This research examines whether women legislators represent more than their male counterparts the interests of disadvantaged groups in society, such as women themselves, the poor, migrants, LGBT groups, or indigenous peoples. Our main hypothesis is that women legislators are more active in promoting the interests of disadvantaged groups. Also, we expect to observe disparities in the representation of disadvantaged groups as a function of legislators’ ideology. To test our arguments, data are examined from parliamentary speeches and meetings with interest groups held in the Chilean Chamber of Deputies from 2014 to 2022. The inferences drawn from the data uphold the hypothesis that gender does affect the degree to which legislators represent the interests of disadvantaged groups. Moreover, ideology also explains variation: left-wing legislators embrace more often the representation of marginalized groups.

This article examines the evolving category of yellow music in the People’s Republic of China from the Maoist era to the early reform period, with a focus on the reception and regulation of Teresa Teng’s music. It argues that yellow music was not a static or CCP-invented concept, but one that expanded and contracted in response to shifting political climates and ideological campaigns. Drawing on archival documents, official newspapers, and autobiographical accounts, this article explores how the label “yellow” was applied to a wide range of musical styles and examines how this shaped public musical consumption. Instead of framing yellow music listening as an explicit form of resistance, this article highlights how such practices reflected unmet emotional and esthetic needs. The entry and eventual state appropriation of Teng’s music illustrate both the cultural consequences of the Cold War and the CCP’s adaptable approach to cultural governance. Teng’s widespread popularity helped revive suppressed traditions of individual emotion and love in music, and her gradual rehabilitation reveals a negotiated space between official ideology and popular demand. Ultimately, this article sheds light on the dynamic interplay between state control, listener agency, and global influence in socialist and post-socialist China.

Socio-legal scholarship has long been driven by a commitment to social change. Yet scholars continue to debate how best to pursue politically engaged empirical research – especially in relation to the elite audiences that influence the production of socio-legal knowledge. Increasingly, researchers are turning to participatory action research (PAR) as a strategy of scholar-activism. PAR centres the knowledge and agency of marginalised communities by involving them as collaborators in the research process, with the aim of producing knowledge that supports their struggles for justice. As socio-legal scholars experiment with PAR, they may encounter tensions both with their research participants and within the broader scholarly community, particularly over the role of ‘law’ in their work. Drawing on my experience using participatory methods to study data governance in Kenya, I explore the challenges and possibilities of integrating PAR into socio-legal inquiry. I suggest that when socio-legal scholars adopt PAR, they are likely to fall short of PAR’s radical participatory ideals and the conventional framing of socio-legal research. Yet, as I argue, this friction is generative. Adopting PAR can transform socio-legal inquiry to be more responsive to contemporary political struggles.

Ku Hung-Ming 辜鴻銘 (pinyin: Gu Hongming, 1857–1928) was the first Chinese translator who translated Confucian classics into English, breaking the long-time monopoly of translation of Confucian classics by Western missionaries. He also translated Western poems into Chinese and elaborated on his thought on translation in his writings. However, Ku is peripheralized in contemporary Chinese historiography of translation. This article investigates this striking phenomenon, arguing that Ku’s peripheralization is due to Chinese translation historiographers’ subscription to the dual meta-narratives of individual enlightenment and national salvation, their colonial mentality, and the impact of the century-long trivialization of Ku in China. This article throws into relief the intricate relationship between translation historiography and its socio-political context, calling for attention to this under researched area of translation studies. It also sheds important light on contemporary Chinese intellectual landscape, calling for a decolonized understanding of Chinese culture.

Using new interpretations of oral traditions written in older documents, this article changes the origin of complex societies and larger kingdoms. Showing that the Kingdom of Kongo, presently believed to be the origin of large kingdoms actually achieved it status by conquering an existing kingdom, called Mpemba, the author reassigns both the date and origin point of kingdom level polities there. The author further points to new interpretations of documentary evidence to demonstrate that Mwene Muji and Kulembembe, located to the east and south of Kongo were also early large scale polities at a date as early as Kongo.

This paper argues that interactions with artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, such as ChatGPT, can mediate genuine mystical experiences. Building off the framework of mystical experiences developed by William James, I argue that interactions with AI chatbots can mediate mystical experiences in a structurally comparable way to how guided meditation can produce mystical experiences. I conclude by raising various concerns about the implementation of AI technologies in our religious lives, including their use as mediators for mystical experiences.

This paper explores the potential offered by a cinematographic approach to the study of museums, particularly science centres. By setting up an intermedial lens that maps between the museum medium and film – particularly the visitor experiences in museums onto a specific genre of museum film – correspondences between these media and their respective ‘grammars’ are analysed. After a brief overview of the relationship between museums and film in the twentieth century, a language of documentary film suitable for museum film is introduced based on the film theory of Jon Boorstin, who also directed a film on the Exploratorium in San Fancisco, which adapted post-war insights in communication design as developed by the Eames Office. Reviewing five documentaries about the Exploratorium shows that only Boorstin’s museum film could adequately convey the museum experience to others, thus going beyond intermediality to enable a transmedial transfer. How this film emerged through the cooperation of the Exploratorium with the Eames Office and national funding agencies is presented in some detail in order to show that the intermedial lens can work both ways, allowing for the transmedial application of film analysis to the museums themselves.

This paper uses Old Spanish as a case study to argue that verb-second (V2) syntax is not monolithic but instead involves a split between external merge (EM) and internal merge (IM) into the C-system. Building on Holmberg’s (2020) findings on Swedish, it demonstrates that the enclitic and proclitic patterns in Old Spanish finite main clauses serve as diagnostics for whether a V2 constituent reaches the preverbal field via EM or IM, reflecting a broader distinction between formal V2 and scope/discourse-related V2. The high frequency of enclisis in Old Spanish suggests a predominance of EM-driven V2, in contrast to Holmberg’s assessment of Swedish, where EM-driven V2 is claimed to be more restricted.

The paper proposes a mixed model of V2 syntax, integrating EPP-driven merge into Spec-FinP (Haegeman 1996) with interpretively motivated Criterial movement (Rizzi 2006; Samo 2019). Residual V2 reflects the resilience of the interpretive component, with its assumed Spec-head configuration (Poletto 2000) reinterpreting verb movement to Fin0 as movement to the Criterial head. The model provides a new perspective on the interplay between formal and interpretive aspects of V2 syntax, with implications reaching beyond Old Spanish.

This article examines the Puerto Rican legal mobilisations for the right to access public information through the lenses of activist-scholarship. Based on ethnographic research with Puerto Rican scholars, lawyers and civil society organisations, the article explores how they have used the legal system to demand greater transparency and accountability from the Puerto Rican government and the Federal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB). First, it engages with the efforts of Proyecto de Acceso a la Información, a law clinic and civil society organisation initiative aimed at securing access to public information, transparency and accountability in government. Second, it reflects on Sembrando Sentido’s efforts, an anti-corruption and transparency civil society organisation, to draft and enact a series of anti-corruption laws. These case studies illustrate how activist-scholarship shapes Puerto Rican society by using legal tools to challenge colonial legality and resist the imposition of neoliberal policies that exacerbate inequality and corruption.

How does the form of community dissent shape public support for coercive state policies? This article addresses this question through a vignette experiment on coca forced eradication in Colombia. Participants were randomly assigned to scenarios in which communities either verbally objected to or mobilized against coercive eradication efforts. Exposure to mobilization, compared to verbal objection, reduces support for both unconditional eradication and outright opposition. By contrast, it increases support for eradication conditioned on community consent. These effects are consistent across racial frames, suggesting that the impact of dissent form may transcend ethnic boundaries. We interpret these findings as evidence that visible, organized community dissent can shift public preferences toward more community-centered and conditional approaches. These findings contribute to research on protest, state coercion, and public opinion by showing that the form of dissent shapes support for coercive state interventions.