how to pursue politically relevant and engaged scholarship has been an ongoing theme within socio-legal scholarship. In the United States of America, Presidential Addresses of the Law and Society Association have consistently urged greater political engagement (Lempert 2001; Seron 2016; Scheppele 2023). In the United Kingdom, journals such as Social & Legal Studies have placed critical and engaged scholarship at the core of their mission (Editorial 1992; Editorial 1998). In the Majority World1 – where the socio-legal field is less institutionalised – scholars have often been more directly involved in political action, re-imagining colonial law and using it as a tool for social change (Shivji 2018; Sieder, Ansolabehere and Alfonso Sierra 2019). These scholars have not only inspired calls for activist scholarship in the Minority World (Munger 2001) but have also unsettled the very dichotomy between scholarship and activism (D’Souza 2009).

This article focuses on French espèce de + NP! ‘you + NP!’ to make a case that impoliteness can be conventionalized in linguistic form beyond the level of the lexicon. We argue that the pattern can be considered a construction in its own right and also that it is strongly conventionalized for impoliteness in particular. To support this claim, we adopt both a corpus-based and a questionnaire-based approach. The corpus study reveals not only that espèce de + NP! mainly serves impolite purposes in actual usage but also that it tends to force an impolite interpretation onto noun phrases that do not themselves express negative evaluation. Our questionnaire study complements these findings by showing, inter alia, that the construction is generally judged to be ill-formed when combining with positively evaluative or evaluatively neutral nouns and, at the same time, that such nouns are indeed rated as impolite in the construction. It also points to a difference between calling someone espèce d’idiot! ‘you idiot!’ and calling them just idiot!. We conclude the article with some reflections on why espèce de + NP! is an impoliteness construction.

While the idea of predistribution is gaining traction, it may seem inherently elusive. The source of confusion is the prefix ‘pre’, which denotes priority or prevention. This paper proposes a new functional definition of predistribution that is practically useful and unifies different predistributive policies. Through defending predistribution as policies of ex ante distribution, I offer a philosophically robust notion of priority (‘procedural priority’) and different functions of prevention that help make sense of predistribution. I also develop typologies of different predistributive policies and explore justificatory grounds and strengths of predistribution. I emphasize instrumental reasons for supporting predistribution.

It is often argued that religious experience should enjoy the epistemic presumption of innocence (EPI), analogous to the deliverances of perception, memory and other non-inferential basic beliefs. However, many religious belief systems incompatible with theism (theistic-unfriendly in my terminology) would also count as justified on this presumption. Awareness of the vast number of theistic-unfriendly beliefs that are epistemically on a par with theism can significantly undermine confidence in the latter. To counter this challenge, defenders of theism could resort to two core naturalistic claims: that the physical realm is causally closed, and that mental states supervene on physical states. Given naturalism, supernatural agents, including God, are not able to produce humans’ religious experience and beliefs by direct interventions. However, a theistic God could take an alternative route to provide people elected by Him with true religious beliefs through causal processes prearranged at the moment of creation of the physical world. By contrast, low-ranking spirits and polytheistic deities cannot act in this way, either because they do not participate in the process of creation or, if they do, because they lack full control over the initial conditions of the universe. It follows that theistic-unfriendly beliefs arise by chance rather than through reliable truth-aimed belief-producing processes. Under naturalism, therefore, such beliefs cannot be justified, even if, by unlikely coincidence, they are true. This naturalistic argument for theism serves to boost confidence in theistic belief by narrowing the range of rationally available religious options.

With research showing the benefits of feedback, teachers have come under increasing pressure to provide more, including more personalised, and more detailed responses to students. This often places heavy demands on teachers and with ever-larger class sizes and heavier workloads, teacher fatigue and burn-out are common. Automation has the potential to change all this and new digital resources have already proven to be valuable in supporting L2 writing. In this paper I look at the contribution of Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) programmes and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to feedback. The ability to provide instant local and global feedback across multiple drafts targeted to student needs and in greater quantities promises to increase learner motivation and autonomy while relieving teachers of hours of marking. But haven’t we heard this all before? Are these empty claims which raise our expectations of removing some of the drudgery of mundane grammar correction? Most importantly, what is the role of teachers in all this, and can AI really improve writers and not just texts?

This article combines approaches from critical place-name studies and the ‘imperial turn’ to examine the perception of Vilnius and the so-called Northwestern Region as Russian ‘national territory’ rather than merely an imperial possession. In the second half of the nineteenth century, to counter the significant Polish influence, the tsarist elite intensified the ‘imperialization’ of Vilnius’ cityscape more than in other borderland towns. Meanwhile, the local public, lacking any real influence over place-naming, lived in an alternative reality and continued using old names. The case of Vilnius illustrates the empire’s systematic but largely failed efforts to intervene into subjects’ lives.

The article introduces the special issue by mapping the field of pertinent scholarship and situating the articles with regard to the special angles and contributions they have to offer. As our five articles present case studies from Bulgaria and the GDR, both state socialist countries and their health care systems are portrayed here to provide context. The introduction locates each of the contributions and the overarching aims of the special issue within current scholarly discussions and demonstrates the issue’s innovative potential.

Imprecise Bayesianism has been proposed as an alternative to Standard Bayesianism, partly because of its tools for representing ambiguity. Instead of representing credences via precise probabilities, a set of probability distributions is used to model belief states. However, there are criticisms of Imprecise Bayesianism’s update rule. A recent alternative update rule is Alpha Cut, which evades some of the primary criticisms of Imprecise Bayesian updating. We compare Alpha Cut with Imprecise Bayesianism and another alternative update approach called Calibration. We find that Alpha Cut has problems with respect to ambiguity, coherence, and performance qualities, whereas there are more promising alternatives.

Direklerarası Street was a popular promenade and entertainment hub in late Ottoman Istanbul. It was constructed in the arasta form along the historical Divanyolu in the 1720s and largely retained its spatial configuration until the 1880s. This article examines the spatial transformation of Direklerarası Street from the 1880s to the 1910s, situating it within the broader dynamics of late Ottoman urban reform. It investigates urban interventions such as the demolition and reconstruction of arcade columns, street lighting, pavement reconfigurations and square design, not merely as outcomes of modern urban regulations but also as processes intricately linked to the various dynamics shaped by the sociopolitical and cultural contexts of the late Ottoman capital.

Environmental protection is widely considered a core function of the state. Yet more than 210 million people currently live under the control of armed non-state actors (ANSAs), many of whom exercise state-like authority over vast, environmentally important territories. Despite growing legal and political science scholarship on ANSAs, their role in environmental protection remains largely unexplored. International law, shaped by conflict-centric frameworks, often fails to account for ANSAs’ non-military dimensions – especially those related to environmental service provision. Similarly, theories of rebel governance have yet to meaningfully incorporate environmental service provision as a governance facet. The article addresses this gap by examining the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) in Colombia, drawing on documentary analysis and interviews with former combatants. It shifts the limited ecological perspective on war, arguing that the FARC-EP’s environmental practices amounted to a form of rebel environmental governance – structured, intentional and legally plural. Through this case study, the article challenges dominant narratives that view ANSAs solely as environmental spoilers or incidental protectors and instead advocates for a more comprehensive understanding of their impact as environmental service providers and lawmakers. In doing so, the paper reframes ANSAs as socio-legal actors whose environmental practices merit scholarly attention – particularly in ongoing debates around accountability and transitional justice in conflict-affected regions.