This article brings critical human rights scholarship into the intersex sphere to unearth the potential limitations of the growing deployment of human rights to improve the health care experiences of intersex people. It traces the changing tactics of intersex activist groups and identifies three tendencies – reformism, coerciveness and juridification – that may be brought by the intersex movement and international agencies embracing human rights as the vernacular. This article argues that the dominance of the human rights approach, while allowing the intersex struggle to gain legitimacy, visibility and recognition, risks fuelling a depoliticised framework of remedicalisation and increased penality. It deflects attention from the endeavour of interrogating the social and cultural foundations rendering intersex variances a deviant form of embodiment.

Pleasure is widely thought to have intrinsic value. However, this thesis has been threatened by the argument that pleasure is a mental state that essentially involves the subject’s conative attitudes. Its value, then, would be subjective. Though the existing version of the argument can be resisted by simply rejecting the attitudinal theories of pleasure on which it is based, I will develop a new and more general version based on the reasonable hypothesis that the phenomenal character of pleasure is reducible to a physical or functional property. If this new version is convincing, then the most promising way to secure the intrinsicality of the value of pleasure and to escape all versions of the subjectivity argument might be to embrace a non-reductionist account of pleasure and its value.

Since the 1920s, the workers’ movement has been crucial in linking international communism with colonial liberation. From the 1950s, communist trade unions and the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) played a key role in this process. The WFTU forged ties with Afro-Asian unions to challenge Western powers with an anti-imperialist platform. Decolonization opened new opportunities for European workers in their anti-capitalist struggle, prompting unions such as the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and Italian Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) to build relationships with unions in newly independent African nations. Their focus was mainly on North and West Africa, where socialist movements emerged during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The CGT and the CGIL established solid links with trade unions in Guinea, Mali, and Ghana. Their views, shaped by their affiliations with the French and Italian communist parties, were not consistently aligned. The CGT maintained a Eurocentric approach to African socialism, while the CGIL, aligned with the PCI, supported a “staged” revolution in Africa, where the working class did not occupy a position of leadership. The CGIL and PCI emphasized the role of peasants and workers in building socialism through a “social revolution” that could strengthen the socialist bloc. These differences created tensions in African trade unions and the FSM, leading to the marginalization of the CGIL’s approach. Nonetheless, Italian unionists gained support from African unions and joined the CGT in mediating for workers in Guinea, Mali, and Ghana.

Many believe that relationships can make a constitutive difference to the moral status of paternalistic treatment. For example, it is often assumed that it’s easier to justify paternalizing a spouse than a stranger. But although this thought is widespread, there exists no detailed account of how relationships could mitigate paternalistic complaints. The aim of this paper is to develop an account of this phenomenon, drawing on the work of Margaret Gilbert and the notion of joint commitments. According to the resulting view, close relations can constitutively mitigate paternalistic complaints by rendering paternalistic interference consistent with the will of the paternalized agent.

This article traces the union career of Abdoulaye Diallo, born in French West Africa in 1917, from the united World Federation of Trade Unions’ (WFTU) 1947 Pan-African Trade Union Conference in Dakar to the founding of the Union Générale des Travailleurs d’Afrique Noire (UGTAN) in 1957. The Dakar conference was a turning point: African delegates, including Diallo, compelled the WFTU to address colonial labour exploitation, thereby unsettling representatives of empire. Following the 1949 split, the WFTU increasingly amplified and promoted leaders from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and Diallo was appointed vice-president. Our analysis of Diallo’s publications reveals his fierce anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. It also shows how, following the split, the WFTU provided a platform for Africans to express their anti-colonial views to a wider audience through newspapers and WFTU publications. His interventions at meetings of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in the early 1950s exposed forced labour and repression to representatives of international organizations while offering unwavering, uncritical support for the Soviet Union. At the WFTU’s Third World Congress in Vienna (1953), Diallo stood out as the leading African delegate, urging workers to organize for liberation. Regionally, he mobilized Francophone West African workers against wage discrimination and colonial coercion, navigating tensions between communist internationalism and emerging nationalist priorities. This study reimagines the WFTU as an anti-colonial arena, shaped by African agency during the early Cold War period.

In this article, I study non-material harm in cases of environmental liability. Environmental tragedy does not only come at great economic cost but often also brings about non-material loss – that is, loss that has no market value. In order to better recognize, assess, and measure this type of harm, more insight is needed into its psychological conception and parameters. Departing from the available legal frameworks on non-material harm in Belgium as well as in the Netherlands, I study how environmental psychology can help in recognizing, assessing, and measuring environmental non-material harm. More specifically, I focus on solastalgia, a notion that describes the psychological impact of negatively perceived changes to a familiar environment. Solastalgia describes a crisis of identity as a result of a disturbance in the way in which humans inhabit their environment. It describes a form of ecological grief over the loss of a familiar place – that is, the aggregate meanings, values, familiarity, and predictability attached to a specific environment. Using the available theoretical framework around solastalgia and the available empirical insights in the solastalgia literature, I show that solastalgia qualifies as a valid type of harm and bears significant advantages when implemented in environmental tort law frameworks.

This article examines the historical transformation of childhood vaccination in the Netherlands between 1872 and 1959. It analyses how vaccination was reframed from an individual parental responsibility to a collective practice through the establishment of the ‘Rijksvaccinatieprogramma’ (National Immunisation Programme). I analyse this historical trajectory as a case of ‘public health atomism’, a strategy that achieves collective health by prioritizing individual health outcomes and local action. Rather than relying on top-down state mandates, the ‘Rijksvaccinatieprogramma’ was a consequence of co-operation between general practitioners, municipal health officials, civil society organisations, and volunteers. Drawing from published medical sources, parliamentary records, and material from local and national archives, this article provides a detailed historical account of how local governance and autonomy shaped vaccination practices, highlighting the role of the ‘entgemeenschap’ (vaccination community) as a key organisational model for situated collaboration. As such, it revisits childhood vaccination as an archetypical example of biopolitical state intervention, demonstrating how localised, flexible co-operation was instrumental in integrating vaccination into Dutch society.

This article explores how memories of Muslim-Tibetan alliances predating Communist rule still shape social dynamics in Amdo. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Northwest China, it analyzes narratives about relationships between Muslim Xidaotang merchants and Tibetan religious or secular institutions. These accounts reinterpret the past to make sense of present relationships, reshaping the meaning of historical interactions. The paper examines the emblematic case of the offering of a large cauldron to a Tibetan monastery – an act of alliance rooted in local conflict-resolution practices. This tradition of gift-giving is traced within a broader inter-institutional economy sustained by reciprocal hospitality and protection. The Tibetan designation of Xidaotang merchants as Chösoma (“new religion/teachings”) highlights the role of ethical reputation and technical skill in building trust. The paper concludes by examining the evolution of Xidaotang’s Tian Xing Long commercial label amid China’s ongoing economic reforms. The narratives reveal a trading culture grounded in moral valuation, shared responsibilities, and economic collaboration.

Fossil fuel companies no longer deny anthropogenic climate change in litigation, but they challenge the validity of climate science in establishing legal responsibility. Research on climate litigation, social movements, and legal mobilization has focused primarily on plaintiffs’ perspectives, showing how they use the judicial process as a site of knowledge production. This article shifts the focus onto defendants, conducting an analysis of scientific disputes in major climate change lawsuits and developing a typology grounded in both empirical analysis and theoretical insights for studying their arguments about science and evidence. Corporate defendants build evidentiary counter-narratives, challenge the substantive quality of plaintiffs’ claims, and contest the scientific integrity of compromising evidence. The future impact of such litigation will hinge on how courts evaluate climate research as legal evidence, and whether corporate defendants are successful in their efforts to reframe, undermine, and discredit the science.

This article examines Redcliffe N. Salaman’s (1874–1955) efforts to establish a national system for producing virus-free seed potatoes in 1930s Britain. It explores how scientific authority was mobilized to reshape agricultural practices and assert regulatory control over seed production. Although Salaman’s proposals were never fully realized, they laid the groundwork for enduring strategies to improve potato crop health by protecting seed from infectious agents and their insect vectors. Salaman’s work drew on both traditional horticultural knowledge and emerging microbiological techniques, spanning field and laboratory settings. He exemplifies how diverse modes of science making shaped a period of increasing professionalization and institutionalization in the biological sciences. By tracing interactions between scientists and other actors – including growers, seedsmen and government officials – the article shows how plant virus control was gradually redefined from a craft-based practice to a scientific domain. This article contributes to the early history of virology from an agricultural perspective, as well as to broader historiographical debates on the role of science in agriculture, the professionalization of expertise and the construction of regulatory authority in twentieth-century Britain.

The purpose of the seminar was to bring together scholars from within linguistics and disciplines such as psychology to explore what short-form social media is, how we might practically and ethically collect and analyse short-form social media data, and what analytic possibilities are on offer for a linguist interested in examining this type of data. The seminar, held at the University of Nottingham on 11th September 2024, was well-attended, with around twenty people joining in-person or online. It ran for a single day and was split into a morning of plenaries and lightning talks about personal research interests, and an afternoon of interactive sessions which sought synergies between those research interests.

Readings of the history of penal expertise trace its rise to the late nineteenth century and its decline to the late twentieth century, with the crumbling of the welfare state. Despite stark differences along Whiggish and Foucauldian lines in evaluations of that history, a consensus has emerged that the penal-welfare complex peaked around mid-century, dependent on correctional experts. Most studies of that phenomenon have focused on the institutionalization and “treatment” of “problem” populations while neglecting the role of penal expertise in critiques of capital punishment. When Britain and Canada undertook major inquiries into the death penalty in the 1950s, they turned to the world’s foremost expert on the subject: sociologist Thorsten Sellin. Yet, these government-appointed studies devalued his academic capital in favor of the lived expertise of police. By examining the contestation of Sellin’s sources, methods, and conclusions, this paper puts the chronology of penal welfarism and its experts into question. Not simply a case of ill-informed opinion prevailing over criminological evidence, the dismissive treatment of this penal expert highlights the need to apply a more capacious understanding of contending forms of expertise at numerous points in penal history, rather than setting the devaluation of penal expertise in the recent past.