Heatwaves in a Net Zero World

While historical and future increases in heatwave frequency, duration and intensity are well documented, no studies have yet examined heatwave changes after anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions reach net zero. We address this by examining heatwave projections from millennial-scale simulations run with the Australian Earth System Model, ACCESS-ESM1-5. Each simulation branches off the SSP5-8.5 scenario at 5 year intervals between 2030–2060, from which point anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are set to net zero. Heatwaves are systematically hotter, longer and more frequent the longer net zero is delayed and reach their highest values when net zero is delayed until 2060. Moreover, most regional trends show no decline over the entire 1000 years of each simulation, indicating that heatwaves do not start to revert to preindustrial conditions.

Some regions even display significantly increasing millennial-scale trends when net zero occurs by 2050 or later. Furthermore, the longer net zero is delayed, the more occurrences of historically rare and extreme heatwave events. This is problematic for low-latitude countries which are also generally more vulnerable, where historically record-breaking events occur once a year or more when net zero is delayed until after the middle of the 21st Century. Should the global effort to permanently reach net zero occur before 2040, future heatwaves will be less severe than in a 2°C warmer world, however if net zero is not reached until 2060, heatwaves will be systematically more severe than this upper threshold of the Paris agreement.

Our research critically challenges the general belief that conditions after net zero will begin to improve for near future generations. While our results are concerning, they provide a novel length of foresight, such that effective and permanent adaptation measures can be planned and implemented while the world is still on the imperative path to permanent net zero.

What Is Critical Environmental Politics?

That the environment has become a major political issue is uncontested even by most resolute denialists of climate change or its anthropic causes. Moreover, decades of debates and interventions have not produced much, at least if we consider the situation about climate change and other alterations to the processes that, since the inception of the Holocene about 10000 years ago, have reportedly ensured a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity. This alone suggests the need for a thorough critique of environmental politics carried out thus far.

A critical outlook is committed to questioning the backdrop against which, or the framework whereby, problems are identified and solutions devised, and in so doing being attentive to the origin and contestation of institutional arrangements, power differentials, agency distribution, knowledge and authority claims, reality definitions, interest and identity attributions, and the transformative potential of alternative approaches and social struggles. It is therefore sensitive to historical change.

Leaving aside for the moment who the subject of emancipation is, being critical thus entails both doing good research (increase of knowledge) and making that research instrumental to tackling domination. This goal reminds the Enlightenment principle of human progress, a famous description of which comes from Kant. For him, enlightenment is the task for humanity to emerge from immaturity, which depends on a lack of courage to use one’s reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of someone else. His famous motto is Sapere aude! (Dare to be wise!) – a call for the use of reason to emancipate themselves addressed to each and every human being. This involves also, and perhaps primarily, being alert to the dominative assumptions and outcomes hidden within our own intellectual posture.

Global Climate Politics after the Return of President Trump

The second Trump administration has disrupted global climate politics, turning the United States away from the clean energy and environmental policies of the Biden administration. Consequently, analytical attention is turning, inside and outside of the United States, to a family of concepts referred to as “Climate Realism” (CR), which favors long-run investments in technology and adaptation over near-term climate mitigation efforts.

We critically engage with CR and argue that political science identifies four key features of climate politics that shed light on CR’s strengths and weaknesses, and which will persist even in the second Trump era. Despite CR’s flaws, we contend that its emergence in reaction to the second Trump administration highlights some important dimensions of climate politics that deserve greater attention going forward. We highlight three topics for research: the political and practical strategies of the anti-green coalition; the heterogeneity in viable national economic strategies; and the implications for IR of a turn away from meaningful climate mitigation in powerful nations.

Climate Change, Ecocide, and the Rise of Environmental Refugees

This article revisits the climate-conflict-displacement nexus by analyzing the Syrian Civil War as a case of climate-exacerbated state collapse. Rejecting linear causality, it asks: how does climate-induced stress contribute to armed conflict and forced migration, and how might these dynamics be understood through ecocide? Drawing on international relations, legal studies, and environmental studies, we develop a framework positioning environmental refugeedom and ecocide as concepts revealing international legal categories’ insufficiencies.

Examining Syria, we show how drought, environmental mismanagement, and authoritarian governance intensified grievances, fueling conflict and mass displacement. Rather than presenting climate change as a singular cause, we argue for its role as a threat multiplier within authoritarian rule, developmental failure, and global inequality structures. The article contributes by proposing expanded conceptual vocabulary to capture environmental collapse’s political violence. It calls for rethinking state responsibility, legal protection frameworks, and human rights paradigms under planetary crisis—especially in authoritarian regimes facing ecological breakdown..

The Evolution of Neoliberal Authoritarianism and the Criminalization of Climate Activism

This paper examines the ideological and strategic links between Cold War-era authoritarian neoliberalism and contemporary climate obstructionism, arguing that the criminalization of dissent has shifted from anti-communism to anti-environmentalism. Through a genealogical and contextual analysis of think tank networks – particularly the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) and the Atlas Network (AN) – grounded in key texts and proceedings published by them or their affiliated institutions, I show how neoliberal thought has long been entangled with fossil capital, militarized epistemologies, and reactionary politics.

The study reveals how neoliberal politics, despite its rhetoric of freedom, relies on illiberal measures to enforce market fundamentalism, from Pinochet’s Chile to the rise of figures like Milei and Bolsonaro. By tracing the theological, military, and epistemic dimensions of this dispositif, I analyze neoliberalism’s authoritarian dimensions, showing how climate change denial and the repression of environmental activism serve as modern iterations of Cold War-era ideological hunts. The Southern Cone emerges as a critical site where this continuum is tested, showing the alliance between neoliberalism and authoritarian governance.

Conceptualizing Transformative Climate Action

This synthesis article conceptualizes transformative climate actions (TCAs) by reviewing social-science-based climate and transformation research, with a particular focus on (Western) sufficiency literature. It identifies six key characteristics of TCAs.

First, they aim to transform social practices and provisioning systems to reshape society-nature relations, requiring a ‘whole-of-government’ approach and state capacity building for cross-sectoral coordination. Second, TCAs prioritize sufficiency, using efficiency and substitution as supporting strategies rather than parallel goals. Third, they empower collective agency, shifting the focus from individual behaviour changes to societal structures. Fourth, they presuppose a shift toward a multi-level planning framework that moves beyond market-based governance, integrating top-down steering with bottom-up, reflexive deliberation and experimentation. Fifth, TCAs recognize the distributional character of ecological crises, ensuring universal access to essential provisioning while curbing excess production and consumption through eco-social policy portfolios.

Finally, they rely on broad alliances of diverse actors, grounded in everyday interests, with empowered multi-stakeholder platforms to challenge entrenched interests. In developing these six characteristics, the article bridges conceptual debates with real-world policymaking, highlighting key climate policy challenges while demonstrating how integrating these characteristics can drive deep societal transformations and support policymakers in designing holistic strategies for effective climate action

Progress and Regression, Modernity and Social Evolution

IThis paper deals with progress and evolution. Regarding progress, it in particular critically engages with recent works (Wagner, Allen, Jaeggi), arguing that we need a more assertive perspective. Our immersion in an evolutionarily and contingently created but globally established (modern) imaginary is found to underpin that more assertive perspective of progress.

To articulate its perspective more generally, the paper draws upon a former elaboration on evolutionary homology and homoplasy regarding power. Thereby it tackles the development of morals/ethics, leading to a discussion of progress – and regression – including but going beyond material and cognitive issues. It grapples with evolutionary theory (introducing ‘homoplasy’ and ‘convergence’) and discontinuist views of history, as well as modernity, also glancing at some post/decolonial perspectives regarding history (Chakrabarty, Dussel). Finally, the text introduces the concepts of retrospective teleology and of prospective teleology in order to frame how these issues are, or may be, dealt with within the imaginary of contemporary modernity, in which universalized equal freedom – and universal solidarity – appear as a criterion for progress.

Reconnecting with the Social-Political and Ecological-Economic Reality

This article critically reflects on the research portfolio by the ecological economist Clive Spash who has helped pinpoint specific and systemic blindspots in a political-economic system that prioritises myopic development trajectories divorced from ecological reality. Drawing on his published work and collaborations it seeks to make sense of the slow, or absent, progress in averting global warming and ecological destruction. Three strands of key concern and influence are identified and discussed with reference to their orientation and explicit expression regarding Ontology, Epistemology and Axiology. Some complementary points about indeterminacy and holism are presented to further strengthen the arguments for a transition towards a social-ecological economic system that puts values and principles back into focus.

While Clive Spash’s work has made a strong case within the economic community and appealing to ecology professionals, the value-myopia or value-vacuum has to be tackled across all disciplines, politics and society for a meaningful and urgently required transformation in decision making. Hence, the article finishes with some suggestions for the (higher) education system, and highlights the importance of simplicity and sufficiency, as well as strong sustainability-driven citizen and community action as necessary catalysts of change in this social-ecological transformation.

Multi-Level Cultural Evolution: From New Theory to Practical Applications

Evolutionary science has led to many practical applications of genetic evolution but few practical uses of cultural evolution. This is because the entire study of evolution was gene centric for most of the 20th century, relegating the study and application of human cultural change to other disciplines. The formal study of human cultural evolution began in the 1970s and has matured to the point of deriving practical applications.

In this article, we will first review major developments in our basic understanding of human cultural evolution. Then, we will show how they can be applied to a diversity of positive change efforts, no matter what the scale (e.g., from the individual person to global governance) or topic domain. We elaborate for the topics of complex systems science and engineering, economics and business, mental health and well-being, and global change efforts.

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Ecological Civilization in the Making

In the Anthropocene, debates about global climate risks have taken carbon as a measure of policy success, with land-based mitigation strategies like afforestation receiving particular scrutiny. While scientists and policymakers discuss forestry as a potential climate solution, China has been implementing massive forestry projects for decades, drastically transforming environments under the Ecological Civilization framework.

This article showcases China’s globally emerging paradigm of Eco-Civilization and its implications for the climate-forestry nexus. Drawing parallels with Ulrich Beck’s concept of ‘metamorphosis’ and Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘mutation,’ we argue that China’s Eco-Civilization aspires to a fundamental transformation in worldview – but one that is promoted as distinctly non-Western. We use the case of forestry to illuminate the potentially unique features of Chinese environmentalism as encapsulated in Eco-Civilization. We find that Eco-Civilization affords a strong role for the central state in actively building and constructing an ecological future in which the natural and the socio-political are not considered separate. This is in contrast to certain Western visions of preserving nature from human encroachment through grassroots environmental movements. We conclude by highlighting the theoretical contributions more pluralized debates about China’s environmental rise could bring to environmental sociology.

Navigating Simplicity and Complexity of Social-Ecological Systems through a Dialogue between Dynamical Systems and Agent-Based Models

Social-ecological systems research aims to understand the nature of social-ecological phenomena, to find ways to foster or manage conditions under which desired phenomena occur or to reduce the negative consequences of undesirable phenomena. Such challenges are often addressed using dynamical systems models (DSM) or agent-based models (ABM).

Here we develop an iterative procedure for combining DSM and ABM to leverage their strengths and gain insights that surpass insights obtained by each approach separately. The procedure uses results of an ABM as inputs for a DSM development. In the following steps, results of the DSM analyses guide future analysis of the ABM and vice versa. This dialogue, more than having a tight connection between the models, enables pushing the research frontier, expanding the set of research questions and insights. We illustrate our method with the example of poverty traps and innovation in agricultural systems, but our conclusions are general and can be applied to other DSM-ABM combinations.

Greenwashing: A Critical Realist Approach to the Study of False Ecological Claims

Greenwashing is on the rise as a strategy for maintaining business-as-usual through false ecological claims. This paper articulates an approach to the study of greenwashing guided by the philosophy of critical realism. In its first move, it identifies greenwashing as depending on the possibility of socially conflating the relation between transitive and intransitive objects of knowledge.

The paper discusses theories of truth suitable for detecting mismatches between ecological claims and performances, with particular attention to correspondence theory and alethic truth. It then provides an illustrative reading of the oil corporation Preem’s greenwashing campaign through critical realism’s ‘holy trinity’ and explores ‘ideology’ and ‘fetishism’ as concepts for judging falsehoods and theorizing greenwashing. The paper ends with a step-by-step guide to the critical realist study of greenwashing and its emancipatory absence.

Centering Exploitation in Global Political Economy

Global capitalism is undergoing multiple crises and rapid transformation – though, it’s not quite clear into what. Research in IPE and related disciplines has captured important patterns of contemporary restructuring through analyses of (among other things): processes of financialization, assetization, rentierization, and platformization; the re-organization of global value chains; and new and old forms of extractivism. Yet these analyses have often been pitched in terms that overlook, and at times outright dismiss, the continuing relevance of labor.

The article argues for wider engagement with Marxist debates about ‘exploitation' as a way of grasping the continued importance of labor and work amidst the turbulent transformations of contemporary global capitalism. Engaging the problematic exploitation from this perspective demands enquiry into the concrete forms of relational activity through which value is created, circulated and accumulated. Or, in short, it enjoins us to ask: How does some people's activity become other people's wealth? The article moves on to argue that a plural and dynamic view of exploitation is needed in order to adequately grasp how these dynamics operate in past and present capitalism. It closes by considering questions around how the dynamics of exploitation are stabilized and reproduced through processes of racialization and practices of statecraft.

Rentier Capitalism, Technofascism and the Destruction of the Common

This paper critically examines the emerging discourse on technofeudalism. While mainstream narratives celebrate technological advancement driven by American tech giants, proponents of the technofeudalism thesis argue that a new ruling class – ‘cloudalists’ – has supplanted traditional capitalists, extracting data and rent in ways reminiscent of feudal relations. However, this discourse fails to account for the ongoing dynamism of capitalist investment and competition. In contrast, this paper advances the concept of rentier capitalism by revisiting Marx’s analysis in Capital, with particular attention to his often-overlooked theory of ground rent in Volume III.

Drawing on Marx’s notebooks published for the first time in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), the paper argues that rentier capitalism constitutes the most advanced and contradictory form of contemporary capitalism, which accelerates the destruction of the common and undermines the conditions necessary for working-class solidarity. As the dual crisis of capital accumulation and anti-systemic movements intensifies socio-economic and political instability, the threat of an authoritarian turn towards technofascism becomes increasingly imminent.

Politics of Evolution: Hayek’s Naturalization of Neoliberalism

The article delves into Friedrich Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution as a framework for understanding his “restatement” of liberalism. Beginning in the 1950s, Hayek increasingly embraced a naturalistic perspective, leading to a conceptualization of the market in evolutionary terms. His definition of the market sharply contrasts with the one proper to laissez-faire liberalism of the nineteenth century. Unlike classical liberalism, Hayek claims that the market is “unnatural,” as it has culturally evolved in opposition to innate human traits.

The article argues that Hayek’s concept of “evolutionary rationalism” establishes a new political rationality aimed at cultivating conditions that promote the flourishing of the market order and protect it from innate human instincts. According to this political rationality, the cultural reproduction of the market order maximizes the evolutionary “progress” of the human species and must be upheld to prevent the purported decline of modern civilization attributed to political rationalities based on “primitive” behavioral traits such as “solidarity” and the pursuit of “common goals.”

The Global War on Drugs: Militarism and Its Human Rights Consequences

This article presents an analytical framework that explains how militarism emerged as the prevailing paradigm in narcotic governance and its implications for human rights. The framework comprises four interconnected mechanisms—dehumanization, moralistic justifications, intensified state coercion, and a culture of impunity—that uphold and legitimize militarized drug policies.

Dehumanization portrays populations as expendable threats, while moralistic narratives depict repression as necessary for maintaining public order and security. These processes enable intensified state coercion, evident in militarized policing, mass incarceration, and extrajudicial violence, while a culture of impunity protects perpetrators from accountability, consequently perpetuating cycles of state violence. This framework contributes to scholarship in international relations, security studies, and political sociology by demonstrating how states and other transnational as well as domestic actors institutionalize expanded and intensified violence in narcotic drug governance.

Healthcare in the USA: Money Has Become the Mission

Despite extraordinary scientific and medical resources, the US health-care system underperforms. In this Review we consider the damage wrought by decades of market-based policies that have stimulated profit-seeking by insurers and health-care providers. Policy makers have subcontracted coverage under the public Medicaid and Medicare programmes for people with low incomes and those older than 64 years to private insurance firms—which now derive most of their revenues from those programmes—raising taxpayers’ costs and constricting patients’ care. Despite worrisome evidence of misbehaviour, firms obligated to prioritise shareholders’ interests—and, more recently, private equity firms with a single-minded focus on short-term profit—have gained control of vital clinical resources.

President Biden rescinded some of Donald Trump's most egregious first-term policies, expanded coverage for lower-income Americans, and initiated modest drug price controls. Since regaining office, President Trump has laid siege to science and public health, cut US$990 billion from Medicaid to offset tax reductions for the wealthy, and is accelerating Medicare's privatisation. State governments can tighten regulation of profit-driven abuses, and the medical community should resist Trump's health-harming agenda. But neither restoring the pre-Trump status quo, nor further attempts to reconcile the human rights of patients with the property claims of investors will suffice. Reforms must, instead, decommercialise insurance and care provision.

The Problem of Disinformation: A Critical Approach

The term disinformation is generally used to refer to information that is false and harmful, by contrast with misinformation (false but harmless) and malinformation (harmful but true); disinformation is also generally understood to involve coordination and to be intentionally false and/or harmful. However, particular studies rarely apply all these criteria when discussing cases. Doing so would involve applying at least three distinct problem framings: an epistemic framing to detect that a proposition in circulation is false, a behavioural framing to detect the coordinated efforts at communicating that proposition, and a security framing to identify threats or risks of harm attendant on widespread belief in the proposition. As for the question of intentionality, different kinds of clues can be picked up within each framing, although none alone is likely to be conclusive. Yet particular studies tend to centre on or prioritise a single framing.

Many today aim to make policy recommendations about combatting disinformation, and they prioritise security concerns over the demands of epistemic diligence. This carries a real risk of disinformation research being ‘weaponised’ against inconvenient truths. Against combative approaches, this article argues for a critical approach which recognizes the importance of epistemic diligence and transparency about normative assumptions.

Metacognitive Failure as a Feature of Those Holding Radical Beliefs

Widening polarization about political, religious, and scientific issues threatens open societies, leading to entrenchment of beliefs, reduced mutual understanding, and a pervasive negativity surrounding the very idea of consensus. Such radicalization has been linked to systematic differences in the certainty with which people adhere to particular beliefs. However, the drivers of unjustified certainty in radicals are rarely considered from the perspective of models of metacognition, and it remains unknown whether radicals show alterations in confidence bias (a tendency to publicly espouse higher confidence), metacognitive sensitivity (insight into the correctness of one’s beliefs), or both.

Within two independent general population samples (n = 381 and n = 417), here we show that individuals holding radical beliefs (as measured by questionnaires about political attitudes) display a specific impairment in metacognitive sensitivity about low-level perceptual discrimination judgments. Specifically, more radical participants displayed less insight into the correctness of their choices and reduced updating of their confidence when presented with post-decision evidence. Our use of a simple perceptual decision task enables us to rule out effects of previous knowledge, task performance, and motivational factors underpinning differences in metacognition. Instead, our findings highlight a generic resistance to recognizing and revising incorrect beliefs as a potential driver of radicalization.

Post-Truth Conspiracism and the Pseudo-Public Sphere

Rather than seeking to recuperate the ideal of a digital public sphere or lament its demise with the rise of social media platforms, in this paper I seek to identify the dangers of precisely this insistence to imagine the Internet as a public sphere. It is this curious insistence and persistence that, I claim, may feed into precisely those post-truth media dynamics such critical accounts worry about and rally against.

The success of viral conspiracy narratives like Pizzagate and QAnon, as well as other forms of mis- and disinformation, hinges not (only) on the absence or distortion of a healthy democratic public sphere, as is typically assumed, but (also) on its persistence as an imaginary in an environment that obeys an altogether different set of logics, namely that of ‘communicative capitalism’ and ‘information warfare.’ Whereas the former has drawn most critical attention in connection to current post-truth dynamics (e.g., the effects of targeted advertising and the role of algorithms in creating polarizing echo chambers and filter bubbles), I will instead focus on the latter.

The unique problem and ‘cunning’ of what I refer to as ‘post-truth conspiracism’ is that it draws on idea(l)s of digital publicness to establish its own epistemic legitimacy, as well as derive its unique powers of persuasion, while also mobilizing the full tactical arsenal of information warfare in a global attention economy. The resulting weaponization of digital public sphere imaginaries complicates attempts to recuperate the idea(l) of a digital public sphere as a solution to a ‘polluted’ information environment.

‘A Great Awakening of Men of Action’: What Does the ‘Right-Wing Davos’ Represent?

The Financial Times called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s 2025 conference the ‘right-wing Davos’. The Alliance involves academics from elite universities, current and former members of government from the UK, Australia, Hungary, and the USA, global media personalities, international capital investors, and CEOs of major companies. Superficially, it appears to represent a motley association of self-described Classical Liberals, evangelists of free-market capitalism, ethnonationalists, atheists and conservative theologians. We need a better understanding of what unites this power elite because through its interventions it is seeking to radically change societies. The dataset is all the publicly available keynote speeches (32) given at ARC 2025. The method is the Discourse-Historical Approach.

The analysis reveals a community unified by its opposition to a common enemy that the conference claims is destroying ‘Western Civilisation’ from within. By drawing on its bespoke history and a series of discursive strategies, ARC 2025 becomes a theatre of self-affirming ideological recursion that, despite each speaker’s different origins, converges on an ideology that morally justifies its members’ investments in fossil fuels, their social status, and right to intervene in society. Consequently, ARC’s regressive neoliberalism erases the boundaries between Christian nationalism, neoliberalism, and the far-right.

Heterodox Protest, the Conservative Right, and the Law

This paper suggests that the conservative-populist backlash that liberal democracies are facing can be understood as part of heterodox protest movements which react to the liberal-legal hegemony, and, in alliance with populist movements and parties, move into the political centre. Here, I understand the illiberal, or better anti-liberal, reaction to liberal democracy, constitutionalism, and human rights as the result of a long-term mobilization of different counterforces around a dissensus on liberal democracy and its main constitutional and legal approach and mindset. In recent years, an initially rather marginal or peripheral, but now forceful, set of protest and protest movements has been able to move to the political centre, attacking the liberal-constitutional hegemony head on.

The paper will discuss the heterodox critique of the liberal-legal consensus, subsequently identifying five key components (including the sacred and the profane, leadership, intolerance, impure universalism, and a turn to the past), particularly derived from Eisenstadt’s analysis of sectarian and heterodox movements. In the second part, I will apply these components to, first, a discussion of intellectual, theoretical justifications for the conservative-heterodox project, to then turn to more practically oriented documents, using a similar analysis of the five components. I conclude by arguing that the heterodox project contains a strong totalizing dimension, by combining a range of positions of charismatization, closure, and fundamentalism, and which prioritizes the primordial and the sacred, to the detriment of the civic.

Mapping Left-Right Associations: A Framework Using Open-Ended Survey Responses and Political Positions

The terms left and right are essential poles in the context of political ideology. Their meanings and understandings vary across contexts, affecting political communication, discourse, representation and polarisation dynamics. We know less about how different meanings and understandings manifest themselves beyond differential usage of the left-right scale. Building on this research gap, I measure how associations with left and right systematically vary across different political positions.

I present a novel theoretical two-dimensional model distinguishing between left- and right-leaning individuals and their associations with left and right. In doing so, I propose ‘in-ideology’ (alignment with one’s political leanings) and ‘out-ideology’ (opposition to one’s leanings) as a theoretical foundation to understand diverging associations. Using data from German GLES candidate studies (2013, 2017, 2021), I introduce a methodological framework that maps left-right word associations from open-ended survey responses into a semantic space, combining these with political positions to reflect the in- and out-ideology dichotomy.

The findings reveal substantive differences based on left-right positions, manifested in associations with—for example, justice (left) and patriotism (right)—and negative connotations for out-ideology—for example, racism (right) and socialism (left). The model’s applicability is demonstrated in scaling parliamentary speeches and is reliable across different model specifications in terms of construct and external validity. The study advances the understanding of ideological associations and their role in political research by highlighting the importance of distinguishing between in- and out-ideology in explaining ideological language across the political spectrum.

Everyday Norms Have Become More Permissive Over Time and Vary Across Cultures

Every social situation that people encounter in their daily lives comes with a set of unwritten rules about what behavior is considered appropriate or inappropriate. These everyday norms can vary across societies: some societies may have more permissive norms in general or for certain behaviors, or for certain behaviors in specific situations. In a preregistered survey of 25,422 participants across 90 societies, we map societal differences in 150 everyday norms and show that they can be explained by how societies prioritize individualizing moral foundations such as care and liberty versus binding moral foundations such as purity. Specifically, societies with more individualistic morality tend to have more permissive norms in general (greater liberty) and especially for behaviors deemed vulgar (less purity), but they exhibit less permissive norms for behaviors perceived to have negative consequences in specific situations (greater care).

By comparing our data with available data collected twenty years ago, we find a global pattern of change toward more permissive norms overall but less permissive norms for the most vulgar and inconsiderate behaviors. This study explains how social norms vary across behaviors, situations, societies, and time.

Can’t Stop the Hype: Scrutinizing AI’s Realities

Recently, we have been inundated with reports about the revolutions brought about by AI. However, much of our knowledge about these ‘revolutions’ arises from media sensationalism and advertising clamor – from AI hype. Therefore, to understand the societal impacts of AI, we must first grapple with its hype and ask: What truly transpires in the ‘revolutions’ allegedly brought about by AI? What role does hype play in them?

This paper addresses this need by offering a methodological framework for studying AI, a way to scrutinize AI hype while acknowledging its power. I begin by presenting the STATE typology of AI hype that differentiates between five distinct types of hype. I then offer six heuristics to identify and explore AI hype. Lastly, I argue that holistic empirical research can leverage the STATE typology and its heuristics into a robust methodological design for scrutinizing AI-driven phenomena and their hype.

Contentious Data Imaginaries and Social Movement Mobilization

This article highlights the role of data imaginaries in shaping narratives about social movement mobilization. Weaving together critical data studies and social movement studies, it examines how activists imagine, negotiate, and resist the politics of datafication, which may further construct collective understandings of political opportunity structures and shape their repertoires of action. Empirically, we analyzed discussions about digital data and surveillance in Hong Kong’s 2019–2020 Anti-Extradition Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement. These discussions took place on LIHKG, a Reddit-like online forum that served as a crucial site for framing and mobilizing the Anti-ELAB movement.

The analysis identified three data imaginaries. The first envisioned CCTV, transaction, biometric, locational, and mobile phone data as everyday omnipresent surveillance infrastructures. Second, participants imagined how police could weaponize their personal data against them, reflecting deep institutional distrust. Third, participants envisioned how smart lamppost sensor and biometric data, and CCTV could be integrated into a trans-border regime of surveillance, rendering data surveillance an object of contention.

Each imaginary articulated a distinctive framing of the threats of datafication and mobilized specific anticipatory tactical responses. Together, they conveyed unease about the present and possible futures of techno-authoritarian control. This study contributes to understanding how activists develop collective visions of data surveillance—data imaginaries—that enable them to identify threats, devise counter-strategies, and foster mobilization within datafied movements.

Of Data and Dissent: Labor and Human Rights at the Crossroads of the Automation Agenda

With every advent of a new technological phase — whether social media, big data, machine learning algorithms, or generative artificial intelligence (AI) — one fundamental task among many falls to legal scholars and practitioners, adjudicators, and lawmakers to confront: determining what the new technology changes, what it does not, and where and how the differences matter (legally and otherwise). To that end, this talk will address issues such as how algorithmic discrimination differs from “analog” discrimination; how society and our laws should view human labour in a time when so much more of it seems instantly replicable by machines; and the connection between how automated decision-making works and proposed changes to liability frameworks when it comes to AI.

What will become clear through this discussion is one thing that has never changed: technology is about power. Questions of technology thus carry particular weight in contexts built around systemic power imbalances, whether as a matter of workplace relations or human rights law. Drawing on a panoply of work by lawyers, academics, researchers, and grassroots community experts in various interdisciplinary combinations of law, computer science, labour, human rights, science and technology studies, and algorithmic accountability scholarship, this keynote will challenge the audience to reconceptualize AI not as a “neutral tool” or coherent technical object, but as, to quote anthropologist and computer scientist Ali Alkhatib, “an ideological project to shift” power, and consider the consequences of ignoring what that means for our legal and human rights.

The Material Agency of a Large Language Model

In the field of ethics of LLMs, agency is a highly contested topic: Can LLMs perform agency? The current discourse on the agency of LLMs is heavily shaped by a traditional, properties-based, individualistic, and anthropocentric approach. In contrast, I propose a relational and network-based approach to agency, drawing on Actor-Network Theory and New Materialism, which is open to non-human agency and a plurality of agencies. Building on this relational, non-anthropocentric perspective, I also introduce a material perspective that has been largely overlooked in the LLM discourse.

While LLMs are often thought of as immaterial, I develop a framework that distinguishes various dimensions of their materiality. I refer both to their material production and conditions, as well as how they concretely materialize in our devices and the materializing effects they have on us and our bodies. This perspective highlights the connection of LLMs with culture and material practices, cultural and social values: they are part of us, our culture, our time, politics, and our society. It also shifts the focus from human users as individual agents and opens up a view of the hidden network of multiple agents – human workers, big tech actors, environmental and technological non-human agents, and more – while drawing attention to the diversity and specificities of agencies. This shift transforms the questions currently posed in the ethics of LLMs and opens up new avenues for ethical inquiry.

Genocide, Neutrality, and the University Sector

The ongoing destruction in Gaza demands urgent academic and ethical reckoning, exposing the complicity of universities and scholarly disciplines in sustaining settler-colonial violence. This essay interrogates the role of Sociology as a discipline and academic institutions in shaping, legitimising, or resisting systemic oppression, with a focus on institutional neutrality as a mechanism of erasure.

Drawing on critical scholarship on settler colonialism, anti-Palestinian racism and neoliberal academia, the article examines how universities suppress Palestine advocacy through overt repression, bureaucratic silencing and material entanglements with the military-industrial complex. It critiques the discourse of neutrality and balance, demonstrating how these frameworks function to maintain dominant power structures. By tracing the complicity of Western academic institutions – from their partnerships with Israeli military research to their suppression of pro-Palestinian activism – the article argues that meaningful decolonisation requires a rejection of performative neutrality and an active dismantling of structures that sustain occupation and genocide.

Academic Solidarity in the Time of Genocide

In this paper, we engage with the manifestations of academic solidarity with Palestine, particularly those that have appeared since October 2023. We problematise the prevalence of performative and conditional support that criminalises resistance to the occupation and requires Palestinians to be passive victims. We analyse a three-tiered framework of solidarity in academic spaces: Macro-level institutional repression, Meso-level faculty conditional solidarity which preserves privilege, and Micro-level student-led unconditional solidarity despite high precarity.

Drawing on participatory observations, student activist interviews and systematic databasing of solidarity initiatives, we analyse academic solidarity models and backlash in the United States, United Kingdom and Lebanon. We argue that unconditional solidarity with Palestinian liberation requires a rupture from virtue signaling, which necessitates a greater willingness to take risks and a commitment to the frameworks advanced by Palestinian academics and collectives. We conclude by advocating for an unconditional solidarity model, as defined by Palestinian scholars, that centres liberation, rematriation and return over humanitarianized victimhood.

The Logic of Body-Counting: From Korea to Gaza

This study examines body counting practices of enemy combatants across six critical conflicts: Korea (1950–1953), Vietnam (1955–1975), Iraq (2003–2011), Afghanistan (2001–2014), Israel’s operations in the West Bank and Gaza (from the late 2010’s onward), and the Israel-Gaza war (2023–2025). I argue that body counting repeatedly emerged as a key criterion for assessing military progress once warfare shifted from occupying territory to pursuing other goals, such as attrition, destroying enemy forces, enhancing deterrence, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism.

Post-World War II military managerialism made this criterion a ready-made method. Such vague and often unwinnable goals coincided with diminished legitimacy for the use of force and for bearing its associated costs. Thus, the legitimation system shifted from legitimating results—the outcomes of military operations—to legitimating means, focusing on how results are produced and emphasizing their direct impact through casualty numbers. Initially, body counting served as a criterion for progress, but over time it assumed additional functions: encouraging killing, reflecting and promoting dehumanization, demonstrating resolve, mitigating casualty sensitivity, and serving as a humanizing mechanism by distinguishing between intentionally killing combatants and protecting non-combatants.

Debilitated Democracy: When the Legs Get Ripped Off

Democratic theorists often argue that democracy is in crisis, but nonetheless maintain democracy can be revived. In contrast, this paper argues that modernization and democracy have become opposed. Drawing on the work of Michael Th. Greven and Hartmut Rosa, it argues that as modernization intensifies, it erodes the preconditions necessary for democracy to credibly make the promises long associated with it.

This process of debilitation involves ‘ratchet effects’, such that it becomes steadily less possible to restore lost capacities. The regime that remains is like a marathon runner who has been subjected to an amputation – it continues on in a minimalist sense, but its horizons of possibility are irrevocably altered. Because this debilitated democracy is unable to check or manage modernization, it will remain subject to the process that has debilitated it, further reducing its horizons in the years to come.

Hope in the Interregnum: On the Prospects of Prophetic Socialism

In this article, we explore the crisis of the socialist imaginary and Left melancholy at the “end of history,” the utopian and ideological shifts of the past decades, the lost cultural and spiritual resources of socialism, as well as the open question of the 21st century utopias still to be invented. Examining the way in which three decades of neoliberal hegemonic struggle has remade the world and diminished socialism, we contend that the Global Financial Crisis has triggered a shift beyond neoliberal hegemony into a state of interregnum, a moment of both crisis and opportunity.

Drawing on Gramsci’s emphasis on culture building and moral and intellectual leadership, Bloch’s reformulated materialism, and emergent forms of Left movements and thought today, we argue that the “end of the world” is not just a reason for despair, but also for hope, courage, and solidarity. Specifically, we suggest that the reactivation of emancipatory history might require a prophetic socialist orientation: an insistence on the possibility of another world and its prefigurative emergence, an understanding of the longer arc of struggle, and an emphasis on the spiritual inflections and beauty of the socialist dream of “an entire earth as the homeland of humanization”.

Human Needs in the ‘Radical Turn’ on Workplace Domination

This article argues that contemporary radical republican critiques of wage-labour rely on an unduly narrow conception of human needs. While radical republicans have rightly highlighted how structural dependence on work can produce a form of domination, they typically frame that dependence as arising from the worker’s separation from the means to meet their ‘basic’ or ‘fundamental’ needs. As a result, their focus has predominantly been on material deprivation, the wage as a means to subsistence, and the distribution of material productive assets. Against this trend, I argue that domination can also arise through the processes in which the needs themselves are constructed.

Drawing on contemporary needs theory, I propose that republicans adopt a political conception of need that treats needs not as fixed prerequisites for a decent human life, but as historically contingent, socially mediated, and contested objects of political struggle. This reframing extends and deepens the radical republican critique of work by shifting focus from material subsistence to the broader terrain of need production. On that basis, I illustrate how dominators manipulate that terrain in two key ways: first, by reshaping the norms and values that define what counts as a legitimate or intelligible need; and second, by reorganising productive processes to render workers dependent not just on the wage, but on the very form of modern work itself. Dependence on work to meet needs is thus driven not only by separation from the means of production, but also by shaping human needs in ways that compel individuals into wage-labour.

Contradictions of the Ecowelfare State: The State, the Human, and Nature

This paper theorizes ecowelfare as the arena in which the capitalist state governs co-produced crises of climate change and inequality by adding a third regulatory imperative—ecoregulation—to accumulation and legitimation. Read through metabolic rift and world-ecology, ecoregulation is the ongoing (re)composition of human–nature relations via discursive, administrative, and material techniques—eco(de/re)commodification.

Deployed heuristically, this lens surfaces three recurrent contradictions: legitimation, as programs stabilize human/nature binaries even as lived experience erodes them; accumulation, as carbonized, commodified need-satisfaction forecloses sufficiency; and scale/time, as national policies mismatch planetary dynamics. U.S. cases—FEMA’s Individual Assistance Program and the National Flood Insurance Program—show how eligibility, mapping, and pricing humanize and exclude. The paper proposes evaluative criteria and sketches ecosocial designs that reorient crisis governance.

Toward Decoloniality of Connectedness in Higher Education

This article advocates for conceptualizing law as a design science, with a comprehensive approach that integrates formal, explanatory, and design dimensions of legal knowledge. By embracing the empirical aspects of legal scholarship, this perspective challenges the traditional image of lawyers as solely reliant on linguistic constructs. Instead, it positions them as social engineers capable of shaping legal norms and interpretations in alignment with societal needs.

Through analysis and illustration of its application in diverse factual contexts, the article underscores the necessity for this evolution in contemporary legal scholarship, particularly as teleological interpretation gains prominence in legal practice.

Sociology Amid Climate Breakdown: A Call for Systemic Pedagogical Transformation

We teach sociology on a dangerously heating planet. The first half of the 2020s has witnessed extreme heatwaves, devastating floods, catastrophic droughts, agricultural shocks, and rampant wildfires: harbingers of a situation that is due to escalate towards the end of the century. In this paper, we argue that for sociological education to meet the existential challenge posed by the climate and ecological emergency, we must do more than simply add climate to the curriculum. Instead, a fundamental rethink of the discipline’s epistemes, theories, and canon is urgently needed, with far-reaching pedagogical implications.

We suggest that sociological education requires an epistemic transformation towards a pluriverse of ecocentrisms, a planetary and decolonial reckoning of social theory, and a reappraisal of sociology’s canon. We conclude with a range of low-threshold first steps those teaching sociology can take toward ecologising sociology for the era of climate breakdown.

Kant on Regulative Principles in Science

One of the many virtues of Kant’s philosophy is that it offers us an account of how the practice of science can be guided by regulative principles. Kant’s basic thought is that reason is crucial not only when it comes to justifying scientific claims, but also in determining what should be investigated next, for reason points toward an ideal that we have reason to try to realize. Because scientists do not proceed randomly in their research, but rather are guided by regulative principles, they know both what questions are the right ones to ask and how they should go about trying to answer those questions. By appealing to regulative principles Kant can thus account not merely for the claims advanced in the sciences, but also for the progress that has been made so far as well as the progress that is still to come.

This paper specifically focuses on Kant’s views on what these regulative principles are, why they are justified, how they function to regulate our inquiry, and what conception of reason can support them.

Global Governance and the Promissory Visions of Education

This article contributes to the expanding scholarly literature on the global governance of education, with a particular focus on its future-oriented and ‘promissory’ dimension. Inspired by Beckert’s (2020) concept of ‘promissory’ legitimacy, a key contribution of this special issue is to critically analyse past and contemporary promissory narratives of the major international organisations and other global actors concerning the future of education.

We focus on three overarching themes that emerge from the contributions to this special issue: Problems of legitimacy in the global governance of education; a shift towards multistakeholderism, which we explore through the lens of ‘the neuro-affective turn’; the use of crisis narratives as an instrument of global governance, and geopolitical shifts and the decline of the liberal world order.

The Rise of Chinese Universities: Research, Innovation and Building World-Class Universities

Higher educational institutions coupled with research and development (R&D) and S&T institutions are intimately intertwined with the rise of Asia in the global knowledge economy. First Japan, followed by the Dragon economies together with China, South Korea and India continue to play a dominant role in characterising twenty-first century as the Asian Century. In the last couple of decades, the rise of China has caught up the imagination of people and governments alike all over the world. This has happened not only because of China’s manufacturing prowess and skills that the country has mastered over the decades, but also because of her ability and potential to develop human capital, training, advancement of knowledge and innovation impacting the national economy. In other words, science, technology and innovation policies (STI) in the last couple of decades enabled a select band of Chinese universities to not only enhance their research intensity but scale up in the rankings of world-class universities.

STI strategies were systematically deployed towards building human capital and promoting ‘triple helix’-based entrepreneurship and innovation in universities. China is second only to the USA in the global research output of papers in science and engineering as well as R&D expenditure. It is the leading nation in the world not only in the production of science and engineering undergraduates and graduates but also PhDs. Chinese multinational firms such as Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and others, emerged to rival those in Japan and the USA in the last two decades. All this could not have been possible without harnessing education at all levels, but particularly in universities impacting advances in science and technology research. In the early 1990s, none of the Chinese universities figured in the top 200 list of World University Rankings. Within two decades, more than half a dozen Chinese universities were listed in the top 200, three in the Top 100 and two in the Top 50. More than any other factor, universities have come to occupy a very significant position in the Chinese national innovation system.

Strategies of Neoliberal Knowledge Production

The actions states took in response to the Covid-19 pandemic posed serious questions about the role of the state in the economy and posed a challenge to neoliberals invested in defending and re-asserting neoliberalism. This paper seizes the pandemic as an opportunity to examine how neoliberals react to modern crises, how they may attempt to re-establish neoliberalism and what role neoliberal ideas play within those processes. It analyses outputs from ten neoliberal think tanks in Germany and the UK and interviews with members of those think tanks to trace neoliberals’ narratives of the crisis and the ways in which neoliberal ideas are wielded to construct these.

We find that for neoliberal think tanks ideological adherence is the key strategy, enabling the construction of a cohesive narrative about the pandemic across various schools of neoliberal thought and country contexts, adjustable through the variations within neoliberalism to specific policy environments. Brief major disagreements did not affect this overarching narrative and, interpreted as matters of principle, instead strengthened self-perceptions of a communal ‘liberal’ identity. Neoliberal ideas form the cornerstone of neoliberal think tanks’ work in large part because they are strategically useful for the production, coordination and attempts at dissemination of neoliberal knowledge.

The Existing Inaccessibility of Science in Neoliberal Academia

This paper explores the detrimental effects of the monopolization of academic publishing by commercial entities, with a focus on Elsevier. The high costs associated with article processing charges (APCs) and subscription fees create significant barriers for academics from impoverished backgrounds in neoliberal academia, perpetuating inequality and limiting access to knowledge, thus showing epistemic vices of intellectual arrogance and injustice, which forms a dilemma in the “publish or perish” academic landscape.

Therefore, we propose the formation of the VALTA consortium, a coalition of Vietnamese universities and institutions, to negotiate transformative open access contracts through collective bargaining power. Furthermore, we aim to re-design the traditional publishing system with a decentralized blockchain-based one where tokens are paid as compensation for reviewers alongside AI editors as a sustainable alternative to reduce labor costs and enhance transparency. By democratizing access to scientific knowledge and rationally adjusting the cost barrier, our proposed solutions aim to foster multidisciplinary innovation, ensure equitable distribution of research focus, and address the systemic issues of discrimination, injustice, groupthink, and financial barriers in the current academic rat race. This paper advocates for a community-driven approach to making scientific knowledge accessible to all, promoting a more inclusive and diverse academic research environment, hence putting the “Non Solus” back into Elsevier nature.

The Road to Social Ecological Economics

In this wide-ranging interview, Clive Spash discusses his career, influences, key publications and how he eventually became a critical realist. In Part 1, he discusses his education, the founding of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) in 1990 and the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE) in 1996, and the period up to and including the publication of his monograph Greenhouse Economics. He ranges over critique of cost–benefit analysis and of integrated assessment models, the central role of ethics, the problems ingrained at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) based on its organizational division of labor and the continual tensions between mainstream economics and ecological economics.

A Defense of the Circular Economy

The notion of circular economy (CE) has been trending among policymakers, businesses, and academia for over a decade. Sometimes poorly understood and often misrepresented as a one-size-fits-all solution to environmental problems without economic trade-offs, the concept has recently drawn considerable criticism. According to its critics, the CE (1) rebrands existing concepts without clarity, (2) makes unrealistic environmental promises, (3) oversimplifies and overlooks critical factors, (4) clashes with societal values and norms, (5) fails in practical business applications, and (6) serves as a capitalist tool for Western interests. In this paper, we critically review these criticisms of the CE, many of which are not based on empirical realities, are obsolete, or originate in oversimplified interpretations of the circle metaphor.

We argue that CE is an “umbrella” framing for existing concepts with a relatively concrete definition. Formerly corporate led, CE has matured into an academically dominated field, backed by substantial technical literature, new sub-fields led by social scientists, and an increasingly advanced and detailed understanding of previous simplifications. Empirical evidence is emerging that CE can be operationalized and scaled, provide considerable environmental benefits, and can align with societal values and priorities. While easy to criticize, the hope and momentum that the CE has sparked is creating tangible benefits over other sustainability-oriented concepts. Further research is required to establish its long-term advantages, drawbacks, and complementarities with alternative approaches.

Are Cooperatives More Virtuous than Corporations?

There are several sectors of the economy in which cooperatives have flourished, competing successfully against standard business corporations. The best explanation for their success is that they provide superior benefits  to their members.

The question addressed by this paper is whether cooperatives also provide important benefits to society, such that non-members should prefer a cooperative economy to one dominated by business corporations. It has often been suggested that cooperatives are more virtuous because they are more democratic, less hierarchical, less anti-social and less apt to produce economic inequality. This paper evaluates these claims. The central challenge stems from the observation that cooperatives are not nearly as  different from corporations as is commonly assumed.

Creativity or Institutionalization? Beyond the Dualism in Democratic Innovation

Democratic innovation and institutionalization processes both seem to aspire to achieve the same goals: to ensure that democracy can evolve and thrive over time and to generate and embed new modes of functioning that can include more people and respond to emerging needs. However, both conceptually and in practice, the two approaches tend to be depicted as apart, as some scholars of democratic innovation take a critical stance toward institutionalization, while those researching modes of institutionalization struggle to account for the messiness of emerging practices that evolve in unexpected ways. This article aims to reflect on how a strong dualism in debates about democratic innovation and institutionalization risks that certain forms of change go unnoticed and therefore under-theorized.

By drawing on the concept of political creativity, this article introduces an anti-dualist perspective and advances new critical reflections within existing democratic innovation literature. Interestingly, the scholarship on political creativity has so far not entered the democratic innovation debates, despite some interesting points of contact and shared concerns with recent publications in this field. Drawing on practical cases, this article advances three main suggestions for re-thinking institutionalization beyond the dualism in democratic innovation, which all directly emanate from the political creativity scholarship and concern the importance of taking into account the dimension of time, the concept of relationality, and a novel understanding of order as assemblages.

Community-Led Management of the Urban Commons

At a local level, the role of urban green spaces for tackling sustainability issues has received renewed attention, in line with a wider shift in thinking which places cities at the heart of sustainable development action. In parallel, funding for green space provision has reduced, prompting Local Authorities to reimagine how green spaces are governed, including transferring authority to communities. Preference for community-led green spaces is frequently justified with reference to normative arguments derived from “commons” theory, which advocate for self-governing institutions as effective means of managing local resources.

What is lacking in this literature is a contemporary focus on urban settings, operational prescription, and an awareness of the real challenges facing self-governance. To fill this gap, the different interactions with, and claims over, a self-governed nature reserve in Bristol, UK, are investigated; alongside the operational and legal mechanisms deployed in its governance and management prioritization; and difficulty in establishing and legitimizing norms whilst advocating for shared use. This deep empirical case provides valuable insights for policymakers and theorists as they continue to make decisions concerning the future of urban green spaces, in different localities and across scales.

Grassroots Mobilization for a Just, Green Urban Future

Municipal climate resiliency and re-naturing plans are promoting greening and green (re)development, such as the inclusion of new parks, greenways, or rehabilitated shorelines, frequently as a-political, win-win solutions for all residents. Greenwashing and (re)development of green amenities in vulnerable neighborhoods—those often most in need of support toward resilience and adaptation—expose residents to the impacts of green gentrification, such as the pricing-out and physical displacement from housing, socio-cultural displacement from public space, and associated personal and community traumas.

This paper explores an under-researched avenue in the green gentrification literature: How do grassroots community activists organize to address housing and greening simultaneously and how do they operate to achieve justice in greening neighborhoods? We examined the strategies and tools used by community groups in 10 cities in the United States facing green gentrification. We find that justice-driven strategies and tools are supported by the formation of multi-sectoral coalitions which strengthen what we define as “community infrastructures”—social, economic, and political capacities—against exclusive green-washing. We argue that each of the three capacities must be built amongst residents in order to to fortify the material and immaterial components of community infrastructure.

Principled Experiments in Just Being: From Police Oversight to Community Intersight

This article compares ideals and practices of police oversight in two very different contexts—settler colonial North America and “post” colonial South Asia—to interrogate fundamental principles underlying police oversight globally and to imagine new ways of working toward transformation. The analysis ultimately asks: how might we conceive new modes of engagement around community safety and governance in line with ideals of social justice as a global humanistic principle?

Drawing inspiration from (1) a Gandhian ethics of “fidelity to being” and “unconditional equality” in Satyagraha praxis as a “religion of resistance” to sovereign command and (2) Haudenosaunee principles manifest in the Kayaneren'kó:wa (Great Law of Peace), I suggest we move away from demanding more or better police oversight bodies and turn instead toward creating institutions that foster “intersight” as spaces of exchange among community members, government officials, legal experts, and other stakeholders. Intersight may provide good-faith forums for critical self-introspection by all parties involved and, crucially, open-minded and compassionate listening to others regarding what kinds of policing or other forms of collective action geared toward security, safety, and justice, may be needed in a particular community.

Museums as the Catalysts for a Democratic Revolution in Cultural Policy

As culture exists and evolves predominantly in society, democratic principles provide a strong foundation for future cultural development. Through a range of case studies and provocations from Latin America and Europe, this paper delineates the necessary debate on urgent challenges and opportunities for practitioners, researchers and communities in working together with indigenous and marginalized groups to extend democratic cultural practice in the creative and museum sectors.

The paper also considers some of the barriers that may stand in the way of transformation to democratic legitimacy, alongside recent international collaborations that provide examples of commitment to cultural change. Finally, the paper suggests that the cultural sector should step back from the colonial model of culture and the arts in buildings and collections, which framed the creation of the dominant model of cultural institutions across the world.

What Is Critical about Critical Librarianship?

Library labor constitutes a world-making practice, wherein the collection, organization, preservation, and provision of materials structure the intellectual horizons of communities. This paper argues that such work is not neutral. Grounded in a critical librarianship framework, it interrogates the library as an Enlightenment institution, historically co-produced within and reinforcing systems of racism, patriarchy, and capitalist production. By positioning libraries alongside other colonial projects of dominant order—such as museums, zoos, and cartographic projections that center Euro-American worldviews—the analysis reveals the library as a “desiring machine” that seeks to totalize and universalize knowledge through classification schemes from which nothing is meant to escape. This totalizing impulse, however, is inherently bound to fail, revealing the contingent and ideological nature of the orders we impose.

Moving beyond critique, the paper surfaces the often-invisible material and temporal structures that underpin library practice. Drawing on Susan Leigh Star’s concept of infrastructure, it examines the physical and digital substrates of library work—from the metals in servers to the temporal constraints of the one-hour conference talk—that remain obscured until they break down. Critical librarianship, therefore, necessitates making these structures visible and questioning the labor required to sustain them.

Central to this inquiry is an engagement with time: the library’s relationship to a past that reflects dominant modes of accumulation and ordering, and its orientation toward a future actively shaped by daily, present-tense decisions about what to collect, how to organize, and whom to serve. The paper contends that a critical librarianship framework provides the essential tools to both diagnose these inherited structures and imagine alternative futures. It concludes by exploring what critical librarianship means in practice, how it manifests in everyday labor, and how its perspectives enable practitioners to confront the field’s most intractable problems, thereby participating in the deliberate construction of more just and equitable epistemic worlds.

Reconceptualizing Transformative Learning Theory

This article is based on a critical ethnography study conducted in a continuing education department of a cégep in the Montreal area (Québec). The main objective of the research was to describe and analyze educational practices in this specific educational setting. To understand the conditions under which those practices are carried out, the study describes the life pathways of those adult students and the effect it has on them years after their graduation.

This article is divided into four sections. First, we present the theoretical framework used for the study, a critical theory of adult education. Next, we describe the research methodology and data analysis method. The results obtained are then presented. Finally, we present a conclusive discussion around how this theoretical proposal sheds new light on the transformative effect of the learning journey and helps us to better understand the institution that could lead to the transformation.

Knowledge-Specific Epistemic Injustice

The actions states took in response to the Covid-19 pandemic posed serious questions about the role of the state in the economy and posed a challenge to neoliberals invested in defending and re-asserting neoliberalism. This paper seizes the pandemic as an opportunity to examine how neoliberals react to modern crises, how they may attempt to re-establish neoliberalism and what role neoliberal ideas play within those processes. It analyses outputs from ten neoliberal think tanks in Germany and the UK and interviews with members of those think tanks to trace neoliberals’ narratives of the crisis and the ways in which neoliberal ideas are wielded to construct these.

We find that for neoliberal think tanks ideological adherence is the key strategy, enabling the construction of a cohesive narrative about the pandemic across various schools of neoliberal thought and country contexts, adjustable through the variations within neoliberalism to specific policy environments. Brief major disagreements did not affect this overarching narrative and, interpreted as matters of principle, instead strengthened self-perceptions of a communal ‘liberal’ identity. Neoliberal ideas form the cornerstone of neoliberal think tanks’ work in large part because they are strategically useful for the production, coordination and attempts at dissemination of neoliberal knowledge.

Postdigital Feminist (Citizen) Science in Patriarchy-Capitalist Ruins

We write in a world ablaze—ecological collapse, rising fascism, and genocide unfolding in real time. For the colonized, these are not new catastrophes but enduring conditions. Against this backdrop, we explore postdigital feminist citizen science as a set of subversive, generative practices that compost the ruins of empire into possibilities otherwise. Rooted in the postdigital’s refusal to separate the digital from the material, postdigital feminist scholarship interrogates how technologies, bodies, and epistemologies are entangled with systems of colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, and racial violence. Postdigital citizen science, too, is fraught—its promise of participation often undercut by exclusions encoded in the very notion of ‘citizenship’. Yet, within these contradictions lie insurgent spaces of refusal, creativity, and reimagining.

We offer a loose manifesto, not as a prescriptive call, but as an invitation to cultivate postdigital feminist citizen sciences from the ground up—from disobedient data practices to feminist counterpublics and speculative pedagogies. This is an alienated science of ruination from below: emerging from breakdown, grown in the cracks, and committed to dismantling platform patriarchy, colonial capitalism, and white supremacy. Our manifesto may be provisional, but our commitment is clear: to imagine and enact worlds beyond the fire.

The ‘Design Features’ of Language Revisited

Language is often regarded as a defining trait of our species, but what are its core properties? In 1960, Hockett published ‘The origin of speech’ enumerating 13 design features presumed to be common to all languages, and which, taken together, separate language from other communication systems. His framework was highly influential in shaping language evolution research and cross-species comparative work. Yet, in the 65 years since its publication, major advances in our understanding of language and animal communication demand a rethinking of what characterizes language and what makes it unique.

In this article we review which features still hold true in light of new evidence from cognitive science, linguistics, animal cognition, and anthropology, and demonstrate how a revised understanding of language highlights three core aspects: that language is inherently multimodal and semiotically diverse; that it functions as a tool for semantic, pragmatic, and social inference, as well as facilitating categorization; and that the processes of interaction and transmission give rise to central design features of language.

Reified Identities and Politics of ‘Authenticity’

Anthropology and the social sciences have largely neglected the illusive and narrative nature of social identities, frequently relying on realist metaphysical assumptions. Such assumptions, often implicit, underpin reification and essentialist political uses of identities.

This paper challenges these prevailing approaches by critically examining the foundations of Verbuyst’s defence of ‘subversive authenticity’ as a strategy for indigenous empowerment. It interrogates the theoretical implications of such authenticity, offering a critique of its analytical validity and its role in contemporary identity politics, and suggests an anti-realist view of identities as an alternative point of departure for anthropology.

Chatbot Epistemology

This piece considers the epistemological challenges that arise with the increasingly widespread use of AI chatbots. I articulate a problem that they present—the ‘boiling frog problem’. According to the metaphor, if you boil a frog by putting it in scalding water, it will try to save itself, but if you put the frog in a pot of tepid water, it will remain unaware of the rising water temperature and therefore, make no attempt to escape to save itself. In both cases, the outcome is the same—the frog dies. Likewise, I argue that the combination of factors I identify in this piece, over time, will give rise to detrimental engagements with chatbots and ultimately, to diminished human autonomy. The factors I consider include problems with digital privacy, misplaced epistemic trust in AI companions, LLM emergence, the use of personality profiling and adaptive language, misattributing sentience to LLMs, and more.