Access to quality healthcare varies across the national territory inside Latin American countries, with some subnational units enjoying higher-quality care than others. Such territorial inequality is consequential, as residents of particular regions face shorter life spans and an increased risk of preventable disease. This article analyzes trajectories of territorial healthcare inequality across time in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The data reveal a large decline in Brazil, a moderate decline in Mexico, and low levels of change followed by a moderate decline in Argentina. The article argues that two factors account for these distinct trajectories: the nature of the coalition that pushed health decentralization forward and the existence of mechanisms for central government oversight and management.

The objective of this article is to explain the territorial variation in indigenous political representation at the subnational level in Peru. The Peruvian state introduced a weak indigenous electoral quota, and its effects have varied across provinces. This article presents a typology that combines descriptive and substantive dimensions of political representation. Using a subnational comparative method, the four cases studied illustrate distinct dynamics. The article argues that these differing dynamics are explained by a combination of sociostructural variables (i.e., political articulation and cohesion of indigenous organizations as a result of a conflict) and individual variables (i.e., candidates’ political capital). This article demonstrates how, even in an institutionally adverse environment that does not feature ethnic parties, both descriptive and substantive indigenous political representation can be achieved, and that these two dimensions are not necessarily related. The article is based on fieldwork and interviews with key provincial political actors.

The role of bioethicists amidst crises like the COVID-19 pandemic is not well defined. As professionals in the field, they should respond, but how? The observation of the early days of pandemic confinement in Finland showed that moral philosophers with limited experience in bioethics tended to apply their favorite theories to public decisions with varying results. Medical ethicists were more likely to lend support to the public authorities by soothing or descriptive accounts of the solutions assumed. These are approaches that Tuija Takala has called the firefighting and window dressing models of bioethics. Human rights lawyers drew attention to the flaws of the government’s regulative thinking. Critical bioethicists offered analyses of the arguments presented and the moral and political theories that could be used as the basis of good and acceptable decisions.

This article explores the tension between multicultural legal reforms and the liberal state-building project in present-day Mexico. Specifically, it traces the process by which the Mexican state challenged and eventually forced changes to customary restrictions on women in public life in some indigenous communities in the southern state of Oaxaca. The study argues that the act of formalizing autonomy for indigenous communities, in the context of Mexico’s homogenizing neoliberal state, had the unanticipated effect of exposing exclusionary practices to state scrutiny, which eventually forced those communities to recognize women’s political rights. Thus the effort to protect indigenous practices facilitated the territorial and juridical expansion of the Mexican state into formerly autonomous areas of the countryside.

There are two main trends in the field of nation-building studies. One subset of the field focuses on democratic nation building, seeking to answer questions of how people can live together in divided societies and presenting institutional recommendations. The other subset examines autocratic nation building, or how those in power utilize nation building to maintain their position of dominance. Scholars examine both types of nation building from above, examining government policies and elite action, and from below, analyzing the practices and emotions of non-elites. While there has been much progress in the field of nation-building studies, I suggest that we focus more on the conceptual differences between democratic and autocratic nation building, address the interactions of elites and non-elites in nation-building practices, and disaggregate analyses to take into account in-country variation in nation building.

Since Charles Jones referred to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study’ (1989: 279), there has been a great deal of progress in research on this period, but, as Beal (2012: 22) points out, much of this has been in the fields of syntax, morphology, lexis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and the normative tradition. Beal argues that the availability of corpora of Late Modern English texts has greatly facilitated research in these areas, but, since creating phonological corpora for periods antedating the invention of sound recording is a challenging proposition, the historical phonology of Late Modern English has benefited much less from the corpus revolution. To redress this imbalance, the editors of this issue, with technical support from the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, created the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP), which is freely available at www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/ecep/

Over the past century, divine passibility has become the majority view within Christian theology and philosophy of religion. Yet it faces a serious objection from proponents of impassibility that I shall call the Problem of Creepy Emotions. In this article, I shall develop the objection in detail, and explore two ways for divine passibilists to answer this objection. I shall do this in several steps. First, I will offer some brief historical remarks to help readers understand that divine empathy is the watershed issue in the debate over impassibility and passibility. In particular, impassibility denies that God has empathy, whereas passibility affirms that God has empathy. Second, I provide definitions of important concepts for this debate such as impassibility, passibility, emotions, and empathy. I shall articulate Linda Zagzebski's recent account of passibility called omnisubjectivity, or perfect empathy. Third, I shall examine the Problem of Creepy Emotions that arises from the affirmation that God has perfect empathy. Fourth, I shall explore two different strategies that divine passibility can employ to avoid the Problem of Creepy Emotions.

This article examines how international organisations with mandates in health and development interpret global economic crises and respond to disease. It contributes the perspective of World Bank to emerging scholarship on the various factors leading to the decline of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its Health for All (HFA) mission during structural adjustment. It does so by telling a story of collaboration and conflict between WHO and World Bank’s Population, Health and Nutrition (PHN) Department following the ambitious Alma Ata Declaration in 1978 until the initial global AIDS response. As debt crises emerged in Latin America in the early 1980s, WHO tried to find a way forward for HFA. However, the African crisis of 1985 fractured the international community’s support, causing WHO and PHN to dialogue more closely regarding health sector financing. As AIDS became a global crisis, this culminated in their 1987 joint research on the disease’s macroeconomic and demographic impact. However, observing WHO’s continued hesitance regarding financing and its decision to act as a donor gatekeeper, the Bank ultimately opted to work separately in AIDS. Thus, the themes of the Alma Ata versus Selective Primary Health Care debate of the late 1970s continued throughout the 1980s into the early years of the global AIDS response: a perennial conflict of financing within resource constraints and the appropriate role of donors in the grand project of health and development.

Individuals often face administrative hurdles in attempting to access health care, public programmes, and other legal statuses and entitlements. These ordeals are the products, directly or indirectly, of institutional and policy design choices. I argue that evaluating whether such ordeals are justifiable or desirable instruments of social policy depends on assessing, beyond their targeting effects, the process-related burdens they impose on those attempting to navigate them and these burdens’ distributive effects. I here examine specifically how ordeals that levy time costs reduce and constrain individuals’ free time, and how such time-cost ordeals may thereby create, deepen and compound disadvantages.

The history of dentistry during the Third Reich is still a neglected chapter in medical history; especially with a view to the concentration camps. Beyond the theft of dental gold, we actually know very little about the number of camp dentists or even about their activities and how these changed in particular in the final phase of the war. By using as a case study the biography of Willi Schatz, 2nd SS dentist at Auschwitz from January 1944 till autumn 1944, this paper examines the tasks of SS camp dentists in Auschwitz. It points out to what extent the scope of action of the camp dentists changed under the impression of extraordinary events, and clarifies that using the example of the Ungarn Aktion, in which more than 300 000 deportees were immediately murdered. It illustrates that such situational dynamics were an essential driving force for the expansion of dentals tasks. Despite the fact that Schatz was acquitted during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963–5) for lack of evidence, we show that dentists were not only part of the selection personnel but also high profiteers of the accelerated extermination actions. It can be demonstrated that participation in the selection process – originally reserved for physicians – offered SS dentists access to further SS networks. The study is based on primary sources supplemented with relevant secondary literature, and combines a biographical with a praxeological approach.

This discussion is a response to Richard Hudson's response to my article, ‘The policy and policing of language in schools’ (Cushing 2019). Hudson argues that current education policy in England generally rejects and avoids prescriptivism and sets out to illustrate this in reference to a number of policy documents. As in my original article, I conceive of language policy as p/Political and one way in which language ideologies get turned into practices, through a series of policy mechanisms such as curricula, tests, and guidance for teachers. I show how these mechanisms do not ‘reject’ prescriptivism, but explicitly perpetuate it, and thus act as a system of coercion which can lead teachers into reproducing these ideologies in their practice. I argue that Hudson's argument is limited because of its depoliticised stance and understanding of key sociolinguistic concepts and issues, such as ‘Standard English’, ‘linguistic correctness’, and language education itself. (Language education policy, language ideologies, critical applied linguistics, schools, England)*