The proliferation of information and communication technologies in US archaeology has created myriad expectations for professional labor throughout the life cycle of data. Technological adoption has outpaced the development of professional and ethical frameworks, leaving archaeological data labor unsustainable in our under-resourced discipline. This article reviews traditional Western paradigms underpinning legal and intellectual property models that have shaped archaeological data standards and contribute to problematic outcomes for archaeological data labor, alienate publics from primary data of publicly mandated heritage preservation, disregard Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and enable the extractive commodification of heritage for AI enterprises. To address these tensions, archaeologists must reshape data labor and its products by centering public goods and Indigenous rights in all aspects of their work. As scientific and cultural professionals, archaeologists should embrace best practices in data ecosystems to create, guide, and enforce governance principles that inform and promote labor sustainability and accountability. This article illuminates the current state of archaeological data labor across the discipline through a critical review of policies, legislation, and ethics surrounding data governance (e.g., CARE, FAIR, and the US OPEN Government Data Act) and describes how archaeologists can integrate these efforts into technological initiatives across the full spectrum of archaeological practice.

Biomaterial design is often celebrated as a sustainable alternative to industrial material production, promising to replace extractive processes. Yet, this vision sits uneasily beside critiques that see it reproducing extractive logics through the instrumentalisation of living systems. Drawing on ethnographic research among UK-based biomaterial designers, this paper examines how relationships between biomaterial designers and organisms are lived, negotiated, and ethically charged in practice. It argues that care, far from resolving tensions of exploitation, functions as a mechanism through which hierarchies of value are stabilised, justified, and sometimes unsettled. Through practices of growing, attuning to, and killing organisms, biomaterial designers cultivate what Donna Haraway (2008) calls non-innocent care: an engagement that acknowledges complicity in harm while sustaining responsiveness to more‑than‑human worlds. Attending to these ambivalent, affective, and creative entanglements reveals how care in biodesign operates simultaneously as an ethical aspiration, a condition of production, and a site where ecological promise and capitalist value production intertwine unevenly.

Mental healthcare respecting human rights is a worldwide need, yet research into practices that support such rights is limited. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2006 and the United Nations Resolution on mental health and psychosocial support, 2023 each heighten the urgency and the legal, as well as moral, social, political and other obligations to improve the quality of mental healthcare and respect human rights worldwide. It is useful to be specific about the actions to be taken, as done in recent programmes by the World Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization. The work requires partnerships at all levels, from global to local, among healthcare professionals, people with lived experience and their families, communities and policy-makers. We present a themed series of papers developed in two parts: one related to principles of human rights-based mental healthcare; the other to assessment, policy and actions needed for tackling the implementation gap.

Human-Centered Design focuses on individuals who struggle to grasp the relational aspects crucial in designing for care. This proposes a relational framework that visualizes the relational expectation misalignments between stakeholders’ perceptions. We extend the Theory of Planned Behavior to model dyadic care relationships. Expert interviews and autoethnographic analysis evaluated the model. Our findings reveal two layers of misalignments: the model’s ability to describe the structure of conflict and its potential as a reflective tool for stakeholders to resolve conflicts.

Gender data gaps in the United Kingdom are political choices that reflect deeper assumptions about whose labour, lives, and experiences are deemed worth measuring. This paper examines the strengths and limitations of the UK census for bridging these gaps, drawing on feminist participatory action research with 170 participants across 12 workshops in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Participants comprised representatives from local government, women’s and non-profit organisations, academia, and unaffiliated individuals with varying statistical skills. Through co-produced inquiry, participants identified critical gender data gaps and questioned the political and epistemological assumptions embedded in census design. We find that while the UK census provide comprehensive disaggregated multivariate data at the local level, they systematically omit critical dimensions of gendered life, including income, unpaid childcare, and occupational segregation. Drawing on Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice, we argue that these omissions are not incidental but structural: the census lacks the conceptual framework to recognise them as dimensions worth counting. Realising the census’s potential for feminist analysis, therefore, requires deliberate reshaping of data systems and practices.Crucially, we demonstrate that involving those affected by gender data gaps as co-analysts, rather than consultation subjects, surfaces blind spots and analytical priorities that academic or statistical institutions are unlikely to identify from within, making the case for embedding participatory mechanisms in how official statistics are designed, produced, and used. The paper concludes with four user-informed recommendations for census reform and the wider reimagining of UK gender data systems.

This paper draws on feminist disability scholarship on care to examine the figure of a sacrificial mother located within the moral unit of family, which is identified as central to the public discourse of disability around the Kasargod-endosulfan episode. It is an instance of pesticide poisoning that resulted in the acquisition of disabilities by the populations living in the region. The paper argues that the figure of the sacrificial mother who forsakes her job and social life is discursively constructed by feminised notions of care, absence of formal care structures, and the state’s imagination of care as a packageable/givable product. Caregiving has often been thought of as a linear process or mobilised as a moral force to organise familial structures or care containments. By reflecting on the ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews with mothers of endosulfan-affected people at a private care home in the Indian state of Kerala, the study attempts to locate ways in which disability-care destabilises these containments. It also deliberates on the possibilities of socialities and solidarities enabled by disability-care, forming newer spatialities.

This article discusses the musical engagement of disabled people given recent scholarship in care ethics. It considers how terms used to describe them frame the relational aspects of care. Possibilities and challenges are examined for caring relationships in music teaching that involve: inclusive practice; vulnerabilities; reframing it towards reciprocal care; and the dangers of “benign neglect”. Hel’s “distributive justice” is also considered. The article concludes that disabled insiders’ authentic experiences might best serve as a platform for appropriate resources, policies and music education practices.

This article explores how predictions about future nanotechnological and neuropharmaceutical applications to medicine further anti-ageing discourse in the present. Products of both research areas enable physiological augmentation, with uses way beyond accepted traditional goals of medicine. But most “nanodreams” have not come to fruition, yet; as such, much popular scientific writing about nanotechnology is “thoroughly science-fictional” in how it imagines its future. Projections about these technologies contribute to devaluing the ageing experience and neglecting the need to address challenges of ageing in the present. To make these points, this article will read two speculative texts alongside one another: a piece of creative science fiction and a predictive popular science account. Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind propagates brain–computer interfaces, and Jeffrey Moore’s The Memory Artists deals with neuropharmaceuticals. Such parallel reading risks conflating different genres, narrative forms and contexts, obfuscating the purpose and possibilities of either genre. But it helps illustrate how ideas of an augmented human species have begun structuring social belief systems that shine through creative writing that joins in pitching, rather than effectively critiquing, these technologies as holding the fountain of youth.

In light of progressive criticism of the managerial ‘expert’ logic dominant in the development field, the article analyses how international organizations (IOs) increasingly seek to pluralize their knowledge by adding to their toolkit certain territory-based elements of participatory approaches to data, especially from the Global South. It examines how such attempts to pluralize IOs’ expertise translate in practice, by focusing on the localization processes of the UN 2030 Agenda in six peripheral communities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that is, their development of territory-based targets and indicators for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. The article contrasts these local practices with UN expert agencies’ approaches to data disaggregation. This comparison shows how datafying tools and processes may vary considerably, indicating important epistemological differences in how knowledge gets validated, with impacts regarding visibility and accountability. The territory-based practices analysed defy authorized forms of knowledge by making data not only for monitoring or for action but also for caring and for making live. The article concludes that localization gives the impression that IOs’ knowledge is becoming more plural, yet these changes remain at the surface only, with other knowledges becoming parts of standardized templates and merely complementing official data.