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China's massive 'Belt and Road Initiative' (BRI) - designed to build infrastructure and coordinate policymaking across Eurasia and eastern Africa - is widely seen as a clearly-defined, top-down 'grand strategy', reflecting Beijing's growing ambition to reshape, or even dominate, regional and international order. This article argues that this view is mistaken. Foregrounding transformations in the Chinese party-state that shape China's foreign policy-making, it shows that, rather than being a coherent, geopolitically-driven grand strategy, BRI is an extremely loose, indeterminate scheme, driven primarily by competing domestic interests, particularly state capitalist interests, whose struggle for power and resources are already shaping BRI's design and implementation. This will generate outcomes that often diverge from top leaders' intentions and may even undermine key foreign policy goals.

This article seeks to add to the current body of knowledge regarding Cognitive Stylistics an approach that has witnessed an increase in popularity in recent years due to the emergence of Cognitive Linguistics as a valuable tool for studying language in general. Stylistics and its evolved form, Cognitive Stylistics, have proved influential in understanding the process involved both in the creation as well as in the reception of literature. The study demonstrates that Cognitive Stylistics is a reliable framework for explaining how textual features such as deviation, metaphor or foregrounding trigger specific cognitive models and mental processes in readers. It argues that incorporating cognitive theories and tools, like conceptual metaphor theory, schema theory, text-to-world theory and foregrounding, can enhance literary interpretation and reveal both universal and text-specific aspects of reading comprehension.

The Convention on Biological Diversity is defining the goals that will frame future global biodiversity policy in a context of rapid biodiversity decline and under pressure to make transformative change. Drawing on the work of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, we argue that transformative change requires the foregrounding of Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ rights and agency in biodiversity policy. We support this argument with four key points. First, Indigenous peoples and local communities hold knowledge essential for setting realistic and effective biodiversity targets that simultaneously improve local livelihoods. Second, Indigenous peoples’ conceptualizations of nature sustain and manifest CBD’s 2050 vision of “Living in harmony with nature.” Third, Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ participation in biodiversity policy contributes to the recognition of human and Indigenous peoples’ rights. And fourth, engagement in biodiversity policy is essential for Indigenous peoples and local communities to be able to exercise their recognized rights to territories and resources.

In the wake of anthropology’s much storied crisis of representation; attempted corrections following movements of “Third World” peoples, women, and queer folks; the recent disavowal of 1980s and 1990s reflexivity and experimentation; and what George Marcus has recently termed a “crisis of reception,” this essay seeks to critically reassess and reanimate the formative interventions of anthropologists of the African diaspora (including Africa itself)—foregrounding work that lends new insights into anthropological theory, method, and pedagogy. The intention here is not to merely redeem the pioneering insights of African diaspora anthropologists as unsung forerunners of contemporary anthropological theories (though this is a worthwhile endeavor in itself) but rather to illuminate continued and prospective contributions of this mode of knowledge production.

The intersection of Shakespeare and critical race studies has become increasingly visible in recent years, due in part to critiques of now-mainstream “historical” approaches that inadvertently reinforce Shakespeare’s historical status as a tool for racial and colonial oppression. However, this body of work has yet to account for the role of property relations - a capitalist construct upheld by liberal formations of the subject - in structuring conversations about the politics of anti-colonial Shakespearean appropriation. This article addresses that gap by examining Arthur L. Little Jr.’s term “white property” as a phrase that signals common ground between divisive colonial politics and entrenched assumptions about to whom Shakespeare “belongs.” Specifically, I look at two plays from the recently published Bard in the Borderlands anthology (ed. Gillen, Santos, and Vomero Santos; ACMRS Press, 2023) to detect how English-Spanish bilingualism plays a critical role in delineating cultural and other forms of property as matters of contestatory ownership between discrete communities on the U.S.-Mexico border. I argue that these linguistic contests reveal dominant concepts of theft and counter-theft that not only govern relationships within the plays, but reveal the unconscious investments of U.S. Anglo audiences steeped in Shakespeare as “white property.” In conclusion this article, by closely examining theft and property as ideas central to anti-colonial Borderlands appropriation, offers a new lens on scholarly conversations about trans-cultural Shakespeare production.

This article considers what Brexit means for British citizens living in France. Drawing on empirical research I examine the emotional and material impacts that uncertainties about their futures have had on their lives. The article documents the measures they take (or anticipate) in their bids to secure their future rights to stay put in France. However, not everyone is well placed to secure their own future. Foregrounding Brexit as bordering – the social and political process through which judgements are made about who is ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ of the privilege of (European) belonging – I question who among these Britons is newly bordered through Brexit and with what impacts? As I argue, Brexit is unevenly experienced, exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and generating new fault lines of belonging among the British in France as they are repositioned in relation to hierarchies of European belonging.

Although informed consent models for prescribing hormone replacement therapy are becoming increasingly prevalent, many physicians continue to require an assessment and referral letter from a mental health professional prior to prescription. Drawing on personal and communal experience, the author argues that assessment and referral requirements are dehumanising and unethical, foregrounding the ways in which these requirements evidence a mistrust of trans people, suppress the diversity of their experiences and sustain an unjustified double standard in contrast to other forms of clinical care. Physicians should abandon this unethical requirement in favour of an informed consent approach to transgender care.

Drawing on an ethnographic study of the installation and maintenance of Paris subway wayfìnding system, this article attempts to discuss and specify previous claims that highlight stability and immutability as crucial aspects of material ordering processes. Though in designers' productions (such as guidelines or graphic manuals), subway signs have been standardized and their consistency has been invested in to stabilize riders' environment, they appear as fragile and transforming entities in the hands of maintenance workers. These two situated accounts are neither opposite nor paradoxical: they enact different versions of subway signs, the stabilization of which goes through the acknowledgment of their vulnerability. Practices that deal with material fragility are at the center of what we propose, following Annemarie Mol and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, to term a care of things. Foregrounding such a care of things is a way to surface a largely overlooked dimension of material ordering and to renew how maintainability issues are generally tackled.

‘Dementia-friendly communities’ herald a shift toward the neighbourhood as a locus for the care and support of people with dementia, sparking growing interest in the geographies of dementia care and raising questions over the shifting spatial and social experience of the condition. Existing research claims that many people with dementia experience a ‘shrinking world’ whereby the boundaries to their social and physical worlds gradually constrict over time, leading to a loss of control and independence. This paper reports a five-year, international study that investigated the neighbourhood experience of people with dementia and those who care for and support them. We interrogate the notion of a shrinking world and in so doing highlight an absence of attention paid to the agency and actions of people with dementia themselves. The paper draws together a socio-relational and embodied-material approach to question the adequacy of the shrinking world concept as an explanatory framework and to challenge reliance within policy and practice upon notions of place as fixed or stable. We argue instead for the importance of foregrounding ‘lived place’ and attending to social practices and the networks in which such practices evolve. Our findings have implications for policy and practice, emphasising the need to bolster the agency of people living with dementia as a route to fostering accessible and inclusive neighbourhoods.

A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, esthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialized journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain constructs the world in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott and Jacobs, 2011). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives.