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.

This article investigates the role of constitutional texts in memorialising historical guilts and traumas by delving into an unconventional and hitherto unexplored comparison: the Italian Constitution’s final Provision XII against the reorganisation of the fascist party, and the Indian Constitution’s Article 17 against caste-based untouchability. Both Constitutions, written in the same years, encoded their respective hurtful and traumatic pasts into their fundamental laws through these provisions, which explicitly mandated criminal legislations. After reconstructing the two very different contexts from which these constitutional provisions emerged, the article examines the very similar ways in which the two Constituent Assemblies incorporated historically motivated, criminalising clauses in their respective texts. It subsequently analyses the difficulties that legislators in both contexts encountered as they had to pass penal legislations emanating from the Constitutions, as well as the restrictive and contradictory interpretations of these legislations provided by the judiciary. By means of an original incursion into comparative constitutional history, this article contributes to a wider reflection around the interplay between historical traumas, constitutions, and mandates within them as a form of criminalisation of painful pasts.

This article assesses the impact of the discovery of bacteriophages, which emerged from an investigation into a 1915 outbreak of bacillary dysentery in France, on influenza virus research. Specifically, it details the way in which the phages became a vehicle for importing certain assay techniques into the study of influenza and other viruses that cause infectious diseases in humans and other animals, thereby enabling the scaling up of vaccine production for these diseases. Very soon after his 1917 report of the discovery of bacteriophages, Felix d’Herelle developed an assay technique based on their ability to form countable plaques on solid media when incubated along with the dysentery bacteria. This basic technique was further refined by Macfarlane Burnet in the late 1920s. Still later, in the wake of a 1935 influenza outbreak in Australia, Burnet applied the principles of serial dilution and plaque counting, honed during his work on the phages, to develop a technique for cultivating influenza viruses in fertilised eggs and assaying them by counting the pocks induced on the chick embryo membranes. The ability to grow and assay these viruses proved crucial in developing the first successful vaccines against influenza. In the 1950s, bacteriophage assay techniques were once more carried over to the assaying of viruses on cultured cells by Renato Dulbecco and Marguerite Vogt. The importance of quantification in science, as well as the ability to apply the results of investigations in one area of biology to another, relatively unrelated field, is also discussed.

Astrotheology, the theological engagement with astrobiology and the possibility of extraterrestrial life, has primarily focused on the compatibility of scientific and religious beliefs. However, this article argues that probability and risk assessments play a larger role in the discussion than is commonly recognised, and there is need to learn from the rigour with which natural theological arguments have been evaluated. For instance, the relative urgency and style of astrotheological discourse is affected by ideas of what sort of life is likely to be out there, if any. In this article, I analyse astrotheological risk assessments from the framework of decision theory, using the discussion over Pascal’s Wager as a comparison case. Arguments over the fittingness of creating other life forms are analysed through a comparison with fine-tuning design arguments. I argue that while theological engagement with astrobiology remains important, the justification of probability and risk assessments depends on disputed philosophical and theological assumptions. Examining the compatibility of theological systems and ideas about extraterrestrial life is important. However, fostering doubt about these probabilities is also a service that theology can do for astrobiological debates.

This paper examines the intersection of socio-legal research and activism through my ethnographic work with the Tulipas do Cerrado collective, a group of sex workers in Brazil. It explores the dynamics of knowledge production and the transformative potential of collaborative research that prioritises the reflections and experiences of marginalised communities while recognising the importance of legal expertise. Drawing on the concepts of ‘whoring the knowledge’ and ‘whoring the law’, the article highlights how sex workers reclaim their narratives and creatively navigate legal frameworks, demanding that researchers enhance both academic and activist relevance of their endeavours. First, I discuss relevant literature on ethnography within sex workers’ activism, introducing recent key studies on Brazilian sex work as examples of having the knowledge whored. Then, I detail the ethnographic approach employed in my research, which was inspired by the preceding three studies. Ultimately, the work analyses how reciprocal engagement between sex work activists and scholars is a consequence of a demand that researchers adopt a bolder and more creative way of thinking and living. Furthermore, from a socio-legal perspective, these exchanges present an opportunity to rethink the role of law within these communities and to foster concrete social transformation. I propose the concept of ‘whoring’ the law, suggesting that both activists and socio-legal scholars can identify and build new pathways for dealing with the law.

With this paper, I suggest focusing on diplo-scientific actors as a fruitful approach to study how certain actors have helped to shape international organisations through their diplomatic activities and scientific practices. Using the example of the Swedish medical physicist Rolf Sievert, I show how Sievert’s personality and preferences came to decisively shape the post-war trajectory of the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP) and more broadly the international landscape of radiation protection. In the inter-war period, Sievert was engaged in the ICRP and its mother organisation, the International Radiological Congress (IRC), dealing with the interwoven questions of how to formulate international radiation standards and radiation protection initiatives. Following the Second World War, Sievert became concerned with the proliferation of nuclear technologies and the spread of radioactive fallout following nuclear test bombings. Because of this concern, Sievert set out to separate the ICRP from the IRC and form a new, independent group that could deal with the dangers of the new ‘Nuclear Age’. While Sievert was ultimately unsuccessful, his attempts would decisively change the purview and trajectory of the ICRP. This had large ramifications, as the ICRP continues to be the prime international organisation on radiological and medical radiation protection, formulating recommendations that are used by international, regional, national, and local groups, informing epistemic judgements on radiation research.

This paper explores the complex role penicillin played in the relations between Britain, the USA and the USSR between the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War through the lens of science diplomacy and the category of negotiation. In the post-war years the Soviets tried to acquire know-how on large-scale penicillin production from Britain and the USA. While the USA refused to collaborate, the British strategy was more complex. The British government allowed the Oxford team, which had discovered the antibacterial properties of penicillin, to disclose all the technology and know-how concerning large-scale penicillin production of which they were aware to the Soviets, while simultaneously trying to slow down penicillin research and production in the Soviet Union by controlling the export of certain industrial machinery, Podbielniak extractors, to Eastern Europe. By contrast, the USA put a stop to scientific and technological collaboration with the Soviets, but were less strict about the export of industrial machinery. The different strategies generated tensions between Britain and the USA, and ultimately mirrored both the British fear of an American disengagement from Europe and the American will to protect the interests of their national industry.

In Spanish America, the enslavement of Africans was just one of several widespread forms of bonded labour. This article explains the different forms of colonial obligations that limited the freedom of the Indigenous population. It compares the situation in the viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru, with a special focus on two types of dependent labourer: the laboríos in New Spain and the yanaconas in Peru. Although the origin of both categorizations was different, they were functionally comparable. Both generally worked in mines, haciendas, cattle farms, and in textile or sugar mills. It has been argued that by migrating to their workplace, they cut ties with their communities of origin – a hypothesis that was often, but not always, true. This article shows that both categorizations could be temporary as well as permanent and hereditary. On occasion, people could change to other, “neighbouring” categorizations, such as “sedentary” Indigenous people living in Indigenous communities or free mulattos – the latter being more frequent in New Spain. To explain these phenomena and highlight the agency of the colonial population, we examine petitions as a strategy to change fiscal categorization in order to gain greater freedom. Examples from Cajamarca in northern Peru and Michoacán in western Mexico are presented; both regions lay outside the traditional mining centres in relation to which bonded labour has been most often analysed in the respective viceroyalties. We argue that developments towards the end of the colonial period differed between the regions.

James Croxall Palmer served during the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842 as assistant surgeon aboard the Peacock from late February to mid-April 1839 when it sailed with the pilot boat Flying-Fish on a difficult and treacherous high-latitude foray west of the Antarctic Peninsula. The papers of the Flying-Fish were lost with the destruction of the Peacock at the mouth of the Columbia River in July 1841, thus the book Palmer authored in 1843 under the title Thulia (a pseudonym for the Flying-Fish) became both the sole surviving firsthand account of the excursion and the first Antarctic poetry. A quarter century later, Palmer revisited, revised, and expanded Thulia, publishing it as Antarctic Mariner’s Song in 1868. Palmer’s own proof copies of Antarctic Mariner’s Song were retained by his descendants but were otherwise unknown until they recently surfaced. The proofs with Palmer’s numerous annotations contribute to the expedition’s history. A presentation and discussion constitute this report.

Historians and archaeologists have extensively studied the history of health and illness in medieval England. Despite uncovering evidence of many diseases, especially fatal ones, questions remain about the impact of infirmity on people’s lives. How often were people unable to work because of illness? Were there seasonal patterns to such absences and did some people suffer recurring bouts of sickness? It has long been recognized that sick customary tenants could, in theory, be excused from performing their labor services (known as “works”) but few examples of this practice have been found. This article presents new evidence of infirmity on the manors of Ramsey Abbey. The monks excused sick tenants from performing their labor services for up to a year and a day, and sixty-two manorial accounts offer new insights into 229 cases of infirmity among their customary tenants in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. These accounts reveal a variety of experiences, from acute illnesses that lasted just two days, to chronic and debilitating infirmities that could result in a year’s absence. Five weeks of autumn accounted for a high number of absences, perhaps reflecting the demands of the harvest, but also the possibility of workplace accidents or even fraudulent claims of infirmity.