On 25 October 2017, the Saudi Arabian regime granted citizenship to Sophia, a humanoid robot developed in Hong Kong. Sophia became the world's first robot citizen. Some of the globe's wealthiest investors, foreign dignitaries, and foremost economists, journalists, and public relations experts celebrated the conferral firsthand. They were guests of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, where they attended the inaugural Future Investment Initiative. Sponsored by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the forum heralded the regime's renewed commitment to diversify the country's petro-economy, develop its human capital, and increase its global investment competitiveness. The national reform plan, dubbed Vision 2030, dominated the event's discussions. Vision 2030 was an ambitious blueprint that had as its goal nothing short of overhauling everyday life in Saudi Arabia. It entailed revamping bureaucratic capacity, building global gigacities, and opening the country to visitors and investors alike. Developing the tourism and entertainment sectors were key. Through these lucrative socio-technical experiments, the regime hoped to tackle the dire economic, financial, and social challenges it faced. To appeal to the global investor, it framed the reforms in the language of high-tech modernization, sustainable development, and socioreligious tolerance. Sophia, and all the trappings of modernization that “she” embodied, epitomized the ruling class's entrepreneurial vision for a new Saudi Arabia, and in turn, a new global citizen: the naturalized elite as well as the new Saudi Arabian citizen-subject (Fig. 1).

Space, in the dictionary, is “a continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied” and “the dimensions of height, depth, and width within which all things exist and move.” Those of us who are social scientists may recognize Henri Lefebvre's unitary theory of space in the dictionary definition, which seeks to capture physical, mental, and social “fields” constituting space: spatial practices, representations of space, and representational space (such as the opening and closing of airports, requiring that people queue for temperature scans, constructing stadiums and choosing names for them). If anything, the spread of coronavirus disease at the present moment draws the significance of space and tensions between different concepts of space to our immediate attention.

Between c.1350 and c.1750 a small group of professional hereditary physicians served the Gaelic communities of Ireland and Scotland. Over fifty medical kindreds provided advice regarding health maintenance and treatment with herbs and surgery. Their medical knowledge was derived from Gaelic translations of medieval European Latin medical texts grounded in the classical works of Hippocrates and Galen, and the Arab world. Students studied in medical schools where they copied and compiled medical texts in Irish, some for use as handbooks. Over 100 texts are extant. Political upheaval and scientific advances led to the eclipse of this medical world. Through examination of the Gaelic medical manuscripts and other sources this article provides an assessment of medicine in Gaelic Ireland and Scotland from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries.

While scholars have rightly recognised that the First World War transformed twentieth-century Ireland, this article queries assumptions regarding the scope and scale of public support for hostilities during 1917 and 1918. Eleven elite boys’ schools are used as case studies to assess civilian reactions to the ongoing war effort, food shortages, and the 1918 conscription crisis within specific institutional communities, illuminating the importance of socio-religious affiliations and political aspirations in determining late-war behaviour. Drawing on school magazines and newspaper coverage of college events, it is argued that alternative visions of statehood underpinned divergent reactions to the conflict; Protestant schools clung to fundraising and militaristic activities seen to support continued union with Britain but Catholic establishments rejected such endeavours in the wake of increased separatist sentiment. This research also casts new light on the interplay between conflict, educational socialisation and politicisation in revolutionary Ireland. Constitutional nationalist reputation aside, wartime mobilisation in elite Catholic schools proved extremely lacklustre, while the unionist expectations their Protestant counterparts had for the post-war world ultimately went unfulfilled. Prestigious colleges across the denominational spectrum demonstrably navigated late-war pressures on their own terms, shaping Ireland's political landscape both throughout and beyond the conflict's most contentious years.

This roundtable is an effort to challenge prevailing assumptions that have long dominated the general discourse about citizenship and belonging. We use the Arabian Peninsula as the site for our discussion. Our scope and purpose involve both theoretical innovation and empirical diversity. Participants are multidisciplinary and put forth ideas that move conversation on the politics of citizenship and belonging beyond the usual suspects: oil and arms, the rentier framework, social contracts that exchange welfare for loyalty, a simple state-centric lens, the primacy of tribal identities, the binary of local or foreign worker, and the binary of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) or Yemen.

Both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics there is some debate about how rich or thin lexico-semantic representations are. Traditionally, in formal semantics but also in philosophy of language as well as in cognitive pragmatics, lexical meanings have been thought to be simple stable denotations or functions. In this paper, we present and discuss a number of interpretational phenomena of which the analysis proposed in the literature makes crucial use of rich meanings. The phenomena in question are cases where the assignment of truth-conditional contents to utterances seems to follow rules that do not operate on simple stable denotations or any other kind of ‘thin’ meanings but where composition takes rich structured representations as input. We also discuss problems for such accounts, which are mostly based on the inability of extant rich meanings accounts to explain many other interpretational phenomena, and we discuss the solutions that have been proposed to solve them. Furthermore, we address the discussion whether the informationally rich meanings are part of semantics, and more specifically part of the lexicon, or whether this information should be ascribed to more general world knowledge.