In Mumbai, the live slaughter of meat by Muslim butchers is an intergenerational caste practice and a source of livelihood and labour, supplying ritually slaughtered halal meat for Muslims, and fresh quality meat for others in the city. Yet in the neoliberal Hindu Nationalist imagination, the very sights, smells, and sounds of butchering are a sign of Muslim abjection, a source of disgust to be eradicated from the “world-class” Hindu city. Muslim butchers are further subject to an intra-Muslim caste politics of disdain, in which their contact with blood is thought to render them impure (na-pak) and untrustworthy. At butcher stores and meat markets, economic development, urban sanitation, and ritual ideologies recruit the senses into a politics of disgust and disdain. These affects are reflexively embodied in ways that reveal the intimate relation between individualising forms of Islamic piety, Muslim infrastructural marginalisation, and the making of a sanitised neoliberal Hindu city.

Our Forum envisions East Asia as part of Islamic Asia, treating it as a space where Muslim communities have forged cross-border networks across time, episodically, and where discourses about Islam have circulated and been appropriated in interconnection with Muslim-majority regions of the continent (that is, ‘Islamic’ Asia). We hold that Islam, as a constellation of religious, political, cultural, and social formations, questions the spatial and conceptual boundaries of East Asia, while East Asia expands the known geographies of Islamic Asia. The articles in this Forum show that Islam was a shared paradigm of meaning-making across inter-Asian geographies, and offered alternative modes and axes of spatial production and political idioms that both Muslims and non-Muslims latched onto across Asia, including its easternmost reaches.

Education policy is always at risk of working at cross-purposes toward education goals. Using a meta-ethnographic methodology and Massey’s geometry of space theory, the present article addresses this in relation to a particular policy realisation problem of teaching for sustainability in schools in depopulated rural areas with identified population challenges. Specific attention has gone to research addressing the enacted curriculum and teachers’ experiences of working with sustainability goals. The results highlight features for goal realisation such as the presence of and attention to rural natural and cultural environmental heritage, having local access and giving curriculum attention to local employment and sustainable vocations and professions, and having community support from the local community and engagement of the school in the community. Working against sustainability were global epistemic rural marginalisation, performative curriculum relations, market competition and competitive exclusions from market participation, tepid community involvement in schools, and socially isolated schools insulated from the local community.

Does the way people talk about time affect how they think about it? Whereas English speakers describe the duration of events most often in terms of spatial length (e.g., a long night), Greek speakers tend to talk about duration in terms of multidimensional spatial size (e.g., mia megali nychta, tr. a big night) or amount (e.g., poli ora, tr. much time). After quantifying these linguistic patterns, we gave non-linguistic tests of duration estimation to English and Greek speakers. English speakers’ estimates were influenced more strongly by irrelevant length information and Greek speakers’ by irrelevant amount information, consistent with verbal metaphors for duration in English and Greek. Next, we tested duration estimation with concurrent verbal interference, to confirm that the observed effects did not depend on participants verbally labeling the stimuli during the task. Finally, we trained English speakers to use Greek-like metaphors for duration, which resulted in Greek-like performance on a non-linguistic duration estimation task. Results show that (a) people who talk about time differently also think about it differently, (b) these effects are not due to participants’ using verbal labels during the task, and (c) language can play a causal role in shaping even basic non-linguistic mental representations of time.

This article explores how pre-service music teachers in Norway reflect on their future professional identities and career trajectories during the final year of a five-year generalist teacher education programme. We analyse two group interviews with eight participants – one conducted during the writing of their master’s theses and one shortly after submission. The study is framed by the concept of spatially situated possible selves, combining Markus and Nurius’ theory of possible selves with Massey’s spatial theory to examine how imagined futures could be shaped by institutional, geographic, and social contexts. Thematic analysis reveals four key areas of reflection: career awareness, the influence of past experiences, the shaping role of music teacher education, and the participants’ hybrid positioning between student and teacher roles. Findings suggest that the master’s thesis serves as a transitional tool for professional development and identity formation. We argue that music teacher education can be understood as a contested and evolving space – a multiplicity of ‘stories-so-far’ – where future selves are imagined, negotiated, and constrained.

Outer space is increasingly central to international security. The use of Starlink in the Russo–Ukrainian war has enabled Ukrainian operations while negating Russian interference. Having witnessed Starlink’s crucial impact in Ukraine, several states seek to emulate the system’s offensive and defensive advantages. This article analyses how the onset of mega-constellations – satellite systems consisting of very high numbers of smaller satellites – will affect stability in the space domain. As states are increasingly dependent on space for both nuclear and conventional operations, the stability of the space domain is a key concern for international security. Showing how mega-constellations can mitigate existing vulnerabilities in space while generating offensive advantages on earth, this article shows that their proliferation is likely to make conventional counterspace attacks ineffective and costly. Therefore, mega-constellations will have a stabilising effect between states equally dependant on space. However, under conditions of asymmetric dependence, less space-reliant states may find incentives to employ highly destructive weapons, including nuclear weapons, to disable adversary mega-constellations. Accordingly, the proliferation of mega-constellations may act in a destabilising manner, especially if under conditions of asymmetry in space.

This short report draws attention to an interesting kind of configuration in the lexicon that seems to have escaped theoretical or systematic descriptive attention. These configurations, which we dub SEMPLATES, consist of an abstract structure or template, which is recurrently instantiated in a number of lexical sets, typically of different form classes. A number of examples from different language families are adduced, and generalizations made about the nature of semplates, which are contrasted to other, perhaps similar, phenomena.

This article considers the material practices of forging ‘Hindu’ spaces in colonial India, through an examination of a cremation charity’s movement against a mechanical crematorium in interwar Calcutta. Established around 1926, the mechanical crematorium was advertised by the municipality as a cost-effective alternative to traditional Hindu pyres, disposing of unclaimed corpses and dissected parts by employing stigmatized Dalit labour, in a region of the city marked for ‘offensive’ trades. However, by 1932, a cremation charity led by municipal councillors and Indian capitalists contested the existence of the crematorium, arguing that its technological process, labour practices, and location were an affront to Hindu sensibilities. This article examines the rise of the charity and the decline of the crematorium within the context of electoral politics, the politics of the location, and the broader impact on interwar labour crises and famines in Calcutta. By analysing the anti-crematorium movement, this article offers a colonial material history of the construction of the emotional resonance in ‘Hindu spaces’ in India, outlining how it emerged at the interstices of communal and caste boundaries.

Most research on social entrepreneurship overemphasizes agency by presenting social enterprising as something that originates solely from the intrinsic motivations of individual entrepreneurs. Research that does regard the impact of state power is almost exclusively anchored in and geared toward neoliberal policy contexts. This article examines the dialectics between state power and entrepreneurial counterpower in the institutional context of the Netherlands. Moreover, since social entrepreneurs develop different tactics and strategies for responding to challenges, we use Gaventa’s power cube to distinguish forms of power and counterpower, which we then combine with the following inductively derived social entrepreneur typologies: successful hybrids, antagonistic organizers, and autonomous entrepreneurs. This offers insights into the development of theory in relation to the social entrepreneurial potential for change and civic participation.

Deterministic and stochastic processes are of great importance in influencing the composition of communities. Here, we tested if deterministic and stochastic processes have the same force of influence on functional traits of tiger moth communities. Specifically, we hypothesised that the functional traits of the tribe Arctiini would be more strongly influenced by stochastic processes (associated with spatial variables), given that these moths are primarily diet and habitat generalists within a highly diverse clade. They also exhibit high morphological trait dissimilarity and are capable of occupying a wide range of vegetation habitats. On the other hand, we hypothesised that the functional traits of the tribe Lithosiini would be more influenced by deterministic processes (associated with environmental variables), given that these moths are primarily diet and habitat specialist moths and tend to occur in more specific vegetation types. In agreement with our hypotheses, the functional traits of Arctiini species were better explained by variables related to stochasticity, while the functional traits of Lithosiini were explained by deterministic processes only. Thus, the processes shaping moth distributions across communities may vary according to species’ functional traits and interspecific relationships.