Building on Roger Cotterrell’s call to theorise the law of trusts in relation to trust as an all-pervasive sociopolitical phenomenon, we explore the interplay between these two concepts of trust in relation to the rise of neoliberalism. Here, we centre how the ability of offshore trusts to evade tax/regulatory obligations compromises the ability of sovereign states to build institutions that nurture trust. Historicising this dynamic, we turn to how the rise of a post-imperial world of sovereign states in the context of decolonisation and the Cold War prompted elite interest in transnational legal innovations – especially trusts – that could avoid state-led redistribution efforts. Empowered by various crises, such innovations became central to neoliberal globalisation and its erosion of trust in the sovereign state. Focus on these material dynamics provides a new lens for conceptualising the failure of human rights and anti-corruption projects whose state-centric outlook detracts attention from broader transnational forces.

In the aftermath of formal independence, two institutions, the East African Court of Appeal (EACA) and the University of Dar es Salaam School of Law, became important international barometers of the potential of post-colonial legal radicalism. Due to the unique power of federal Pan-Africanism in East Africa, the EACA survived the wave of dissolution that claimed similar colonial courts of law. If the EACA represented the formal apotheosis of one version of supranational law, it was the law school at the University of Dar es Salaam, which produced a deeper and wider development of legal thought about the circumstances of law in East Africa. The scholarship produced in Dar es Salaam not only undergirded the legal academies of multiple East African nations but proved globally influential for several left and left-liberal schools of thought. Despite the loose and imperfect coordination of these parallel bodies, the project of East African law shared by the Court and University provides unique insights into the opening for anticolonial or heterodox visions of the law that existed in the opening of twentieth century decolonization and independence. The legal institutions of federal Pan-Africanism usefully illustrate both the unexpected successes and structural limitations on atypical iterations of internationalist Global South legal radicalism.

This article explores the discursive and multimodal strategies through which leadership is accomplished collectively among the coaches of a professional football team. We demonstrate the benefits of using a modified version of Drath and colleagues’ (2008) DAC ontology in sociolinguistic research, and we show what can be gained by conceptualising leadership as a process rather than a set of behaviours or traits associated with an individual in a senior position. Drawing on authentic audio- and video-recordings of the interactions among the coaches of a national football team during a live match, and utilising the analytical concepts of epistemic and deontic status and stance (Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2014), we describe some of the complex discursive and multimodal processes through which leadership unfolds across a web of different interactions, taking place at different moments and in different locations throughout the match. (DAC ontology, collective leadership, professional football, web of leadership)

The article examines politically loaded catchphrases and their development and transformation in the discourses of Russian-speaking social media users. It focuses on how propaganda catchphrases, used to transmit political messages, acquire new meanings and applications in online communication, and how this process is shaped by the specific context of the Baltic states, where the Russian population underwent minoritization after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The data was collected in the course of longitudinal (2021–2025) ethnographic online observation, primarily from posts and comments in public Facebook groups localized in Estonia. Applying conversational analysis of online data, the article investigates the life cycle of specific words and phrases to show how they evolve into complex indexical signs and even systems of signs used to define not only the referenced objects but also the speaking subjects, their audiences, and the sets of ideas they tend to identify with. Using them as discourse devices, Baltic Russian speakers in their public online communication oppose the official discourses of their respective states; in doing so, however, they do not simply transmit the Kremlin propaganda, but rather creatively repurpose local discourses and contexts, building echo chambers of their own.

This paper reconceptualizes aesthetic action in John Stuart Mill’s art of life as a distinct, world-regarding action, oriented toward ideals such as justice, beauty, and nobility. While morality is guided by obligations to others and prudence by rationality and the cultivation of virtues, aesthetics concerns the aspirational pursuit of collective human flourishing. Rejecting character-based interpretations, the paper distinguishes aesthetic action by its transformative effect and expressive quality. Though not enforceable, aesthetic ideals expand moral imagination and inspire long-term social progress. Drawing on Mill’s separation between action and character evaluation, the argument clarifies that aesthetic action cannot be reduced to virtue or character. Instead, it completes Mill’s tripartite normative framework by illuminating a third domain that motivates ethical life through nobleness and imagination. Aesthetic action thus becomes essential to understanding Mill’s perfectionist aspiration and his vision of higher happiness.

This article introduces CriTaRep v1, a geo-coded event dataset documenting state repression against Crimean Tatars (2000–2024). Drawing on locally sourced materials in Crimean Tatar, Ukrainian, and Russian languages, CriTaRep records n = 709 repression events affecting more than 2,200 individual victims. We inductively identify 22 repression types across three categories: deprivation of liberty, legal and administrative repression, and physical repression. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea marked the onset of a large-scale and systematic repression campaign against the Crimean Tatar population. We document a concentration of arbitrary searches on Thursdays, physical repression targeting elites, and intensified repression during periods of dissent. Empirical analyses show that repression spikes in response to protest activity. Russian authorities respond rapidly and increasingly harshly to dissent, pursuing a dual strategy of protest suppression and long-term deterrence. CriTaRep fills critical gaps in existing datasets and provides new opportunities to study patterns and mechanisms of demographically targeted repression in Russian-occupied territories and beyond.

In a world of increasing human movement and displacement, language learning is an educational concern with significant implications for social inclusion in contexts of migration. This review of recent research analyses 40 empirical studies which explore various aspects of language education with adult migrants, investigating what they reveal regarding pedagogical approaches and the impact of policy on language learning, teaching, and assessment. It identifies issues in relation to diversity among adult migrant learners, the value of multilingual practices and the recognition of multiliteracies, as well as the potential of digital learning and affective approaches to language teaching. In addition, this review shows how migration and integration policies can influence language instruction, considering programme design, testing requirements, the learning of minoritised languages, and the role of educators in this field. It outlines directions for further research in areas including critical multilingual approaches to language teaching, equitable forms of assessment, trauma-informed pedagogy, the development of inclusive policies, and teacher education. This paper can thus inform educators, researchers, and policymakers by providing insights which may guide language-related educational support for adult migrants.

In hospital corridors, nursing staff often call on to coworkers and enlist them for the realization of some practical activity, as part of their teamwork. Sometimes, the coparticipants produce a summons-answer (SA) sequence as a preliminary to the recruiting move, for instance the request. They thus check and display the summoned party’s availability for interaction, for talk, and for a new activity foretold by the summons. In this article, we show that they may also convey, through the SA sequence, some understanding of this activity’s nature and specificities. In this regard, we present practices that the summoned party deploys when enacting limited availability for the upcoming recruitment by continuing their current involvement, merely suspending it instead of abandoning it, and in some cases also displaying being disrupted. The data are video-recordings of nursing staff corridor interactions with coworkers in a hospital outpatient clinic in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. (Multimodal conversation analysis, summons-answer sequence, availability, recruitment, nurse, hospital corridor interaction)

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Tbilisi has become one of the key destinations of post-2022 Russian emigration. Unlike in many other host societies, this arrival has been met in Georgia with pronounced public resistance, articulated through the language of occupation and anti-imperial refusal. Slogans such as “Russians go home” and references to a “third occupation” translate everyday Russian visibility – language use, spatial clustering, and lifestyle practices – into a historically saturated interpretive framework. This article examines how and why such interpretations have emerged in Tbilisi, and why hostility is frequently directed even at self-identified “good Russians” who oppose the war and the Russian regime. Empirically, the article draws on a mixed-method research design combining long-term ethnographic and digital observation with 30 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2022 and 2024 with young, urban, pro-European Georgians in Tbilisi. Rather than analysing migrants’ intentions or political self-identifications, the study centres the perspectives of the host society and the conditions through which Russian presence is interpreted. Analytically, it adopts a decolonial/postcolonial perspective and mobilises the concept of coloniality to distinguish between historical empire and the persistence of linguistic, cultural, and epistemic hierarchies after its formal end. The findings demonstrate this dynamic.

In this article, I explain how ideology in Russia’s war against Ukraine has been formulated within specific genres and discourses that are reminiscent of the carnivalesque. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnival has often been used to conceptualise forms of democratic resistance to authoritarianism. Yet alternative readings have always questioned this notion of carnival as liberation, and instead present the Bakhtinian carnival as a potential space and time of violent lawlessness and transgression. I use these contested readings to argue that ideology in Russia’s war is articulated and enacted through the carnivalesque, using forms of transgressive humor, grotesque imagery, and profane language. I use evidence from Russian social media channels, broadcast media, official discourse, and cultural production to support this Bakhtinian framing. The carnivalesque framing of wartime ideology enables Russia to mobilise and demobilise different parts of society simultaneously. It permits social distancing from the war for the Russian public, and enables the leadership to blur and obfuscate ideological tenets, while legitimising the creation of a space of exception in Ukraine, in which transgressive practices are normalised. In this way, carnival is a highly effective discursive mechanism for the transition during wartime to a more consolidated ideological regime in Russia.

The distinction between bridge verbs, which allow long-distance questions out of their CP complement, and non-bridge verbs, which do not, is found in a range of languages. In the previous literature, this distinction has been variably attributed to the lexical semantic/discourse properties of the CP-embedding verbs, or the syntactic positioning of the dependent CP. In this study, we provide evidence for an alternative, learning-based account, whereby positive input evidence is needed for children to acquire the possibility of wh-dependencies across a CP-embedding verb, and to further generalize this property to all such verbs. We examine the bridge/non-bridge distinction in English and Mandarin, with a corpus analysis of child-directed speech and experimental evidence provided for each language. We demonstrate that while English shows a clear bridge/non-bridge distinction, Mandarin CP-embedding verbs are all bridge verbs for both argument and adjunct wh-dependencies. These findings are predicted by a difference in the structure of the input data available to English versus Mandarin children as they acquire long-distance wh-dependencies, along with the proposed learning-based account of the bridge effect.

Foreign language anxiety (FLA) has been widely studied over the past four decades, yet the effectiveness of anxiety-reduction strategies remains insufficiently understood. This article offers a critical review of research on FLA-reduction interventions, synthesizing the findings from experimental studies across four major categories: emotion regulation, cognitive restructuring, skill building, and classroom environment enhancement. While many strategies show promise, the field lacks a coherent, psychologically grounded framework for supporting anxious learners. Drawing on psychological theories including cognitive-behavioral, acceptance-based, and analytical frameworks and emerging Daoism-inspired psychological perspectives, this article argues for a conceptual shift in FLA research: from viewing anxiety as a surface-level symptom to be eliminated toward understanding it as a meaningful psychological signal that may reflect deeper learner-internal processes. The article proposes an interdisciplinary approach that integrates pedagogical practice with psychological insight, positioning anxiety as a potential catalyst for self-awareness and growth. Implications for language teaching and future directions for FLA research are discussed.