Sentences that contain the verb ‘seem’, an experiencer, and an embedded infinitival phrase (e.g. Jill seems to me to be smart) have traditionally been considered acceptable in English, but not in Spanish. However, a corpus analysis reveals that such sentences are produced in both languages, most commonly with the embedded infinitives ‘be’ and ‘have’. Acceptability judgment tasks completed by fifty English speakers and fifty Spanish speakers further reveal that the embedded verbs ‘be’ and ‘have’ render this sentence structure most acceptable in both languages, and that the degree of contextual subjectivity in a sentence significantly affects acceptability. This study demonstrates how multiple data types can be used to uncover novel crosslinguistic patterns that have gone unnoticed in previous research that was based primarily on informal introspective judgments.

We review the ambiguous legacy of Emil Kraepelin. He established an approach that secured psychiatry’s place as a medical specialty, and his methodology has dominated the profession and defined its long 20th century, 1899–2026. However, his eugenic views weigh heavily because of the catastrophes in which German psychiatry was implicated and to which it contributed actively during the Nazi era that followed. Furthermore, his project to establish mental illness in the form of discrete natural kinds has failed in the light of scientific progress. Psychiatry must embrace the complexity of mental illness and engage more deeply with the inherently fuzzy realms of language, culture, technological change and political power. This shift should bear more strongly on psychiatry’s curriculum, research priorities, continuing professional development, practice, ethics and public engagement.

In China’s resource-based cities, work and everyday life have historically been shaped by extractive industries. Amid the ongoing restructuring of the coal industry, examining social dynamics beyond labour – particularly those linked to housing, displacement and resettlement – reveals critical mechanisms of power. Based on fieldwork conducted in Datong, Shanxi province, this article introduces the concept of “extractive governmentality at home” to analyse territorialization as a governing technique that shapes miners’ practices and subjectivities. The relocation of miners from unsafe, self-built dwellings to a new urban neighbourhood, built and managed by their coal state-owned enterprise (SOE), reveals a form of corporate power. While resettlement has improved living conditions for most insiders, it has reinforced SOE dependency and highlighted the social marginality of less- or unaffiliated local residents. More recently, the gradual separation of SOEs from their social responsibilities has increased the administrative burdens on local governments, while resettled populations continue to face territorial stigmatization. This article contributes to scholarly debates on China’s “just transition” by underlining the socio-political complexities of housing provision and management in extractive contexts. Beyond the workplace, housing represents an overlooked yet important domain of power in China’s “independent industrial mining areas,” emphasizing inhabiting practices and territorial subjectivities as key elements for understanding the broader transformations induced by coal industry restructuring.

This article addresses questions about the identity of the subject of constitutional law from a historical-sociological perspective. It aims to reconstruct, beneath the surface of constitutional texts, the actual material subjects that commonly give rise to constitutions. To do this, it isolates the constituent conjunctures in which constitutions have typically been written, and it describes the social pressures that obliged members of different societies to articulate their subjectivities in constitutional fashion. It uses this reconstruction to suggest a new framework for approaching questions of constitutional subjectivity and legitimacy, as, contrary to more deliberative methods, it explains how experiences of military violence usually shaped the emergence of constitutional subjects. On this basis, it argues that constitutions typically acquired stable legitimating force, not by enacting the will of identifiable constitutional subjects, but by displacing such subjects into a manageable form, separate from their military emphases. It cautions against idealist theories of constitutional subjectivity, arguing that most constitutions create legitimacy for government specifically as they promote societal integration in procedures that are not defined by the subjects to which they attribute their authorship. It concludes by addressing some current examples of constitutional crisis, considering how these have been shaping by literalist understandings of constitutional subjectivity.

While much has been written about urban-educated women’s veiling in recent decades, the proliferation of veiling, or wearing a burqa, among ordinary rural women has received little attention. This paper is an attempt at such an inquiry in the context of Bangladesh. It juxtaposes historical, literary, and theological resources with recently collected ethnographic and interview data to show how the landscape of veiling has radically transformed in rural Bangladesh and suggests that ordinary rural women’s veiling cannot be interpreted as either their choice or an imposition on them. It illustrates how women choose to don a veil in compliance with the community’s expectations while simultaneously resisting its prescription of putting on a specific pattern of burqa. In other words, the paper shows how veiling has become a site for women’s complex negotiations with community norms, liberal women’s rights discourse, and legal regimes. This negotiation process, it argues, constructs women as distinct subjects who are neither liberal nor Islamic but are constantly in the process of self-constitution.

In this article I question a long-established, common-sense belief. Namely, that words contain meanings. This belief is the absolute presupposition underpinning the familiar question: ‘What does that word mean? Backed by John Locke, I argue that words don’t mean. Or as Locke puts it: ‘Words are an insignificant noise.’ Words become significant, meaningful, once we have each processed them through our own minds. In short, we subjectively make our own meanings. The role of words is to trigger the meanings we have made for ourselves. This is where the inescapable roots of misunderstanding lie. The words that do the triggering are public. The meanings we create for those words are unavoidably private and mobile. The bulk of the rest of the article addresses the question: ‘How far can we curb misunderstanding?’

With fintech investment apps providing convenience and round-the-clock access to financial markets on the go, investors are becoming more active in managing their financial lives through smartphones and other mobile devices. However, fintech investing’s role in the financialization of everyday life remains unclear. Combining insights from Foucauldian governmentality and Science and Technology Studies (STS), this article positions fintech brokerage apps as both neoliberal tools in governing investor conduct and as agencements in reconfiguring financial subjectivities. Based on a survey and interviews with lay investors in Singapore, the findings reveal that fintech investors use app-based brokerages as a tool to invest conveniently and at low cost. However, users themselves may resist the financial subjectivities promoted by fintech investing, driven by skepticism towards gamified and other algorithmic app features. They are also motivated by feelings of uncertainty towards fledgling fintech startups and difficulties in their interactions with the app user interface. To mitigate uncertainty, investors adopt various tactics to protect their portfolios.

This introduction to the round table attempts an overview of the conceptualizations of ‘voice’ and ‘agency’. It maintains a dialogic balance between the novel insights offered by each contribution’s topic and the authors’ distinct angles, and current debates around voice and agency. The introduction interweaves philosophical, anthropological, and, of course, (ethno)musicological approaches to the vocal phenomenon, highlighting its complex dimensions as well as its dense intersubjective meaningfulness. If ‘listening’ is the counterpart of ‘voicing’, integral to its very materialization, ‘vocal agency’ urges us to think beyond the interconnection between the vocalizer and the listener, shifting our focus of attention to the capacity of the voice to offer insights into and through itself.

In Croatia, due to local histories of violence, purist language ideologies, and the essentialist belief that nations and languages form an inseparable nexus, the ability to speak pure “Croatian” (čisti hrvatski) is perceived as a sign of morality while the use of “Serbian” indexes immorality. Through repetition over time and institutional support – through ethno-linguistic enregisterment – linguistic practises are able to map ethnicity and morality onto the bodies of speakers, making the use of language in Croatia a delicate and politicized performance. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the ways in which linguistic performances of čisti hrvatski by the newly minoritized Serbs in Vukovar become an integral part of performing political subjectivity. The eagerness of some of my interlocutors to perform čisti hrvatski in the public sphere becomes a way to embody exemplary minority subjectivity and to negotiate their stigmatized ethnic difference by demonstrating a sense of belonging to the Croatian nation-state.