This braided essay brings together contemporary concerns, personal memoir, and medieval studies. Specifically, it responds to a feeling of anger regarding current political situations, by meditating on medieval Irish instances of, and reflections on, that emotion. The whole exemplifies the technique of the braided essay which I used to larger-scale effect in an earlier book, Fierce Appetites, and implicitly makes the case that a different register—and particularly an emotional honesty—is permissible in “public” writing in a way that would not usually be accepted in traditional academic discourse.

For most of my scholarly life, I have studied subjectivity—insisting, through the method of currere, that education is less a noun than an infinitive, an ongoing existential undertaking. In this brief reflection, I turn that longstanding preoccupation toward my own experience of cancer treatment. What I discovered, and what startled me, was not simply illness but the gradual substitution of symptomology for subjectivity: the displacement of inner life by the management of bodily events. At a moment when this themed issue invites minoritized scholars to write from cancer’s dirty margins, I find myself confronting a different marginalization—the quiet eclipse of the self by the clinical accounting of its symptoms. This essay provides glimpses of that substitution and asks what remains of subjectivity when the body becomes an inventory of side effects.

A Government of India report that reviewed child care institutions (CCIs) in India in 2018 stated that children living in CCIs are subject to multiple restrictions which hinder access to the services and support required to meet essential human needs. This study evaluates three CCIs in West Bengal to understand the constructions of care and also the different interventions undertaken on the development of persons with disabilities and the extent to which they are able to access a standard quality of life and participate in the larger society. Through qualitative analysis of institutional structures, policy frameworks, and caregiver-child interactions, the research highlights how notions of “care,” “protection,” and “vulnerability” are constructed leading to systemic inequalities and marginalization. The findings reveal a complex interplay between institutional policies, resource constraints, and societal attitudes, which collectively shape the lived experiences of these children. Despite robust bureaucratic structures, the implementation of policies often falls short due to inadequate training of caregivers, limited resources, and pervasive stigmatization of disability. This results in varied and sometimes contradictory approaches to care, exacerbating the vulnerabilities of disabled children.

Since 2015, Danish school children have been able to explore science and research in their free time. Behind this initiative stands the Copenhagen-based NGO Videnskabsklubben (English: Science Club), which facilitates science programs running for seven weeks on an annual basis. What began as a series of clubs focused on the natural sciences has, as of 2024, expanded to include the humanities, with the launch of a nationwide archaeology program for pupils in the fourth and fifth grades (ages 10–12). The archaeology program was developed by archaeologists at the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions at Aarhus University. This article introduces the archaeology program as a best practice example of educational outreach. It also introduces the concept of Videnskabsklubben and examines the specific challenges and opportunities of integrating archaeology into a classroom setting. By this it hopefully inspires archaeologists and educators alike to initiate research-based activities within the humanities for school children.

Data center proliferation in the United States of America to accommodate demand for generative artificial intelligence has raised new questions regarding the impact on communities where data centers are sited. Drawing from frontline reporting and environmental justice scholarship, this article argues that data centers have become yet another means to reproduce harm, violence, and burden, distinctly and disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Hyperscale data centers and the myriad state and private actors organizing to support their deployment, unless otherwise disrupted, place unprecedented burdens on public infrastructure and further facilitate the rescission of social provisions. Future research must engage with the demands of frontline communities to ensure that such data center development occurs at a “more human pace.”

This article examines how constitutional courts in Latin America have brought animal protection into constitutional law despite limited constitutional texts. It asks how and why courts in Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil have become global leaders in recognizing rights for animals and other more-than-human entities, and the role Indigenous epistemologies played in this process. Through a comparative analysis of constitutional case law, the article argues that courts in these three countries have developed an unwritten constitutional animal law through creative interpretation: Ecuador by extending the rights of nature to individual animals, Colombia by deriving an animal protection mandate from its “ecological Constitution,” and Brazil by transforming an anticruelty clause into a biocentric framework through regional dialog. These developments cannot be understood as straightforward incorporations of Indigenous epistemologies. Instead, they are better described as products of “entangled legalities,” formed through ongoing interactions among Indigenous knowledge, Western law, and other normative orders. This approach shows that the transformative consequences of the rights of nature and related concepts are indeterminate and depend on how these doctrines are mobilized. The article concludes by proposing that this jurisprudence represents an “animal law from the South,” shaped by the distinctive role of courts in Global South jurisdictions.

As the LGBTQ+ community has become an increasingly salient political constituency, questions of their belonging and their rights have become highly contested in the American mainstream. This paper examines the nexus between this relatively new battlefield and one that predates the American republic—racial exclusion—by examining the rhetoric of a contemporary far-right group espousing Neo-Confederate and Lost Cause values. Identity Dixie (ID) fits this bill—a loose collection of bloggers that championed Southern nationalism and the preservation of a white supremacy that they felt was under siege. Five years of ID’s blog posts show that this segment of the far-right perceives sexual minorities’ march for progress as an existential threat to their racial and sexual hierarchy. Such groups rely on claims of victimhood status. Society’s increased acceptance of LGBTQ+ people has, they have claimed, undermined their traditionally understood rights. This paper contends that these groups are responding to their perceived victimhood by attempting to re-racialize “pink” as the latest non-white threat to their traditional dominance, linking racism explicitly with restrictive notions of gender and sexuality. And, critically, their perception of lost rights has transcended the American South; they feel besieged in modern America by the direction of the nation as a whole.

This essay explores how right-wing Hindu organizations have coopted American political discourses and institutional structures to advance a nationalist agenda. Specifically, they claim civil rights in a multicultural society and employ the language of equity and inclusion to further their aims through public institutions: school boards, city councils, state legislatures, student organizations, and courts. The essay is about discursive choices, yet these cannot be separated from organizational structures, goals, and strategies. For example, I show how two prominent advocacy organizations, the Hindu American Foundation and the Coalition of Hindus of North America, pursue a nationalist agenda by leveraging progressive causes. I then examine student organizations that have opened up new arenas for Hindu nationalism on university campuses, appropriating the rhetoric of “safe spaces” as part of a targeted effort to build support among second- and third-generation Hindu Americans. Finally, I analyze three nationalist projects involving history textbooks, anticaste discrimination and India Day parades to illustrate different modes of discursive and institutional cooptation, including those of other right wing organizations. Contrary to civil rights ideals, the Hindu right wing is actively advancing a politics that is deeply exclusionary, privileging the rights of Hindus while marginalizing other communities.

Cancer narratives matter! This paper explores Te Whare Tapa Whā, a holistic Indigenous Māori model of health and well-being and its application to my personal narrative after being diagnosed with advanced, stage 3 high-grade serous ovarian cancer. Te Whare Tapa Whā was developed by Māori psychiatrist and academic Sir Mason Durie (ONZ KNZM FRANZCP). It compares hauora (holistic health and well-being) to the four walls of a whare (house), all four being necessary to ensure strength and symmetry, though each represents a different dimension: taha wairua (spiritual health), taha hinengaro (mental and emotional health), taha tinana (physical health), and taha whānau (family and social health). There is also a fifth element to the model, taha whenua, the land and our connections to place. Each aspect of Te Whare Tapa Whā was integral to my recovery and cancer survivorship. This paper discusses those aspects and how cancer patients can utilize this model to support themselves throughout the challenges of a cancer diagnosis and the often arduous and lengthy journey of recovery.

Solidarity has long been recognized as a powerful force for mobilizing collective action in public health, social justice, and political movements. Yet, despite its growing prominence, solidarity remains largely framed in anthropocentric terms, centered on relationships among humans. This framing is increasingly being questioned, leading to concepts such as more-than-human solidarity, ecological solidarity, and solidarity for the Anthropocene, which seek to expand solidarity across species boundaries. However, these theoretical developments risk remaining abstract unless grounded in lived realities.This article contributes to that effort through original qualitative empirical research with an Indigenous community in the western Himalayas of India. It examines how and why the community collectively abandoned animal slaughter, trans-Himalayan cattle trade, and hunting practices once central to their livelihoods and cultural life. Findings show that these changes were not driven by ecological crisis or conservation policy, but by cosmology, karmic belief, and moral responsibility. Solidarity with animals emerged through recognition of suffering and abandonment, sustained by interpersonal trust and relational obligations. Women played a central role in enforcing the ban through religious and spiritual arguments alongside legal, economic, and social pressures.The article argues that this case challenges dominant Western framings of solidarity as something humans extend to nonhuman others. Instead, it illustrates a relational ethic in which humans and nonhumans are understood as members of a shared moral world. Participants also acknowledged that these solidarities remain fragile and increasingly threatened by market-oriented values emphasizing individual economic gain over relational existence.

This paper examines street performance by persons with disabilities in urban India as a critical site for rethinking disability justice, value, and public life. It asks how performers with disability, often positioned at the margins of urban economies and cultural recognition, negotiate survival, visibility, and dignity within an ableist city structured around productivity, speed, and normative embodiment. Focusing on Kolkata, the study investigates how street performance functions simultaneously as economic labour, cultural practice, and ethical critique under conditions of neoliberal urbanism. Employing a qualitative methodology of performance ethnography and semi-structured interviews, the analysis interprets street performance as a form of cultural labour and crip critique. The central argument is that these performers are not passive victims but active agents whose “imperfect” performances expose the ableist, capitalist, and casteist foundations of urban space, which equate human worth with productivity, aesthetic polish, and bodily normativity. The body of the paper explores how performers confront hostile infrastructure, public charity, and aesthetic dismissal while their improvisational acts foreground interdependence and challenge norms of self-sufficiency. The study concludes that disability justice in the Indian context necessitates moving beyond inclusion rhetoric to demand a fundamental reimagining of urban ethics which looks forward to collective responsibility for access, a revaluation of care, and the recognition of street performance as legitimate cultural work.

The landmark Rights of Nature case for the Machángara River in Quito, Ecuador, is examined. Long degraded by untreated wastewater, industrial discharges, and urbanization, the Machángara River became the focus of a citizen-led lawsuit supported by scientists, academics, and indigenous representatives. In 2024, an Ecuadorian court recognized the river as a rights-bearing entity and ordered the municipality to implement a 27-point restoration plan. The case demonstrates how Rights of Nature offers a more effective legal strategy than traditional loss-and-damage claims, correcting power asymmetries, expanding legal standing, and shifting the burden of proof from plaintiffs to authorities responsible for environmental protection. The ruling catalyzed public awareness, institutional learning, and political commitments, culminating in a November 2025 pledge by the mayor to clean Quito’s rivers by 2040. It also sparked new governance structures, such as community groups tasked with monitoring compliance, and encouraged discussion of nature-based solutions despite municipal resistance. The Machángara case highlights the potential of Rights of Nature to transform urban environmental governance by integrating science, community action, and legal innovation, positioning Quito once again as a global reference in watershed protection.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major global public health threat which disproportionately affects low- and middle-income countries. It intersects with other public health issues including climate change and its impact is compounded by existing socio-economic inequities. In the South Asian setting, persistent gender and caste-based discrimination create differences in infection susceptibility, health-seeking behaviours, accessibility and affordability to essential antibiotics, and quality health care and appropriate diagnosis by healthcare providers, resulting in disparities in healthcare access and outcomes. We report on the deliberations from a cross-disciplinary workshop held in Bengaluru, India, focusing on the Indian context of AMR and its intersections with gender, caste, and climate change—contexts that often apply to the rest of South Asia. The two-day workshop brought together healthcare professionals, public health experts, gender experts, climate experts, researchers, activists, and community members to explore institutional and community-level issues in AMR, gender, caste, and climate change. We also present a conceptual framework to understand how caste-based discrimination influences antibiotic use and AMR in India and other South Asian countries. Finally, we discuss the key recommendations highlighted by the experts to address the gender and caste blind spots in existing data collection methods, surveillance, and policy measures related to AMR.

Philosophical insults such as “postmodernist,” “relativist,” and “nihilist” have become common in public discourse, used to dismiss targets as unresponsive to reason, evidence, and principle. Our reasons and beliefs, these insults suggest, are so obviously correct that anyone who denies them must be perverse or insane. But insisting on the righteousness and certainty of our own beliefs and preferences distracts us from actually trying to justify them to one another in terms which might be understood and respected. Terms like “postmodernist” and “relativist” add nothing of value to everyday practices of persuasion and justification; for practical purposes, they are merely hifalutin terms of abuse. Such insults build habits of “turning away from” rather than “turning toward” vexing interlocutors—and incentivize them to “turn away from” us. Denigrating opponents as unreasonable amounts to giving up on persuasion and negotiation, leaving as options only uneasy coexistence or outright conflict. Even in instances of conflict, we will always do better to explain our own reasons and to understand our opponents’, rather than writing opponents off as unreasonable or irrational.

Fungi offer a striking way to rethink the legal foundations of the Rights of Nature (RoN) movement. While RoN seeks to recognize nature as a rights-bearing subject rather than an object of human use, its legal and philosophical frameworks often remain shaped by human-centered models of subjecthood, embedded in arboreal metaphors of trees and forests. This article argues that these arboreal metaphors reproduce stable identities and hierarchical relations, while fungi foreground interdependence, relationality, and distributed agency that unsettle conventional assumptions about legal subjects. Drawing on key RoN cases and debates in philosophy and legal theory, we show how thinking with fungi helps unbind the subject of law by challenging models of subjectivity that stabilize identities, reinforce hierarchy, and project human exceptionalism onto nature.

This essay examines how advanced ovarian cancer is represented in two American texts written by scholarly women: Susan Gubar’s Memoir of a Debulked Woman (2012) and Margaret Edson’s play Wit (1995). It asks how autobiography and drama, two distinct narrative modes, articulate bodily vulnerability, medical authority, and the politics of care in the contemporary hospital. Drawing on pathography studies, autothanatography, and the critical medical humanities, the essay argues that reading these works together reveals how illness is not merely a biological event, but an experience shaped by gendered assumptions, institutional power, linguistic hierarchies, and national welfare structures. The first part analyzes how both texts stage anger, fear of death, and the erosion of intellectual mastery. The second part situates these representations within the framework of the critical medical humanities, examining dehumanizing research protocols, the medical gaze, failures of communication, end-of-life ethics, employment precarity, and the gendered construction of ovarian cancer. Ultimately, the essay contends that these pathographies expose the systemic failures of contemporary ovarian cancer treatment while reclaiming the ill female body as a speaking, interpretive subject. By placing memoir and drama in dialogue, the article demonstrates how literary form itself becomes a site of resistance against biomedical reductionism.

Self-immolation has emerged as one of the most powerful forms of political protest in the age of media, capable of moving people across vast distances into collective action. In 2024, Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty US Air Force serviceman, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest against the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. This essay reads Bushnell’s self-immolation as an act of resistance to US governmentality by using the disciplinary choreography of the American soldier against itself. The essay describes how Bushnell stages a disassembling of the American soldier to reveal an entanglement between the reproduction of the American way of life and the production of Palestinian death in Gaza. Further, the essay argues that Bushnell’s act does not simply protest the genocide in Gaza but performs what I call the ungovernable aesthetics of dying: an immanent, embodied critique of an apparatus of governance that normalizes genocide as a means of managing its possible resistance. Gaza, then, becomes a lens through which the structure of American biopolitical governance becomes inescapably legible. When Bushnell burns the soldier’s body, he transforms it into an exothermic process and, in doing so, releases an affective force that moves people across distances, producing a collective refusal of the American way of life.

Pathographies of cancer illuminate what biomedical discourse overlooks. Minoritized scholars illustrate how bodies and knowledges at the margins are both cared for and silenced. As a gay academic who came of age during the AIDS epidemic and now lives with Stage 4 metastatic cancer, I write from oncology’s “dirty margins”: outside cure and within institutions where marginality has long shaped my labor and leadership. I examine how sexuality, pleasure, and ambiguous grieving intersect with advanced cancer, and how these embodied knowledges can queer and crip the clinic. By foregrounding erotic life, loss, and resilience in an autopathography, my narrative praises exemplary care while critiquing medicine’s discomfort with ambiguity. Methodologically, I draw on autobiographical reflection informed by queer theory, poststructuralist feminism, and crip theory to explore three sites: the erotic body as an archive of vitality and ambiguous loss; insider–outsider tensions across academy and clinic; and a shift from seeking positional authority to being—servant leadership and pedagogical legacy. In this minoritized pathography, I explore tensions between gratitude and critique as a generative queer gesture. Offering praise while unsettling biomedical silences queers the binary of “good” versus “bad” care. For biomedicine, this entails greater tolerance of ambiguity and integration of sexuality and grieving into care; for the humanities, recognition of embodied, erotic, minoritized knowledges as central to reimagining illness and work. Ultimately, such narratives transform suffering into meaning, legacy, and pedagogy—acts of queer resistance that teach how to live and die with authenticity and love.

Between 2023 and 2024, the Anchor Church Heritage Project brought together a multidisciplinary team to conserve and revitalise Anchor Church, a medieval hermitage, Victorian retreat, and modern cultural landmark. Fostering collaboration between specialists and non-specialists, this project provided diverse community-engagement opportunities for undergraduate students from the University of Leicester as volunteer heritage researchers. Through their research, blog writing, and the development of interpretive signage, the students were able to uncover the story of Anchor Church and create resources to engage a broader public audience. The project ultimately fulfilled its aims to raise local awareness of Anchor Church, reduce vandalism, encourage public involvement in conservation efforts, and provide “real world” experience for students beyond the classroom. This case study in collaboration highlights the mutual benefits of projects which unite student volunteers and heritage professionals with coinciding goals of improved conservation, enhanced cultural value, and outreach. Demonstrating how community engagement, education, and interpretation can address and reduce instances of vandalism at rural heritage sites, the paper illustrates the value of initiatives which integrate education with conservation to achieve tangible outcomes, serving as a model for future collaborations between student volunteers and the heritage sector.

Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) remains central to the New Negro literature with its unique focus on its biracial protagonist, Helga Crane, and her search for belonging. However, the novel presents a unique critical voice in understanding performance of the New Negro Renaissance. Be it the Copenhagen vaudeville stage, the Harlem storefront church, or the Black Southern college lecture hall, each location marks a specific racial performance that disturbs Helga’s sense of self. It is Helga, reporting across the diaspora, that brings our attention to the difficulties of the cosmopolitan New Negro to pull away from the figurations of the old.