Critical approaches to research on war-affected societies emphasize the necessity for a more empirically grounded approach to the production of knowledge. Presently, research on war-affected societies is undergoing a shift toward localization with a call for more “voices” with local knowledge and expertise. This research is an attempt to analyze the challenges of reliable knowledge production in war-affected societies and their circulation in academia, the policy-making community, and feeding media discourse. The research focuses on the Russian war against Ukraine since 2014 as a prism through which to examine the main challenges for localized knowledge production. We consider several aspects of knowledge production including the problems and issues of framing and wording that define the character of the conflict, challenges of research design and data collection, researchers’ positioning dilemmas, participants’ responses, differences between policy and academic research, and the role of the media. The purpose of this study is to engage with and attempts to advance the literature on knowledge localization. We argue that a move toward the localization of fieldwork requires a more sensitive and transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production. Based on our own experience of fieldwork during wartime, we point out possible ethical and methodological challenges and offer workable responses to them.

Southwest China is a region that has been perhaps uniquely shaped over the longue durée by mutual appropriations of status, authority, land, material culture, genealogies, and cultural-historical identities. Drawing on both ethnographic fieldwork and the official and unofficial Chinese and Nuosu-Yi textual evidence, in this article I offer a new view of how, during the Ming and Qing dynasties, native officials were shaped by their efforts at appropriating elements of officialdom (responsibility towards the court) and nativeness (adherence to local customs). My historical textual-cum-anthropological analysis builds on C. Patterson Giersch’s notion of the “middle grounds” between the Chinese state and its borderland peoples to reveal “further ways” of uncovering the history of their history. I show that mutual appropriations of officialdom and nativeness have led to specific forms of acculturation that are neither linear nor irreversible. Cultural hybridizations underpin the current Yi core identity and culture in Liangshan today.

In this article I bring Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw, Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper's opera based on the novella, and elements of the 2011 Glyndebourne production of the opera into interaction with theories of the uncanny to wonder about the act of reading. This novella and opera thematize reading in connection with the uncanny and the ghostly, providing an opportunity to pursue what might be at stake and what might be possible when boundaries blur and meaning is put in motion. I begin to explore uncanny reading as a tool to unsettle binary logics and one-to-one mappings. I consider the uncanny as connective tissue between theoretical makings related to identity, relationships, and the potentialities of fiction. And I put these ideas into interactive practice as I self-consciously read this opera, to connect to and challenge normative and oppressive forces, impulses, and systems, including cultural scripts, social power structures, and ways of knowing and interacting.

John Harris has made many seminal contributions to bioethics. Two of these are in the ethics of resource allocation. Firstly, he proposed the “fair innings argument” which was the first sufficientarian approach to distributive justice. Resources should be provided to ensure people have a fair innings—when Harris first wrote this, around 70 years of life, but perhaps now 80. Secondly, Harris famously advanced the egalitarian position in response to utilitarian approaches to allocation (such as maximizing Quality Adjusted Life Years [QALYs]) that what people want is the greatest chance of the longest, best quality life for themselves, and justice requires treating these claims equally. Harris thus proposed both sufficientarian and egalitarian approaches. This chapter compares these approaches with utilitarian and contractualist approaches and provides a methodology for deciding among these (Collective Reflective Equilibrium). This methodology is applied to the allocation of ventilators in the pandemic (as an example) and an ethical algorithm for their deployment created. This paper describes the concept of algorithmic bioethics as a way of addressing pluralism of values and context specificity of moral judgment and policy, and addressing complex ethics.

This article uses the postwar trial of Fascist Italy’s most prominent general, Rodolfo Graziani, to examine issues of transitional justice and the formation of popular memory of Italian Fascism and colonialism after 1945. During the Fascist ventennio, the regime constructed Graziani as the nation’s colonial ‘hero’ despite his leading role in genocidal measures during Fascist Italy’s colonial wars in North and East Africa. His position as minister of defence in Mussolini’s Nazi-backed Salò Republic in 1943–5, however, threatened his heroic reputation as he worked with Nazi commanders and became responsible for atrocities against Italian civilians. After the Second World War, Graziani was tried for Nazi collaborationism at the Supreme Court in 1948, but his colonial conduct was left unquestioned. Unlike in the Nuremberg Trials in post-Nazi Germany, few Italians were tried for war crimes after 1945. This historical inquiry analyses the legal proceedings, transnational representation and outcome of Rodolfo Graziani’s 1948 trial as an emblematic case study to explore de-fascistisation and decolonialisation initiatives and their limitations in post-Fascist postcolonial Italy.

Melina Constantine Bell (2021) argues that J. S. Mill's harm principle permits society to coercively interfere with the use of bigoted insults, since these insults are harmful on “a more expansive, modern, conception of harm.” According to Bell, these insults are harmful in virtue of their contributing to detrimental objective states like health problems. I argue that people with illiberal dispositions might have intense and sustained negative subjective reactions to behavior that the harm principle ought to protect, reactions intense enough to affect their health or other objective interests. Bell's way of thinking about harm therefore has illiberal implications. Yet I agree with her that bigoted insults should be regarded as harmful. I therefore propose an alternative way of understanding harm according to which subjective pain is a harm when it is intentionally caused.

This paper reports the results of a cross-sectional study investigating the acquisition of the syntactic properties associated with the null subject (meso-)parameter in English as a second language (L2) among Hebrew-speaking youngsters (18-year-olds). The two languages differ concerning these properties, with Hebrew allowing null subjects and related properties (although inconsistently) and English disallowing these properties altogether. One hundred four intermediate learners and 97 English-speaker controls provided grammaticality judgments and corrections concerning constructions involving expletive and referential null subjects, post-verbal subjects, and complementizer-trace sequences. The results reveal limited evidence for transfer from the learners’ mother tongue (first language [L1]) and indicate that learners have met the native standard concerning null and post-verbal subjects. These findings support both the meso-parametric view of cross-linguistic variation and feature reassembly on functional heads in L2 acquisition, while partially rejecting the Interpretability Hypothesis. Learners nevertheless deviate from the native standard concerning complementizer-trace sequences. This finding is unaccounted for by the meso-parametric approach, feature reassembly, or interpretability, but can instead be attributed to L1 transfer. Controls also demonstrate variability concerning complementizer-trace sequences, suggesting that the performance of all participants regarding this configuration is affected by processing difficulties, lower frequency in the input, and methodological issues with the items and/or the task.

In political decision-making processes in Greenland, comparisons are often drawn with Denmark, Scandinavia, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. With Greenland as a case, this article analyses a series of aspects across the societies to highlight the politics of comparisons, which are taken for granted, and to emphasise contextual conditions. Comparisons are central to cultural meaning-making and navigation with nation building strategies. We conclude that the current comparisons are significant in terms of explaining Greenland’s challenges with a vulnerable economy and with the sustainable use of natural and human resources. To utilise local resources and create a sustainable livelihood, there is a need to break from the existing trajectories based on the current politics of comparison to explore local conditions more carefully and find other models of inspiration. By developing the concept of island operation, the article unfolds distinct characteristics of the Greenlandic socio-economic structures and includes statistical data on trade, education, and the labour market to support the identification of conditions that can contribute to future analyses of Greenland’s sustainable development. This analysis has relevance for societies that share geographical and cultural conditions with Greenland and post-colonial countries that must deal with complex path dependencies to navigate towards sustainable development.