This piece highlights the role of the media in priming audiences for genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. While the themes illuminated here regarding mainstream media coverage of the Middle East have long been endemic, the Gaza genocide brought them into acute view. The piece also presents three television interviews with the author, Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney, Professor at the Rutgers University, New Brunswick in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice, and Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya, an electronic magazine on the Middle East that combines scholarly expertise and local knowledge. The select interviews, which are part of a significant archive of such interviews featuring Palestinian interlocutors and mainstream Western media outlets, are dated to November 13, 2023, February 10, 2024, and January 17, 2025. The introductory remarks reflect the significance of Palestinian interlocutors being able to speak for themselves, the hostilities they face as they serve as both experts and media correctives, the endemic bias of media outlets, as well as the double standards at play in comparison to other guests often saying similar things. This introduction emphasizes how the media’s construction of narratives that enabled the genocide is as significant as the political and legal orders also at play.

Solidarity is widely invoked as vital for overcoming present and future public health emergencies, as well as bridging global health disparities and inequities. However, despite its rhetorical prominence, appeals to solidarity have repeatedly failed to produce equitable outcomes in global health due to profound disagreements about the concept and how to institutionalize it in global health practice. Negotiations over the recently-adopted Pandemic Agreement revealed two key contrasting notions of solidarity: as redistributive and enforceable, grounded in demands for equity and historical redress; or voluntary, emphasising intellectual property protections and national discretion. We offer an account of solidarity that can function as a framework for integrating these rival views. Specifically, we theorise two understandings of solidarity that we have termed Deep and Responsive solidarity. While Deep solidarity refers to a normative principle of solidarity that is grounded on a profound understanding of being as fundamentally and intrinsically relational, Responsive solidarity is motivated as a response to crises. Our central intervention in this paper, drawing from the two accounts of solidarity, is to reorient solidarity from a crisis language towards a more foundational account of global health governance that can sustain justice both in ordinary times and in moments of rupture.

Many young people are taught to picture life as a straight line: succeed at school, choose a career, and move steadily towards adulthood. Drawing on queer time and crip time, this essay challenges the idea that there is one correct route or pace through life. It argues that pauses, detours, and dependence are not personal failures. They expose how narrowly society defines progress—and help us imagine more accessible futures.

This article examines the Athens War Museum through the perspective of the “conscripted museologist,” a conscript fulfilling his compulsory military service inside the institution. Drawing on retrospective autoethnographic and institutional-ethnographic observations from an eight-month posting in 2016, it argues that the museum’s ideological logic was revealed less through its master narrative than through its margins and omissions. The museum’s chronological narrative presented a linear history of Hellenic defensive struggle from antiquity to the Korean War while systematically avoiding internal conflicts such as the Greek Civil War. This narrative was reproduced through routinised school visits, architectural choreography, and the mediation of conscript-guides who effectively performed the national curriculum on behalf of the army. Against this curated sequence, three marginal sites disrupted the museum’s claims to neutrality and continuity: a napalm bomb displayed in the courtyard, carrying the suppressed memory of the Civil War; internal staff folklore interpreting the building’s modernist form as an atomic mushroom; and the Saroglos Weapons Collection, whose cosmopolitan and non-chronological character contradicted the main exhibitionary nationalist framework. Reading the museum through these paratextual margins reveals the unresolved ideological afterlives of the Greek Civil War and the dictatorship that founded the institution.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold has influentially advocated for a means of thinking that mirrors that of a craftsman or artist. For Ingold, this means adopting a mode of thinking that responds to, and moves with, the materials we work with. As a medievalist who makes linocut prints, I am curious about how my academic and crafting experiences interact, and how my printmaking might function, in Ingold’s words, as an “art of inquiry.” This article will consider two crafting processes required to make a linocut—carving the block to create a relief, and the creation of an impression—and will explore how these crafting processes have encouraged me to think about our creation of the medieval now. To do so, I will reflect on my experience making a lino print, entitled “Salt-in-the-Wound,” to accompany Laura Varnam’s poem “The Name of the Father,” which gives a voice to Grendel’s Mother (one of the three major antagonists in the Old English poem Beowulf).

This is a reflection on some of the ways in which book reviewing might inform and enrich the study of medieval literature. Looking to my own experiences as a medievalist who also writes and edits general-audience review essays, I begin by considering the particular mode of reading it encourages, and then explore what that mode might offer us as scholars. I argue against the idea that non-academic reviewing promotes a superficial or derivative engagement with the books in question, and suggest instead that it demands an evaluative and instinct-led—but deeply serious—kind of reading. Showing how reviewing has prompted me to rethink a number of canonical medieval texts, I make a case for its value not just as a means of outreach or professional development, but as a scholarly activity.

The British Museum in London and the Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam both call themselves stewards of contested colonial-era collections, but they respond to repatriation claims in opposite ways. The British Museum treats a claim as a challenge to manage: it defends its right to keep an object using law and tradition, and the burden falls on whoever is asking for the object back. The Wereldmuseum treats a claim as a question to investigate: it helped build the Netherlands’ provenance-research program, and the burden falls on the museum to justify keeping an object once the evidence is in. These are institutional choices, not national ones. Britain’s own museum sector has pushed for return since 2021, and the Netherlands has its own defensive practices elsewhere. Repatriation itself is not the argument here. It is what shows up when one model, rather than the other, is in charge. The Wereldmuseum’s model makes the stronger case: legitimacy comes not from holding on to what a museum has, but from knowing when to let it go.

This article examines how early Soviet hygiene museums redefined the role of the museum object in the context of mass education and ideological transformation, addressing a field that remains largely understudied. Taking as its point of departure the 1922 Moscow display of three mummified bodies—a saint, a counterfeit relic, and a rat—it asks how museums could produce knowledge without relying on a stable collection of distinctive artifacts. Drawing on primary sources including photographs and contemporary newspapers, it analyzes case studies from agit-trains to museums in Moscow, Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro, Ukraine), and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Combining close analysis of exhibition design with attention to media and spatial narratives, the article situates these practices within Soviet museum theory and an international interwar context. It argues that hygiene museums developed a “language of things” in which meaning emerged through relationships between objects, images, texts, and new media, transforming museum displays into multisensory, even participatory environments. In doing so, they offer an alternative genealogy of modern museology centered not on museum collections, but on the forms of mediation through which museums produced and communicated knowledge.

As popular media culture continues to shape public life, museums and galleries have increasingly turned to high-profile figures to drive attendance, visibility, and cultural relevance. This paper proposes a framework of three archetypes through which celebrity museum collaborations can be understood: the aesthetics auteur, whose personal brand identity shapes the curatorial vision; the collaborative curator, who shares authorship with the institution in a more traditional capacity; and the legacy architect, who leverages the museum as a vehicle for encoding their own legacy into shared cultural memory. This paper examines three case studies—Wes Anderson’s guest exhibition at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Pharrell Williams’ co-curated exhibition FEMMES at the Galerie Perrotin in Paris, and George Lucas’ Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles—to assess the opportunities and tensions each archetype presents for cultural institutions. As algorithm-driven media continues to flatten cultural engagement into surface-level aesthetics, this paper argues that celebrity collaborations are a double-edged sword: capable of expanding access and relevance, but equally capable of reducing institutional integrity to spectacle.

Indigeneity is a category of analysis to read the world. Indigeneity is not a culture and much less a race; it is not a linguistic or biological feature. People have long identified through their nations, such as Tikuna, Kaqchikel, Aymara, Naga, or Chumash, before states labeled them Indian during various processes of land-grabbing. The concept of indigeneity is a category invented by the western modernity that produced a world-system hierarchizing life. Indigeneity is a useful lens to understand why some nations have sovereignty to speak at the UN, while others do not. It sheds light on who owns and who is owned, who has citizenship and who is framed as savage. Indigeneity is a category of political analysis that matters for what it reveals about the modern states that use it, more than the people called Indigenous. Indigeneity operates on three levels: as a political identity, as a relation to the state, and as co-constitutive of political modernity. It matters to understand how we got here, and how to get out of it. Today, Indigenous peoples protect water to restore public life, to enrich our polities with relations of non-domination centered on sustaining life.

This article examines the politics of heritage-making in Mauritius through the case of Le Morne Mountain, a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed as a symbol of maroon resistance. Despite this global status, heritage governance by the state largely remains at the level of performative symbolic reconciliation without addressing structural inequalities, while private actors benefit from the site’s cultural value through tourism activities. The article traces how eco-cultural narratives in tourism projects increasingly commodify and depoliticize histories of maroon heritage, transforming them into consumable experiences. Although Le Morne is framed as a cultural landscape linking memory, land, and culture, the communities whose histories are co-opted remain spatially dispossessed and marginalized. These contradictions reveal that heritage production in Mauritius remains a terrain of struggle and exposes how power asymmetries are reproduced. However, mobilization by on-the-ground communities is a pressing reminder that decolonizing heritage must move beyond symbolic recognition toward structural transformation, foregrounding land justice and reparations.

This autobiographically inflected essay argues for the value of integrating creative work, comics in this case, into scholarly practice in order to encourage a different way of reading, communicate with diverse audiences, and to model an approach that encourages further creative-critical experimentation within medieval studies. Citing the repetition and compression built into the process of cartooning as both challenges and generative strengths of the comics medium, the essay describes three research-informed cartooning projects alongside images taken from the discussed works, all of which take the form of literary adaptations. Discussion of these individual projects leads to a broader examination of what creative-critical work and artistic response might make possible for scholars seeking new ways to engage with the medieval past through less common media and approaches and how this practice might address contemporary conversations about creativity, attention, and community.

This essay reads Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show through bregar, a Puerto Rican practice of negotiating difficult conditions while preserving dignity. From the opening sugarcane field to the closing line “God bless América,” the choreography rearticulated national belonging through Afro-Latino and Latino life and Spanish. Read alongside Cuban revolutionary José Martí’s “Nuestra América” and “Mi raza,” the performance raises a question echoed by US President Donald Trump’s critique of the Spanish-language show: how does an appeal to national identity or unity restrict the political expression of racial difference? To pursue this question, the article turns to El Sapo Concho, the Puerto Rican crested toad, connecting his appearances in the performance and Bad Bunny’s films to Afro-Latino and Latino environmentalism in Puerto Rico. Bad Bunny’s symbolic victory with the halftime show makes these ecological struggles visible through the choreography of his bregar.

If digital platforms present the same content as physical exhibition spaces, what distinguishes the experience of visiting a museum in person? This article argues that the distinction resides not in singular encounters with an object, but in the relation between an inherited building and the curators who stage successive exhibitions within it. This argument is developed through two temporary exhibitions held in the first-floor hall of the House of Histories—part of the National Museum of Lithuania—located in an eighteenth-century palace in Vilnius. The exhibition Riding the Wave of Paris Exhibitions guided visitors along a single chronological path, whereas History Wags Its Tail, presented in the same rooms six months earlier, dispersed visitors into selective pathways. The 2 × 3 room grid and arched openings remain untouched; the curatorial negotiations differed. The article names this condition the flexible cube, a framework that revises Brian O’Doherty’s white cube and Carol Duncan’s ritual script for the era of converted buildings. The comparison shows that the historical museum is neither neutral nor a fixed script, but a co-author whose contribution—familiar in principle, yet rarely isolated in practice—becomes visible only when successive exhibitions are compared within the same unaltered rooms.

For more than a century, American universities justified intercollegiate athletics through the language of amateurism, presenting sport as an extension of education rather than a commercial enterprise. Yet contemporary college athletics, particularly the highest-resourced college athletics programs, operate in an environment defined by billion-dollar media contracts, multimillion-dollar coaching salaries, athlete compensation through name, image, and likeness agreements, and revenue-sharing arrangements following the House v. NCAA settlement. This article examines how universities are responding to these changes through the creation of athletics-affiliated limited liability corporations (LLCs). Using public communications from institutions including Clemson, Kentucky, Michigan State, Rutgers, Utah, and Virginia Tech, the article analyzes how universities explain and justify these new organizational structures. Drawing on organizational legitimacy theory, the analysis identifies four recurring themes: innovation, student-athlete support, competitiveness, and organizational separation. These themes position LLCs not as evidence of the professionalization of college sport, but as necessary adaptations that remain consistent with institutional values. The article argues that athletics LLCs function as both administrative mechanisms and rhetorical tools that help universities maintain legitimacy in an era when the moral authority of amateurism has eroded. More broadly, the rise of LLCs reveals changing cultural assumptions about athlete labor, commercialization, and the place of sport within higher education.

This article explores how museums can engage social capacities that correlate with increases in interpersonal connection and social trust. While analyzing data from a comprehensive audience research study conducted in Spring 2025 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, the authors uncovered an interesting social dynamic occurring between the institution and its visitors: visitors described a felt sense of connection between themselves, the museum, and other visitors, even when no interpersonal interaction occurred. This connection—rooted in a shared visit experience—features specifically demonstrated values: welcome, fun, agency, and curiosity. Theorizing from the study’s results, the authors propose a new framework for museum capacity-building called soft community. Soft community is a social dynamic that encourages individual belonging and enjoyment in a communal social experience, which results in a collective sense of connection and shared purpose across lines of difference. This article outlines practical strategies and tactics for museums to engage their physical spaces, collections, and programming to create and sustain this dynamic. As museums endeavor to develop stronger relevance and civic engagement, the authors propose soft community as a way museums can increase social impact and counter contemporary narratives of divisiveness.

War has long been a continuous reality for those forced to live through it. What may be changing today is the ease with which distant conflict enters ordinary life for those geographically removed from it. For many members of Generation Z, geopolitical tension is encountered less through formal news broadcasts than through feeds: through clips, memes, livestreams, notifications, commentary, and the repetitive logic of scrolling itself. This article argues that digital media does not create continuous war, but alters the texture through which conflict is experienced by many young people during a formative stage of life. The result is a generational condition marked by contradiction: to be highly informed yet uncertain, emotionally engaged yet exhausted, politically aware yet psychologically overwhelmed. Using moments of U.S.–Iran tension alongside broader contemporary conflicts, this essay explores how algorithmically mediated media environments shape attention, identity, and emotional life in ways that make war feel less like a distant event and more like an ambient psychological atmosphere.

As a medieval researcher and a performance storyteller, I use performances to bridge the gap between the groundbreaking work being done on gender in medieval studies and public perceptions of this period. My show Yde and Olive is an adaptation of an Old French thirteenth-century story of cross-dressing, female autonomy, and queer love. It is the latest among my six medieval storytelling shows, which aim to confront the problem that histories and stories showing diverse gender roles remain underrepresented in modern medievalism. Meanwhile, my audience response data demonstrates an eagerness beyond academia to hear stories from the past that contain more expansive representations of gender and sexuality. In Yde and Olive, I wanted to make connections between medieval and modern gender concerns and diversify the repertoire of commonly told medieval stories (often stories told about men and by men), to include tales which centre the agencies of female and queer characters and those who research them. This self-reflective paper provides a case study of the creative and research methods I used to adapt Yde and Olive for modern audiences, as well as considering the responsibilities inherent in any form of public medievalism.

In the academic literature on sports, cricket holds the distinguished title of “Game of the Empire.” The sport’s enduring presence across the former British imperial territories stands as a living testament to the role cricket played at the heart of this imperial project. However, I want to propose a different reading of the term empire and its associated sport. If we broaden our understanding and treat the concept of empire not only as a British historical project but also as a recurring modern formation, defined by a myriad of ways to exercise power and control beyond national borders, then cricket’s claim to the title becomes far less firm. Within this expanded understanding of empire, a stronger candidate emerges in golf. The latter followed the same early path as cricket but transcended the borders of the British Empire, becoming closely associated with US elites and the army for most of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, golf has become the game par excellence of global corporations and financial institutions. In this article, I contend that the title “Game of the Empire” should still be given to cricket, but the far-reaching and expansive title “the Game of Empire” is reserved only for golf.

We are witnessing experiments with political forms of life not seen for nearly a hundred years. Political forms of life are not limited to preferences for particular policies. They entail competing visions for political form itself—an arrangement of power as democracy, socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, or some combination thereof—and a way of life that goes with it. My analysis centres on my own political experiment: a classroom-based citizens’ assembly that I see as a microcosm of this wider phenomenon. This experiment reveals a shared desire among participants to exercise authorship over political arrangements, even as they divide between democratic enthusiasts and sceptics. It is this very authorship that liberal democracy has denied people, even when governments have instituted their own citizens’ assemblies. These citizens’ assemblies seek to expand participation on policy creation while ultimately constraining people to answer predefined questions, leaving the liberal-democratic structure of political decision making intact. I propose that contemporary movements, including authoritarian and other anti-democratic tendencies, can be understood partly as responses to liberal democracy’s reluctance to cede authority over political form. The result is a proliferation of “political experiments” through which individuals and groups attempt to reclaim that authorship.