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Existing literature provides nascent insights into structural arrangements that shape mothers' experiences of being a sport fan, yet we know little about the social meaning sport fandom holds for mothers. This exploratory study draws on qualitative interviews with 41 mothers from Australia and North America to examine their understandings of sport fandom in the context of their everyday lives and contemporary ideologies about mothering. Findings suggest that sport fandom presents an opportunity for mothers to redefine and transform both fan and mothering practices, thereby challenging popular orthodoxies that fandom becomes less important to women after having children. By foregrounding mothers' efforts to stay engaged with their fandom, we extend research on the experiences of women sport fans and offer alternatives to normative constructs of fandom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typological approaches have thus far neglected the perpetration, profiles, and response to neurodivergent men who are autistic, have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and those experiencing psychosis. This article addresses this gap, though adopts a psychoanalytic, psychosocial analysis of neurodivergent men's domestic abuse, using a case study approach. Drawing on the lives of three, non-learning disabled, neurodivergent men, this article reveals that neurodivergence does not cause domestic abuse, as meaning and motive was still discernible in their use of and relevant in the response to their violence and abuse. As I show, this does not obviate the need for more inclusive responses, as neurodivergent men experience additional barriers on mainstream programs that are developed and delivered by and for neurotypical people. This article offers a new contribution to the theoretical and empirical literature on the domestic abuse perpetration of neurodivergent men and criminal justice interventions. Practice and research implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is praise? I argue that we can make progress by examining what praise does. Functionalist views of praise are emerging, but I here argue that by foregrounding cases in which expressions of praise are rejected by their direct target, we see that praise has a wider, and largely overlooked, social function. I introduce cases in which praise is rejected, and develop a functionalist account of praise that is well placed to make sense of the contours of these cases. My claim is that praise functions to affirm and entrench values, exerting pressure in praise's audiences to affirm the values expressed. I show how my account overcomes some of the limitations of recently developed accounts of praise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges conventions of normative femininity and popular feminism by examining the television show Fleabag (2016–2019) and the destabilizing tendencies of its unnamed protagonist (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who insistently breaks the fourth wall, implying a form of narrative agency. However, her refusal and/or inability to conform to expectations around public decency, feminine norms, and heterosexual romance also betray a lack of narrative control. The show's unruly framing and its dysfunctional narrator open a dynamic space for explorations of "bad feminism" (Gay, 2014), "fem (me)inine failure" (Hoskin and Taylor, 2019), and "toxic femininity" (McCann, 2020), while foregrounding a kind of femme resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates on provisioning systems have become more widespread in recent years. Most of these discussions, however, have centered on the monetized economy. While they have elaborated on actors and institutions in the monetized economy, they tend to ignore the foundational role of unpaid provisioning processes. This article contributes to provisioning systems scholarship by foregrounding this indispensable yet invisibilized foundation of production, distribution, and consumption. In doing so, we combine different approaches on provisioning systems in social ecology, political ecology, and political economy with chronologically older feminist economics debates on social provisioning to arrive at an ecofeminist political economy conceptualization of social-ecological provisioning. We elaborate on this conceptualization by drawing upon the example of food provisioning, thereby showing that people provision for themselves, their families, and their communities through closely interlinked paid and unpaid provisioning practices. Only by acknowledging the central role of actors and institutions in the non-monetized economy and by taking an intersectional approach to the questions of who provides and who is provided for can a more holistic picture of food provisioning be drawn. In the last part of the article, we discuss ecofeminist strategies that strengthen non-monetized social-ecological provisioning without monetizing it, thereby questioning the arbitrariness of what is (un-/under-)paid in capitalist economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I read the references to the Regency Romance in Barbie (2023) as key moments in the film's challenge to heteronormative structures of romance and marriage. Diplomat Barbie (Nicola Coughlan) and the Depression Barbie advertisement set up the premise of the film in terms of women's voice, women's self-actualisation and – with its claiming of selfhood – a rejection of heteronormative structures of romance as being one of the primary modes of defining women's role and function. The film's fundamental joyful unwillingness to detach from the unserious – while at the same time foregrounding and then rejecting the heteronormative marriage plot that is indispensable for the Regency Romance – brings us back to the unserious and to laughter as a mode of resistance to capitalism and the patriarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an ethnographic study of diasporic nationhood, Catholicism, and ethical navigation among Polish migrants in Denmark. Focusing on a vibrant Polish Catholic community in Copenhagen, the study utilises fieldwork and 25 semi-structured interviews gathered from 2021 to 2023 to explore the under-researched role of a nationalised Catholicism as a repertoire of guidance in a migratory setting. The conceptual framework combines a praxiological approach to diasporic nationhood with the notion of ethical affordances. Foregrounding specific modalities of connections between Catholic Polish nationhood and ethical guidance, the study expands the perspectives on how migrants actively engage Catholicism amid their lives of transition and accommodation in Denmark. Based on such focus, the analysis shows how this connection enables both an ethical navigation in new terrain, but also an opposition to the secular public outside the church environments. Within the nascent social scientific study of Catholicism and migration, the study contributes by analytically combining these elements – diasporic nationhood and ethical navigation – thereby providing novel insights into the often overlooked ethical and religious experiences of post-accession Polish migrants, and the ethical difference a nationalised form of Catholicism makes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An effective system of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) requires assessment processes that are appropriate for the nature of the experiential learning being assessed. Otherwise, potential candidates may be discouraged from engaging in RPL applications and therefore not benefit from the lifelong learning opportunities available. It has been argued that foregrounding RPL as a specialised pedagogical practice, and not just as assessment, can help in this regard. This article draws on the conceptualisation of RPL as 'pedagogical pragmatism', as developed by Pokorny et al. (2017), and asks how this might look in practice and how might it help in creating assessment processes that reflect the epistemological particularity of prior experiential learning. A cohort RPL project that ran in ten Education and Training Boards (ETBs) in Ireland, in partnership with the Irish Defence Forces (DF) in 2018 to 2019, provides the basis for the research. A key theme in the results is the integrated nature of RPL assessment in its design and operation, and the way in which formative and summative assessment are brought into productive relation and understanding the affordances in assessment can help drive practice forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that late Heidegger's analyses of the Fourfold can be used as a methodological starting point for discourse analyses. It argues that the Fourfold points out elements or foundations of discursive structures that orient us to differing, and to some extent opposing, directions that are at the same time mutually interdependent. A discursive analysis of how the Fourfold is at play in prevailing discursive exchanges and structures will thus be a matter of situating ourselves in a conceptual space beyond existing practices and structures, from which we get a picture of their inadequacies. As such, the article contributes to a critical understanding of discourse analysis. It will be argued that through understanding the Fourfold, we can better understand the problems with various aspects of 'measuring', which are founded upon the (concealed) instability of elements of the Fourfold – which shapes practical discursive engagements. By foregrounding this structural instability we can approach it critically. I demonstrate how this approach might be used in an analysis of a debate between Greta Thunberg and Bjørn Lomborg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers what the African presence at the 2024 Venice Biennale says about visibility and the politics of representation related to broader shifts in the global cultural landscape. It offers an overview of the main exhibition, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, suggesting that it may be seen as both conceptually canon-expanding and structurally center-affirming. It also discusses the curatorial frames and strategies of self-definition of a select group of first-time and returning national pavilions: Benin, South Africa, Uganda, and Nigeria. The article highlights how artists and pavilion organizers from Africa at the Venice Biennale are increasingly using this historic platform strategically to make change by challenging its representational structure, foregrounding African-based knowledge systems, and investing in culture and institution building on the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asset‐based and relational pedagogies highlight the centrality of meaningful relationships and authenticity in teaching and learning. Foregrounding children's lived experiences, interests, and ways of knowing provides a focus for teachers to be responsive, both relationally and pedagogically. Writing workshop, as conceived in the 1980's by Donald Graves and Lucy Calkins, is a longstanding curricular structure that encourages young writers to engage with multiple tools and resources, including peers, as they compose. Through writing conferences and authors’ chairs, young writers attend to the practice of composing on paper/screen as well as how their message may be received. This study analyzes children's writing samples to underscore the presence of (a) writing identity, (b) critical literacy, (c) culturally sustaining pedagogy, (d) translanguaging, and (e) intertextuality. Chilldren's interactions with tools, peers, and others provide fertile ground for understanding the critical role of a humanizing and relational approach to teaching and learning. The following questions guide this study: (1) How is a writing realities framework reflected in young children's compositions? (2) What do children's writing artifacts reveal about relationality? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the scholarship on attainment grouping by focusing on the policy initiatives of streaming and subject‐based banding (SBB) in Singapore. The study is framed by the concept of pragmatic perfectionism, which refers to the continuous and ideals‐oriented drive to improve a system through practical, incremental and paradoxical measures. It is argued that SBB is aligned with setting by giving students the flexibility and choice to study different subjects at varying levels. Mixed‐attainment grouping is also evident, where students are grouped in mixed‐form classes for selected subjects. However, SBB may have inadvertently maintained between‐school segregation for elite and non‐elite schools by supporting the existing policy of school posting based on students' exam scores. This paper contributes to the diverse formulations, adaptations and justifications surrounding attainment grouping. The study also illustrates the usefulness of pragmatic perfectionism in foregrounding the potential and tensions in educational policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s conception of ‘black study’ (2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.) as an enactment of a feminist ethics of response-ability. As such, this article inquires: how might ‘we’ conceive of study as a response-able practice of ‘collective knowing and doing’ (Haraway, D. J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.) through the confluence of thinking-with feminisms, posthumanisms, black studies, and affect theories? This article experiments with study as an ecological mode of engagement that affirms difference through the decentring of individual identity in favour of foregrounding co-constitutive relations. I do so by proposing response-able reading, sensing and storying as practices of study that might contribute towards new educational imaginaries for thinking and doing higher education differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing the world's ecological, economic, and social challenges requires us to connect the concepts of justice, sustainability, and transitions. Bridging and discussing heterogeneous fields, we argue that these concepts need to complement each other, and we present just sustainability transitions (JUSTRAs) to do so. To define JUSTRAs, we review the state-of-the-art literature, focusing on the understanding of these three concepts and their pairings in various disciplinary fields and empirical settings (e.g., environmental justice, just transitions, sustainability transitions, energy justice, food justice, urban justice). We center marginalized voices to highlight the processes of radical transformative change that JUSTRAs seek. We offer three analytical lenses that further the understanding of JUSTRAs: politics, power, and prefiguration. We argue that these complementary lenses are necessary to remake the world in both critical and pragmatic ways. Finally, we present a research agenda on JUSTRAs, foregrounding three complementary modes of inquiry: analyzing, critiquing, designing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn Disability and the Problem of Lazy Intersectionality, Watermeyer and Swartz attempt to address the growing incorporation of intersectionality within the field of disability studies. Yet, Watermeyer and Swartz’s critique feeds into the very issues they seek to refute, including through centring disability above the interlocking systems of power that intersectionality necessitates. In this paper, we engage with their core arguments, illustrating their critical limitations. We conclude by suggesting that only foregrounding disability, as the authors propose, legitimises the non-reflexive co-optation of Black politicised epistemic strategies of justice for global disability scholars and lends other categories of analysis to erasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent issue of Psychological Research, Bock, O., Huang, J-Y., Onur, O. A., & Memmert, D. (2024). The structure of cognitive strategies for wayfinding decisions. Psychological Research Psychologische Forschung, 88, 476–486. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01863-3.) investigated cognitive strategies purported to guide wayfinding decisions at intersections. Following experimentation in a virtualised maze, it was concluded that intersectional wayfinding decisions were based on a 'generalized cognitive process', in addition to 'strategy-specific' processes. The aim of our comment is not to challenge these findings or their methodological rigour. Rather, we note how the study of human wayfinding has been undertaken from entirely different metatheoretical perspectives in psychological science. Leaning on the seminal work of James Gibson and Harry Heft, we consider wayfinding as a continuous, integrated perception-action process, distributed across the entire organism-environment system. Such a systems-oriented, ecological approach to wayfinding remediates the organismic asymmetry pervasive to extant theories of human behaviours, foregrounding the possibility for empirical investigation that takes seriously the socio-cultural contexts in which inhabitants dwell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To create a safer world, it is vital that lessons are learned from near-misses, incidents and accidents and that those lessons are, through active learning, translated into practical, safety-oriented actions. Not unnaturally, vested interests – fearful of the consequences of being associated with the event in question – may seek to delay, deflect or halt whatever investigation is called for or authorised. Drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), this paper uses a case study approach to explore the lengths to which those implicated in a near-miss, incident or accident will go to protect their perceived interests. Through the inductive analysis of five investigations, it is shown that disruptive tactics range from the mischievous, for example, manipulating an inquiry's terms of reference, to the devious and illegal, for example, sanitising or manipulating statements. It is suggested that those charged with investigating near-misses, incidents and accidents use ANT to identify potentially hostile actors' resourcing, reach, networks and likely tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that academia's performative obsession is inherently dehumanising. We seek to rehumanise academia by sharing a method for collective research and writing. Through a fresh approach to Freirean Reading Circles (FRCs), we offer a series of images and conversations from our circle meetings to demonstrate aspects of humanity often erased in traditional academic writing. Although FRCs can be adapted to different cultural artefacts, our choice of the Japanese novel Convenience Store Woman is purposeful. We explore the novel's theme of what it means to be both human and worker, and challenge the patriarchal bias of ‘great’ literature. Grounded in Paulo Freire's ideas, we demonstrate how academia's dehumanising tendencies can be challenged from within. To humanise our writing, we celebrate the joy and messiness of collective processes, foregrounding the human selves often hidden in sanitised academic writing. We invite you, as readers, to resist dehumanisation by extending our emancipatory project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using letter-writing as a research conversation, this paper discusses collage as a reflexive feminist method useful in qualitative fieldwork, particularly autoethnography. The paper is primarily presented through letters written between friends – the two authors of this paper – with an interest in collage as an art practice. The letters discuss the value of making collages in Samantha’s research process, aiding her generative reflection on the emotionally difficult situations she encountered during an ethnographic project. We contribute to literature on collage as research method by foregrounding the embodied character of physically making collages as a process, showing how the body knows more than we think in our research encounters. We conclude by calling for what Moira Ferguson calls a ‘polemics of the heart’ through letter-writing and collage as feminist practice that might soften the patriarchal structures of the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to foregrounding the intimate interconnectedness between the human and the non-human world necro-ecology also undermines the absolute separation between life and death. The purpose of this paper is to deploy these central tenets of necro-ecology to provide a reading of Karoline von Günderrode's 1805 "The Idea of the Earth." After discussing a shift that takes place in Schelling's theory of the relationship between nature, life, and death (Section 1) I turn to the role of corporeal decomposition in relation to the earth as spelled out by Günderrode in "The Idea of the Earth" (Section 2). Though "The Idea of the Earth" operates within a naturphilosophical framework, it does so in a way distinct from Schelling's theologically inflected middle work and in a way that is of relevance to the philosophical history and promise of necro-ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English word digital (from the Latin, digitus) etymologically connects both fingers and technologies. In this special issue, we honor this dual meaning of the digital by foregrounding how living in a digital era both challenges and actualizes our senses, particularly our sense of touch. Ethnographically, the articles gathered offer intimate accounts of tactile experiences that intertwine with the digital in both direct and indirect ways. Despite ongoing—and often legitimate—anxieties about the disappearance of touch from our increasingly digitized world, our special issue shows that human engagements with digital technologies are more complex. We theorize touch through a phenomenological and relational lens and as a sensory experience that is deeply shaped and reconfigured by local, sociotechnical and political‐economic concerns. This special issue illuminates how attention to hands, fingers, or touch can help us understand the relationship between bodies, ethical life, social relations, selves, and subjectivities through a new lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the ROC president's discursive response to PRC efforts to limit Taiwan's future possibilities and undermine confidence in Taiwan's future. I argue that the capacity to imagine the future, and perceiving agency to affect future outcomes, is crucial for national resilience. Since Taiwan is routinely exposed to factors known to cause reduced self-efficacy and morale – uncertainty, threat, marginalization, restricted agency, circumscribed action repertoires – it is crucial that Taiwanese people have a meaningful sense of "what are we striving for?" and confidence that they have the agency to realize these aspirations. The article sets out an empirical examination of discursive constructions of the future as a vector for enhancing cohesion and resolve in Taiwanese society. Foregrounding a novel dimension in the study of Taiwan, the article contributes both an interpretivist account of President Tsai Ing-wen's discourse and opens a new avenue for research on the largely neglected issue of futurity in cross-Strait relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing out resonances across art-based practice and critical imaginations in the discipline, this paper maps out conceptual, creative and experiential resources for re-rooting International Relations for the climate and the needs of the more-than-human world. I trace what I describe as ecologically attuned ways of knowing along two main inspirations: L. H. M. Ling's Imagining World Politics and the 7000 HUMANS participatory initiative designed by Shelley Sacks. Writing with a rhizomatic sensibility and foregrounding ways of knowing that may emerge in and through encounters with trees, I explore imaginative possibilities for transforming epistemological disconnection from vegetal life into embodied, integrative, life-enhancing modes of relating to both ourselves and the more-than-human world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the themed section, we begin to explore how queer and precarity might be used to analyse how vulnerabilities are constituted across diverse spaces. We situate the contents of the themed section in relation to the context in which it was worked on, defined by the Covid-19 pandemic and the increased precarisation of Higher Education workers in the United Kingdom, as well as current literature on queerness and precarity. The interdisciplinary articles that follow are the work of early career feminist and queer scholars. We introduce them as grappling with a range of manifestations of precarity and their intersections with various categories of identity that might be recognisable as queer. Foregrounding navigations of embodied and structural aspects of precarity, these articles highlight the practices and relationalities that can emerge from being 'out of place', as well as specific opportunities and limitations of the aesthetic, and share a concern with the masking of difference as a function of precarity, including via broad analytic categories such as 'precarious' and 'queer'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Money is the epitome of Marx's fetishised commodity. And, in Marxist discussions of the connected topics of currency and commodity fetishism, it often is left under-appreciated that such fetishism reaches its apotheosis only with the development of 'interest-bearing capital.' Herein, I perform two complementary gestures, one as regards Marxism and another with respect to psychoanalysis. Apropos Marxism, I counter-balance the usual, long-standing (over)emphasis on commodity fetishism as per the first volume of Das Kapital with a foregrounding of this fetishism as per the third volume. Apropos psychoanalysis, I shift away from its traditional fixation on reducing financial matters to libidinal contents. I explore instead the implications of the forms of capitalist fetishism for reconsidering the forms of intra-subjective defence mechanisms. This leads me to posit a complementary inversion of Lacan's dictum according to which 'repression is always the return of the repressed': The return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective repression. To pose a rhetorical question paraphrasing Brecht: What is the laundering of money compared with the laundering that is money? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addressing the soap opera's enduring vitality, this study focuses on the soap culture on the Russian-language Web (Runet). With the serials produced in Asia and Latin America at the center, this culture emerges as a vibrant site of transnational spectatorship and a crucial area to negotiate the interpersonal relationships and social values. A fundamental condition of this cross-border phenomenon is language translation predominantly performed by women. In foregrounding the case of the Hindi soap serial on the Runet, this paper examines the role of women translators as a driving force behind global television traffic and an important agent of soap imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Verena Stefan's images of non-oppositional relationality, relations between the self and other beings in the world, and Leib, the living body in her 2007 novel Fremdschläfer which is presented as an assemblage of sections with little temporal and spatial continuity. I examine relationality with reference to a nexus of ontological questions pertaining to non-oppositional models of relational selfhood, alterity and immanence and the relation between empirical experience and the conditions of experience. My analysis of the multilayered imagery in Fremdschläfer focuses on how these poetic images engender self-world relationality, being together with others, heteronomy and intersubjectivity, while also foregrounding the experience of immigration, multilingualism and living with a poor medical prognosis. I argue that Stefan figures the Leib (living body) as a sensible transcendental. It is the touch of and embodied listening by other material embodied selves that give shape to the self's changing boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vivid imagery and intricate tapestry of linguistic features are essential to grasp literary significance and appreciation in Dylan Thomas' poems. This study focuses on one of his most significant poems, Before I Knocked for an in-depth investigation. The study is significant in because combining both the theory of foregrounding and the checklist is unique in this type of study. Therefore, the study aims to analyze Thomas' selected poem and demonstrate how and why various linguistic elements are systematically utilized to create value and quality in the poem. Concerning this, the study utilises qualitative descriptive analysis relying on stylistic analysis within which the theory of foregrounding supplemented by Leech and Short's checklist, is applied. Ultimately, the study finds that Thomas has employed linguistic features and foregrounding aspects systematically and coherently to carry meaning and theme and relate the form and the content of his work. The study also recommends integrating linguistic features in literary stylistic analysis is essential for learners and pedagogical purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past twenty years have witnessed critical terrorism studies (CTS) become an increasingly influential body of work. In this article, I offer the first sustained effort to chart CTS' development and transformation by positing three successive waves in its evolution. CTS' first wave, I argue, was characterised by agenda-setting efforts to map the prospects of a distinctively critical approach to terrorism research. Second wave literature elaborated on this nascent project's scope, strengthening and broadening its empirical, conceptual, and methodological ambitions. More recent third wave work seeks to problematise the underpinning assumptions and commitments of earlier CTS literature, especially in relation to its engagement with race and colonialism. Mapping CTS' development in this way, I argue, offers three contributions to knowledge. First, it helps historicise CTS research by detailing the academic and wider contexts of its development. Second, it enables engagement with CTS' pluralism, foregrounding the importance of internal disagreements for its past and future trajectories. And, third, it enables new reflection on the political and normative stakes of differing approaches to, and aspirations for, critical terrorism research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the assumptions we make in the design of faculty and graduate student orientations and on the implementation of redesigned orientations that foreground participant narrative. When educational developers purposefully make space for participant stories at their orientations, it is a way not only to share power with graduate students and faculty but also to create a more inclusive environment and sense of belonging. We offer a reflection on educational developer and participant experiences of small narrative interventions in graduate student and faculty orientations at our university in 2021. We find that through foregrounding story sharing we were able to shift from assimilation to acculturation by including, cultivating, and honoring diverse views, creating community, and promoting agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demonstrative endangerment scenario of queerphobia manifests in diverse nuanced ways in Nigeria, culminating in closeting, restricted livability and, in the case of the focus of the present study, migration to queer-enabling spaces. Interests in queer-migratory trends continue to swell in existing literature, foregrounding the critical role mobilities play in queer identities, especially when situated post-2014, after the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act. In this study, I interrogate digital narratives from Nigerian Twitter with focus placed on the role of language in establishing identity and ideological constructs within the context of queer migration. Two main dichotomies are established – individualized/personalized narratives and group/communal narratives. Individualized narratives provide positionality by locating the individual within the multidimensional challenges to queer livability. The group narratives, however, draw attention to institutional and governmental complicities in the structures that continue to inhibit queerness. A major identification is that the restrictions to queer livability exist in both Nigeria and in perceived queer-enabling spaces, although their manifestations differ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

wIn this article, I explore human-landscape and human-nature relationships from the perspective of Sufi ontologies by examining how Sufi Muslims revive the sacred landscape in Bashkortostan. I foreground an alternative mode of knowing, the heart perception, to analyze how they experience the landscape’s aliveness. I argue that this mode of experiencing the natural environment goes further than the idea of the sentience and agency of non-humans in the post-humanist turn and the literature on sentient landscapes. Indeed, Sufi ontologies foreground the presence of the Divine in human-landscape and human-nature relationships, shedding light on how my interlocutors differentiate between humans with an ‘open’ or a ‘closed heart’ to warn of the dangers of forgetting their ancestors’ knowledge and care for nature. By foregrounding the heart perception, I explore this diversity of human beings and ways of relating to the landscape between remembrance and forgetfulness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of the multiple instances of feminist ambivalence present in Barbie, perhaps the most poignant for cinema studies concerns the affirmation of both descriptive and interpretive practices. Across its narrative and aesthetic features, Barbie develops a logic that equates matriarchal culture with “wonderful” surface (Greta Gerwig 2023), and patriarchal culture with paranoid depth. As for the former, Greta Gerwig (2023) has characterised Barbie Land through reference to the original toy Dreamhouse: as a space of openness, where “nothing is obscured because there’s no depth, there’s no shame, there’s no aging, there’s no pain.” In contrast, the returned gaze of the real-world effects depth in the form of self-awareness; as Stereotypical Barbie remarks upon entry, “I’m conscious but it’s myself that I’m conscious of.” This opposition is redolent of recent critical debates concerning modes of reading that pit feminist and queer oriented approaches foregrounding surface against older, masculine models that assume the latency of meaning. Relative to this tension, it is interesting that Barbie has it both ways: by the film’s ending, its project to restore matriarchy to Barbie Land is realised just as Stereotypical Barbie comes to terms with her desire to join the real-world, to “be part of the people that make meaning.” This essay interrogates the surface/depth binary tendered throughout Barbie, arguing that the film’s value for contemporary feminists, specifically those working in the field of cinema studies, hinges on the unification of these levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay thoroughly examines the OTPOR! movement's strategic and tactical endeavors from 1998 to 2000, when it played a pivotal role in challenging and eventually overthrowing Slobodan Milošević's autocratic regime. The paper critically dissects the movement's strategic and tactical frameworks, elucidating their interconnectedness within nonviolent struggle. Central to OTPOR!'s effectiveness was its deliberate avoidance of overt political ambitions and alignment with the youth demographic. The movement projected itself as singularly committed to unseating an autocratic leader, countering regime propaganda by foregrounding the nation's welfare above narrow political interests. The trajectory of the OTPOR! movement underscores the intricate interplay between strategy and tactics in successful nonviolent movements. By orchestrating a meticulously constructed long-term strategy alongside various innovative tactical maneuvers, OTPOR! effectively harnessed public sentiment, countered regime dominance and decisively contributed to Serbia's democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future – as a theme, research orientation, and mode of framing societal challenges – is becoming important in the social sciences. Yet the absence of collective action in many such accounts makes clear the potential contribution of social movement studies. In social movement studies, meanwhile, the future has been discussed directly and indirectly. Assumptions about timing, activist orientations towards the future, and causation are embedded in understandings of strategy, agency, mobilisation, tactical choice, consequences, and in concepts of waves, cycles and diffusion. Conceptual developments around temporalities, real utopias and grassroots initiatives, imagination, and prefiguration offer some alternative perspectives and promising new directions. Foregrounding social movement futures also has implications for protesters themselves: ideas and emotions relating to the future are central to activist debates about goals, winning, utopia, hope and burnout. This introduction reviews the societal and academic context for the renewed interest in futures that are relevant for social movement studies, before outlining three major movement areas or debates where futures are implicated, and which need to form part of future research. These areas, and the subdiscipline as a whole, it is argued, may also benefit from a more direct analysis of movement futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has undertaken a vast, comprehensive, systematic project to build a system of "Party law." The rise of Party law is at once rewiring the Party internally and recalibrating the Party's relationship with its state. The result is a potent set of tools for putting into practice the notion that "the Party leads everything," foregrounding the Party in governance processes, and making Party members and organizations more obedient, pliable and responsive to the Party Center. Party law seeks to manipulate and manage Party members' and organizations' behavior as they play an emboldened and more direct role in governing China. This article uses two cases from Party law—new rules on filing and review (备案审查) and Party groups (党组)—to illustrate how Party law is transforming Chinese governance. It finds that contrary to conventional wisdom on "institutionalization," under Xi Jinping, rather than depersonalizing power, institutions that constrain Party members and organizations are leading to stronger personalization. The rise of Party law relates not only to regime "resilience." It is geared toward pursuing the agenda and aims set out in the doctrine ascribed to Xi Jinping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the potential positive correlation between inclusive leadership and hotel frontline employees' (FLEs) customer stewardship (CS) behavior, using the conservation of resource theory as its foundation. It hypothesizes that role breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) acts as a mediating factor in this relationship, with employee conscientiousness serving as a significant moderating variable. Design/methodology/approach: A time-lagged survey design was used, spanning over three rounds to collect data from 348 hotel FLEs and 42 managers. The analysis was conducted using structural equation modeling in Mplus version 8.6. Findings: The study revealed a positive association between inclusive leadership and FLE CS, both directly and indirectly through RBSE. The results also showed that FLE conscientiousness moderated the direct link between inclusive leadership and RBSE, as well as the indirect link between inclusive leadership and FLE CS. Practical implications: The evidence suggests that inclusive leadership behaviors among hospitality managers may elevate FLE CS behaviors, implying significant benefits for the success of hospitality organizations. Managers should focus on enhancing FLEs' RBSE to further improve CS behaviors. In addition, by considering FLE conscientiousness, managers can craft targeted strategies to maximize the impact of inclusive leadership on CS behaviors. Originality/value: This research contributes to the limited body of knowledge on the precursors of CS behavior by explaining both direct and indirect connections with inclusive leadership. Furthermore, it broadens the understanding of the conditions under which leadership most effectively shapes such behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This case study investigates how the same tweet is treated linguistically with different narratives. Taking the case of the tweet of Maryam Nawaz, a Pakistani female politician, we analyze through different linguistic interpretations the selected news channels’ headlines that picked up her tweet on the death of a local journalist, Arshad Sharif. Following earlier studies on critical discourse analysis (CDA) of news headlines, the present study investigated how language is used to portray Maryam’s tweet about Arshad Sharif’s death: (1) how is Maryam Nawaz linguistically represented by Pakistani news channels’ headlines, and (2) how are the news channels’ headlines foregrounded/backgrounded to portray the image of Maryam Nawaz. Using a qualitative approach, we gathered data from 10 news headlines from leading Pakistani news channels and used Fairclough’s three-dimensional model for the qualitative analysis of linguistic choices. We also employed Goffman’s theory to analyze foregrounding and backgrounding of news channels’ headlines. Findings suggest that Maryam Nawaz is portrayed negatively with specific linguistic choices, like ‘apology’, ‘indifference’, ‘to shame humanity’, ‘outrage’, ‘backlash’, and ‘inappropriate tweet’. The analysis also reveals that Maryam Nawaz is foregrounded in most news headlines, while Arshad Sharif’s death is backgrounded, demonstrating the prominence given to Maryam Nawaz and the criticisms against her. Such negative linguistic representations in electronic and print media outlets can shape the portrayal of female politicians in Pakistan and have implications for media representation of female public figures, which can be relevant in contexts where media outlets can reframe narratives using linguistic resources to suit certain agendas.

This article refers to the ecological rhetorical terms ‘marker word’ and ‘environet’ and to the ecolinguistic terms ‘beneficial discourse’ and ‘ecosophy’, and applies the stylistic theories of foregrounding, point of view, and metaphor to explore two diverse but complementary sets of linguistic data pertaining to the environet and containing the marker word ‘biodiversity’. The first set of data is realised by four definitions of the noun ‘biodiversity’ provided by the Oxford English Dictionary and by three recent ecology and environment dictionaries and textbooks. Taking these definitions as a starting point, the second set of data consists of a text drawn from the environmental website of the international movement Extinction Rebellion incorporating the same marker word and showing its use in the beneficial context of an ecologically committed text in line with the ecosophy of this article and its seven norms. The article has a two fold research purpose: 1. To identify the beneficial ecostylistic strategies utilised in the dictionary and textbook definitions and in the text from XR’s website; 2. To promote these beneficial ecostylistic strategies and the beneficial messages they convey among the general public.

This article examines the profound and enduring legacy of the treatise on classical drama known as Praenotamenta ascensiana in shaping early modern dramatic poetics. Written by Flemish scholar Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535) as a preface to his 1502 edition of the Classical plays of Terence, this work has been unjustly overlooked by the critics that have invariably credited Aristotle's Poetics for foregrounding the debate on early modern dramatic criticism, following Alessandro de Pazzi's first Latin translation (1536) and Francesco Robortello's monumental commentary (1548). The purpose of Praenotamenta was to provide educators, students and playwrights with a concise and accessible compendium of ancient dramatic poetics. This treatise circulated widely across Europe and helped disseminate ideas that became central to early modern discourse on poetics, such as verisimilitude and decorum, as well as discussion on the didactic and civic role of poetry. Blended with Aristotelian doctrine, these concepts became the tenets of late sixteenth‐century poetics treatises in England, France, Italy and Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a special section devoted to an interdisciplinary exploration of vulnerability, assessing the theoretical elaborations of the concept, its uses, its political significance, and methodological issues in studying it. By foregrounding feminist and phenomenological philosophical methods that center on lived experience, the paper elaborates a multidimensional theoretical framework for understanding vulnerability as a complex experience and concept. It advances a pluralist understanding of vulnerability, seeking to connect dimensions of the concept that may be fragmented and focusing on its relational nature. Such a non-dualist approach entails that the political and ethical conclusions that can be drawn about vulnerability are complex and thus require critical analysis, especially of how vulnerability becomes a matter of political rhetoric, rather than straightforward prescription. Finally, in light of its complexity and ambiguity, adequate and socially just theorizing about and application of the concept of vulnerability requires more thoroughgoing interdisciplinary collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the complex relationship between pace and place, offering a novel lens for understanding mobility within the context of canal boating. Drawing on fieldwork on the canals in north‐west England, the paper focuses on mobile placemaking practices. Canal boats act as physical and material but also ideological pacemakers, guiding the boaters towards subscribing to the idea of slow living, where certain canal‐based pace‐myths play an important role. Pacemaking on the canals is therefore a form of placemaking, realised through the mobility of the vessel, materialities of the infrastructure, tempos and temporalities, representations and stories about canal life as well as the bodies on board and on towpaths as canal boaters modulate and manage their experience and performance of pace. The investigation of the interplay between the slow pace, rhythms, embodied practices, canal infrastructure, and the prevalent pace‐myths offers valuable insights into the ways places are shaped by the pace of mobility, thus expanding the concept of placemaking. By foregrounding pace as a key concept in mobility studies, the paper demonstrates the need for a more nuanced understanding of the temporalities associated with different modes of movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although social robots are achieving increasing prominence as companions and carers, their status as partners in an interactive relationship with humans remains unclear. The present paper explores this issue, first, by considering why social robots cannot truly qualify as "Thous", that is, as surrogate human partners, as they are often assumed to be, and then by briefly considering why it will not do to construe them as mere machines, slaves, or pets, as others have contended. Having concluded that none of these familiar designations does justice to social robots' still evolving and yet-to-be-defined status, I go on to consider whether engaging in a "relational turn" which prioritises the relationship over the entities in relation, can provide a more satisfactory alternative. In defending this stance, Damiano and Dumouchel (HUMANA.MENTE J Philos Stud 13:181–206, 2020) contend that in addition to foregrounding the possibility that social robots constitute new types of artificial companions which we can find "companionable in different ways", the relational turn has the added advantage of providing a more expansive and productive ethical framework for future research and development in this domain. But on balance, it is far from clear that this approach can circumvent the so-called "dummy-human" problem, the contention that social robots are little more than sophisticated toys with the potential to deceive their users about the prospects for genuine partnership and bonding. Accordingly, I conclude that while Damiano and Dumouchel's shift in "target phenomenology" brings to the fore facets of the interaction that may be difficult to infer by focussing on the relata alone, it is ultimately too "thin" to qualify as a template for robust human-robotic interaction of the sort that could qualify as a genuine partnership. Hence, while their relational turn has its merits in alerting us to the novel possibilities and challenges afforded by this ever-evolving technology and to the limitations of existing frameworks, it is contended that in itself it cannot provide an adequate template for conceptualising what a genuine human–robot partnership might entail. Instead, we need a more expansive approach that can do greater justice to the complexities of human-robotic interaction in its continuities as well as differences from more familiar human (and animal) prototypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a methodological departure. It makes a case for foregrounding interactions between users and transport systems as a methodological departure to move beyond institutional perspectives in history of transport. This wider point is examined in this article through the illustrative example of how at an everyday level users negotiate/contest exclusionary practices and transport disadvantage. The article acknowledges the challenges of this methodological shift, especially the difficulties of recovering "everyday" experiences of transport users. It also recognises that users' mediation and responses sit at the interstices of operational policies of transport infrastructure, individual/collective agency, and the workings of capital. Notwithstanding these caveats, the article suggests that innovative and explicit foregrounding of transport users has the potential to disaggregate the institutional perspective in writing histories of transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese academia's old friend, the world's leading scholar of avant-garde poetry, Marjorie Perloff died on March 24. Perloff was celebrated for her ability to explain difficult experimental poetry. This ability is seen in her early work on Yeats, middle works on 20th-century modernist movements as well as in her last books, 21st-Century Modernism: (2002), Unoriginal Genius (2010) and Infrathin (2021), comparing the new century's experimental poetry with early modernism. This paper, focused on the books of her later years, demonstrates her responses to the 21st-Century modernism and foregrounding the ideas and legacy in poetics of her later years, and reveals one of her major ideas that modernism is back in the forms of Eliot's verbivocalvisual complex and Duchamp's ready-mades, delays in glass, and the infrathin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for a reconsideration of the developmental processes behind Disney's iconic hand-drawn princess characters. It does so by examining the reference performances for Cinderella, Ariel and Tiana, whose live-action actors inspired the iconic designs and mannerisms that made it to screen yet are so rarely recognized for their contributions. Through sustained analysis of these women's work as well as how that work was understood and utilized by Walt's artists, this article reveals previously unseen aspects of patriarchy built into the creative structures of traditional Disney animation. Ultimately, by foregrounding the labour of the women who portrayed these characters in their earliest stages of conceptualization, this piece argues for greater awareness of the multifold layers of performance that the Disney princesses embody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the use of foregrounding that involves deviation and parallelism as a strategy to maintain the identity and disclose racial discrimination in poetry of Langston Hughes, a famous twentieth-century Afro-American poet during Harlem Renaissance. By adopting qualitative approach, researchers selected three different poems from three different volumes of Hughes's poetry by adopting random sampling technique and analyzed them by applying theory of foregrounding presented by Leech (1969). The foregrounding, a stylistic device emphasizing certain linguistic features to create emphasis or deviation from normative language patterns, serves as means for the poets to reclaim agency and articulate their unique experiences, histories, and perspectives. Researchers found that Hughes's poetry presents many foregrounded features upon the different levels, i.e., phonological, graphological, grammatical and semantic. The findings show that these foregrounded features upon different linguistic levels help the poet to maintain his identity and disclose racial discrimination. Therefore, these foregrounding features also help the poet revolt against the racial discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One person treats another as a sexual being by responding to their actual or perceived sexual properties. I develop an account of sexualisation to examine this phenomenon, especially as it relates to wrongful treatment such as sexual harassment. On the account proposed here, one person sexualises another when they foreground that person's sexual properties. Some property of a person is foregrounded when it is introduced to the score of the encounter, following David Lewis's conception of a conversational score. Having developed a concept of sexualisation, I argue that unwanted sexualisation is wrong because it contradicts a person's self-presentation. Unwanted sexualisation is a particularly serious instance of this due to cultural norms surrounding sex and the practice of unwanted sexualisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]