This article explores the practical, ethical, and epistemological issues which arise when carrying out and sharing research in contexts of Italian migration, highlighting how greater reflexivity on our own geographic and historical location as researchers can productively inform and shape our understanding of sites of contact, exchange and confrontation in relation to contemporary Italy. Specifically, we write as researchers informed by ethnographic theories and practices, and who through our research have engaged in emplaced and embodied cultural encounters in sites which are identifiable as both transcultural and Italian. Drawing on vignettes from research in Italy and the UK, the article highlights some of the particular contradictions, opportunities and responsibilities generated by our respective positions. We address how our positionings as white, English and female scholars located within nationally-defined Italian Studies structures have raised pertinent questions of power, privilege and voice, as we place our own biographies and bodies, themselves shaped by specific colonial, national and local histories, into critical dialogue with those on and with whom we research. Through a discussion of these ‘irresolvable tensions’ of our research, we seek to practically engage with the broader imperative of finding new ways of studying and writing culture.

In our article we examine changes experienced by media and memory systems in Russia since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis. Using as an example a popular Russian blogging platform, LiveJournal, we scrutinize how the digital practices related to commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany are influenced by the growing instrumentalization of Second World War memory for media propaganda and manipulation. Using topic modeling to analyze a large set of data on Russian users’ interactions with the platform, we examine how hegemonic and alternative interpretations of the Second World War interact on LiveJournal and how their interactions are influenced by the growing antagonism between Russia and the West. Our findings suggest that LiveJournal constitutes a fractured memory system, which is characterized by uneven representation of Second World War experiences and the growing influence of pro-government actors promoting hegemonic war narratives. However, our observations also show that instrumentalization of the past in the context of the Ukraine crisis does not necessarily interfere with digital practices of Second World War commemoration with the latter remaining unaffected by the events in Ukraine.

This article sheds light on the informal institutional settings that guide the social and economic lives of Muslim migrants in Moscow. Mosques and medresses (Muslim theological schools) serve as central locations from which these institutions emanate, evolve, and transform. Case studies of trade networks and Hijama (wet cupping) healing practices demonstrate the inner workings of such institutions. The article draws on the theoretical traditions of informal institutions and new institutionalists focusing on anthropological works on agency and institutions. These analytical frameworks and concepts help explain the mechanisms and processes involved in the institutionalization of Muslim lives in Moscow. I argue that individual agency and charismatic leadership of individual members of the community play formative roles in institutionalizing daily practices and constituting normative orders of Muslims in Moscow. The article is based on fieldwork conducted in Moscow and Perm during 2016, 2017, and 2019.

This article analyzes women’s socio-political participation and activism within the nonviolent civil resistance movement in prewar Kosovo between 1989 and 1997, as well as the movement’s gender dynamics. This Albanian-led resistance movement emerged during the early 1990s with the principal goal of building a parallel state, seeking independence from Serbia, and offering means of survival for the population. This project required the participation of all Albanian citizens, and although the participation of women was massive, this has gone largely unrecognized. This article will explore the principal features of women’s participation and activism within this movement, what kind of gendered dynamics were developed, and the principal forms of resistance they encountered against their full and active participation through an analysis of women’s activism both within the Women’s Forum of the Democratic League of Kosovo and within independent women’s organizations.

In late 2010, Azerbaijan tried to introduce a ban on hijab in all secondary schools, referring to an article of the new Law of Education that mandated school uniforms. The supporters of the ban argued that the hijab was inimical to Azerbaijani culture and law because it violated the separation of religion and state, was a propaganda tool of Islamist fundamentalists funded from abroad, and was a foreign form of clothing that did not exist in Azerbaijani culture. This article examines why hijab is the focus of controversy in Azerbaijan. The supporters of the ban offered simple oppositions, such as secularism versus theocracy, modernity versus backwardness, and national versus foreign, to explain and justify the ban. However, these dichotomies do not capture the complexities of Islam in Azerbaijan. Rather, they are polemics that blur more than they reveal. In this article, I argue that the debates around the hijab controversy in Azerbaijan are a political discourse aimed at building a nation. The key contribution of this article is to examine the wider historical trajectory of the political discourse that constructed hijab as fundamentalist, backward, threatening, and alien, through discussing the topics of secularism, Islamist politics, modernity, and nationalism.

This article examines the first published ethnographic map of Ukraine, which appeared in Lviv in 1861. While carefully analyzing new archival and published sources from both the Habsburg and Romanov empires, it puts this map into the wider context of a contemporary Ukrainian national movement. I argue that Russian Ukrainian activists of 1860s were unquestionably interested in the extent of Ukrainian national territory and had handwritten maps of Ukrainian national territory in their possession. Contrary to the conventional narratives that the 1861 map was drawn in Lviv by Mykhailo Kossak, I argue instead that the map could have been produced by the Russian Ukrainian activist, Mykhailo Levchenko, and was later transferred to Galicia for publication. Stipulating the need to account for sources from both the Romanov and Habsburg empires—studying both cartographic and textual sources—I argue that similar studies should necessarily be located at the juncture of history of cartography and the intellectual history of mental mapping. Only such approach will provide an undistorted picture of a process of national territorialization.

International football is a field for national identity performances in which narratives of national belonging are articulated. Games of belonging capture discourses on and debates over national belonging. Up-and-coming national football team diversity, and its public promotion, was expected to facilitate boundary blurring in the politics of belonging; however, it caused highly contentious debates revolving around the question of who belongs to Germany and Turkey and who does not. For this reason, we ask how (ethnoculturally) diverse national football teams challenge established narratives of national belonging and, thereby, trigger debates over national belonging across time and space. We compared the media discourse on national team diversity in Germany and Turkey with a special focus on players who disrupt conceptions of ethnic and cultural homogeneity, namely Mesut Özil and Nuri Şahin. Our study illustrates that upcoming international football events constitute games of belonging. Actors from the media, football associations, and politics largely demanded unilateral national belonging from the disrupters, Özil and Şahin. Both players’ reactions, however, draw on conceptions of (trans-)national belonging which challenge and conflict with established narratives of (ethno-)national belonging.

In 1940, a PhD was published in Germany about the claiming behaviour of several countries and the whaling industry in Antarctica. It shows already at this time that a need for regulation on that issue was required. The intertwined relationships between the claiming nations demanded an overarching framework where these complex issues could be managed. This paper elaborates on the state of the claiming parties before the 1940s and will demonstrate that the development for a comprehensive regulation was the only way to avoid a global conflict. The doctoral thesis from 1940 will be the focal point of the discussion.

This article assesses different approaches currently discussed and developed in international human rights and investment law to establish investor obligations. The article begins with a general framework of analysing and comparing these approaches. Next, attempts to include direct obligations of business entities in international human rights treaties are discussed. Despite earlier indications the recent initiative to create a legally binding instrument on business and human rights will most likely not include direct obligations for business entities. Subsequently, the article assesses the development of investor obligations in new international investment treaties and through the interpretation and application of existing international investment agreements. Arguably, the former will not lead to binding obligations in the foreseeable future and the latter rests on methodologically questionable grounds. Consequently, the article suggests that the way forward will require domestic legislation in host and home states to establish investor obligations which can be taken into account when interpreting existing investment treaty clauses requiring the investor to adhere to domestic law. This would reflect recent trends both in investment law reforms as well as the business and human rights movement.

Africa has been marginalised in the history of Antarctica, a politics of exclusion (with the exception of Apartheid South Africa) reflected unsurprisingly by a dearth of imaginative, cultural and literary engagement. But, in addition to paleontological and geophysical links, Antarctica has increasing interrelationship with Africa’s climactic future. Africa is widely predicted to be the continent worst affected by climate change, and Antarctica and its surrounding Southern Ocean are uniquely implicated as crucial mediators for changing global climate and currents, rainfall patterns, and sea level rise. This paper proposes that there are in fact several ways of imagining the far South from Africa in literary and cultural terms. One is to read against the grain for southern-directed perspectives in existing African literature and the arts, from southern coastlines looking south; another is to reexamine both familiar and new, speculative narratives of African weather – drought, flood and change – for their Antarctic entanglements. In the context of ongoing work on postcolonial Antarctica and calls to decolonise Antarctic studies – such readings can begin to bridge the Antarctica–Africa divide.

The international community’s interest in the governance of Antarctica has long been recognised. Consideration of this interest has even been one of the pillars of the Antarctic Treaty System’s legitimacy. The Antarctic Treaty, for example, famously claims to serve “the interest of all mankind.” Yet, exactly how the international community is given a voice in Antarctic deliberations remains unclear. This contribution argues that – with the idea of direct United Nations involvement having been squarely rejected – stewardship could best describe the existing governance model as well as offer a normative framework to assess the system’s legitimacy.

In this paper we demonstrate on the basis of diachronic and synchronic data from a variety of languages that progressives are particularly liable to be used for the expression of extravagance. We define extravagant language use as a signaling mechanism that consists in the exploitation of an unconventional construction in a given context as a way for speakers to indicate that there is something non-canonical about the situation that they are reporting. Novel constructions naturally lend themselves to such extravagant exploitation, since they are by definition to a certain extent unconventional. This is why, as we will demonstrate, the English, Dutch and French progressives were notably often recruited in extravagant contexts at the onset of their development. However, our synchronic data reveal that Present-day English, Dutch and French progressives continue to be used for extravagant purposes, which suggests that there is something inherent about progressive aspect that makes it liable to such expressive usage. This is confirmed by data from other, typologically diverse languages. We offer a cognitive-semantic analysis in terms of epistemic contingency in order to account for this intrinsic association of progressive aspect and extravagance across languages. Our analysis thus reveals that extravagance is not a transient property of emerging progressives, but that, instead, the semantics of these constructions makes them particularly liable to be recruited for extravagant purposes. It also demonstrates that in order to analyze the range of uses of progressive constructions in a unified fashion, we need to look beyond the temporal import ofthese constructions.

During World War II, Hull suffered from an intensity of bombing which made it one of the most heavily blitzed cities in Britain. Air raids fundamentally reshaped the history of the Yorkshire port city. In 2017, 75 years later, Hull's year as UK City of Culture marked another period of change and development. This article explores how one public history project, The Hull Blitz Trail, brought these two moments of urban transformation together, and reflects on some of the benefits and challenges of taking urban history beyond the academy. It outlines how public engagement projects can become more meaningful, more engaging and more ‘impactful’ if we carefully consider the physical and cultural landscape of the city today, as much as the histories themselves. However, combining the urban past and present influences our work in powerful ways, shaping the histories we are able to share, and how we share them.

Over the past two decades a number of Israeli institutions of higher education have opened gender-segregated programs for the ultra-Orthodox, or haredim. The growth of these programs has generated an intense debate in Israel, reflected throughout Israeli media and in several appeals to Israel's Supreme Court. The issues raised concerning gender-segregated higher education reflect an overarching inquiry that is of great interest to multicultural theoreticians: the relationship of liberal democracies to their illiberal minorities. Multicultural theoreticians agree that healthy democracies must tolerate some illiberal practices while acknowledging that not every illiberal practice can be tolerated. In the case at hand, the essay addresses the question: can a liberal democracy tolerate gender-segregated higher education? Using work by Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, John Inazu, and others, the essay reviews the arguments for and against gender segregation in higher education for Israeli haredim. The essay explores the limits of toleration of illiberal cultures within liberal democratic societies and finds crucial the right to exit such a culture—a right whose viability is dependent upon adequate education. The essay concludes by discussing the multiculturalism organization development model and what has been termed the manyness and messiness of multiculturalism.

This article provides an introduction to the two articles in this Special Theme on education, labour, and discipline in colonial Asia. It offers a brief historiography of education to indigenous children in the colonial context provided by non-state as well as state actors. We argue that while many studies have separated the motives behind, and actions of, these different actors in relation to education and “civilizing missions”, it is worthwhile connecting these histories. Moreover, apart from looking at motives, the articles in this Special Theme aim to show the value of studying educational practices in a colonial context. Finally, this introduction identifies several opportunities for future – comparative as well as transnational – studies into the topic of education, child labour, and discipline.

I examine the two-level utilitarian case for humane animal agriculture (by R. M. Hare and Gary Varner) and argue that it fails on its own terms. The case states that, at the ‘intuitive level’ of moral thinking, we can justify raising and killing animals for food, regarding them as replaceable, while treating them with respect. I show that two-level utilitarianism supports, instead, alternatives to animal agriculture. First, the case for humane animal agriculture does not follow from a commitment to two-level utilitarianism combined with a commitment to respecting animal lives. Second, the two-level utilitarian case falls prey to a compartmentalization problem and cannot uphold both respect and replaceability. What I call ‘humane lives’ are not appropriately valued by the lights of two-level utilitarianism itself.