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.

In April 2026, Capcom’s Pragmata became a surprise commercial success. This game is a science-fiction video game about a lunar research facility, a rogue artificial intelligence, and a revolutionary 3D-printing technology capable of ending material scarcity. This essay reads Pragmata through the lens of economic justice, drawing on John Rawls’s account of fair equality of opportunity to argue that the game’s central conflict turns less on who owns the goods a transformative technology produces than on who is permitted access to the technology itself. Situating Pragmata within recent scholarship on video games, economic justice, and institutional power, the essay traces how the game’s plot, its central human–android relationship, and its own commercial success within a highly consolidated games industry together dramatize a live question in 2026: who will control the next transformative general-purpose technology, and on what terms. The essay argues that the game’s doubled position, as both a critique of monopolised innovation and a product of one, is not a contradiction to be resolved but the most honest thing it has to say.

The language of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly omnipresent in human discourse. Many point out that a growing reliance on AI for communication is intellectually and socially deleterious, but its consequences for our moral lives and identities are even deeper than those that contemporary critique is sometimes capable of recognizing. To illuminate these consequences, I turn to the Roman orator, philosopher, and statesman Cicero, whose rhetorical and ethical theory of decorum shows how, by diminishing our eloquence, AI also diminishes our virtue at a time when rhetoric has become increasingly suspect as inimical to civic virtue and civility itself.

From the pyramids of Egypt to the Titanic, LEGO® produces intricate representations of the past for its adult fans. Despite their popularity, these LEGO® sets have gone unnoticed by scholars of public history. This article proposes that LEGO® for adults is a distinct genre of public history. It analyses the 2025 set “The Evolution of STEM,” which “legofies” various moments in the history of STEM, including three historic scientists: George Washington Carver (1864–1943), Isaac Newton (1643–1727), and Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934). I argue that the legofication of the past offers a distinct form of participatory history infused with playfulness and nostalgia, in which consumers literally construct the past. However, legofying the past also entails simplifying complex historical realities into easily consumable and celebratory narratives. This produces a form of micro-commemoration in which consumers buy, build, and display LEGO® monuments in their homes, while also participating in the contestation and co-creation of historical meaning in public.

At a moment when immigration in Canada is framed through targets, housing pressures, labour shortages, and social capacity, this article argues that public humanities can reframe immigration as a question of civic memory. Immigrant Memories of Brantford, a public history initiative launched in 2019, brings together heritage organizations, university researchers, theatre practitioners, and community members to recover and interpret the immigrant and racialized histories of Brantford, Ontario, through museum exhibitions, oral history, theatre, walking tours, and public programming. Brantford’s public identity has long centred on manufacturing achievement while the immigrant workers, families, businesses, churches, and mutual-aid networks that built industrial urban life have remained largely outside the public story. This article frames the project as participatory civic memory work: a public humanities practice that decentralizes historical authority and turns objects, places, and performances into public arguments. It also theorizes civic memory as the collective stories a city tells about who built it and who belongs in it, stories that shape belonging for newcomers today. Immigration is not only a policy issue; it is also a struggle over public memory and belonging.

This article examines the two rationales most frequently invoked in the defense of the humanities: the practical skills they teach (preparing graduates for a wide range of jobs), and the civic-mindedness they instill (preparing students for active and responsible citizenship). As desirable as these aims may be, the article juxtaposes them with a more viable account of what the humanities accomplish suggested by Stefan Collini. It describes what the humanities do as an open-ended process of understanding instances of human meaning-making that affords a kind of gratification that cannot be quantified. Arguably, this redescription will not fix the institutional challenges faced by today’s academic humanities. It does point the way, however, to a more promising, less defensive future, in the form of public humanities, countering the diminished status of the scholarly-academic humanities by expanding into new venues and engaging with new publics.

In August 2026, Beijing hosted the second World Humanoid Robot Games, where machines boxed, danced, and tossed arrows into a bronze vessel in a game descended from Confucian ritual. It is a good moment to watch two word-histories collide. “Robot” entered the language in 1920 as the Czech word for forced labor; “human” and “humane” were once a single word that quietly split. We have built machines in the servile image our vocabulary foretold, and in the same decade asked it for tenderness. Drawing on shipment figures, billboard campaigns, empathy research, and the odd afterlife of a Barcelona doll brothel, I argue that companion machines sell intimacy without obligation—and that the humane, unlike the human, is a practice that must be trained.

“Still Valley” is part of an ongoing series of essays and short stories written following my diagnosis with Fahr’s syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disease, with each piece titled after episodes from The Twilight Zone and Red Shoe Diaries. Drawing on disability studies, queer temporality, and affect theory, this essay examines academic precarity as both an institutional and embodied condition. Through reflections on chronic illness, deferred futures, and administrative legibility, the piece explores how contemporary academic life reorganizes one’s relationship to time, stability, and hope. Ultimately, “Still Valley” considers the emotional and physiological consequences of living within institutions that rhetorically celebrate complexity while materially sustaining contingency and exhaustion.

Two recent Malayalam films, 19(1)(a) (2022) and Private (2025), ask a question that has become urgent in post-2014 India: not “can a writer speak?” but “who will keep the text alive once the writer has been silenced?” Both films turn on the same narrative pivot: a politically charged manuscript outlives the assassination of its author and survives through the hands of an ordinary, reluctant custodian. This piece argues that in staging this scenario, the films offer not just a political thriller but a theory of literary survival under conditions of democratised censorship.

The decline of public trust in mainstream journalism has become a defining concern for contemporary democratic politics. Although this trend is frequently attributed to digital misinformation, algorithmic amplification, and the accelerating pace of online communication, these developments alone cannot explain the depth of the present crisis. The problem is also institutional. Legacy news organisations are increasingly perceived as operating within networks of political and corporate influence, making traditional claims of editorial independence less persuasive than before. Under these conditions, assertions of objectivity are often interpreted not merely as professional norms but as institutional practices whose authority has itself become contested. The resulting gap between journalistic self-understanding and public expectations has intensified wider debates over credibility, legitimacy, and the democratic role of the press. This paper reconsiders this crisis through the philosophical resources of classical Cynicism, bringing Diogenes of Sinope into dialogue with Michel Foucault’s account of parrhesia, or fearless truth-telling. Distinguishing Socratic, political, and Cynic forms of parrhesia, it argues that democratic truth-telling derives authority not from institutional position alone but from ethical commitment, personal vulnerability, and the willingness to accept public risk. The discussion also revisits the political economy of legacy media, reassesses prevailing assumptions about whistle-blower motivations, and employs the “Snowden paradox” to clarify the continuing relationship between individual truth-tellers and institutional mediation. It further examines the problem of “bad parrhesia,” where algorithmically rewarded outrage appropriates the appearance of fearless speech while weakening democratic deliberation.

Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), established to preserve and promote interdisciplinary research on traditional knowledge, have been increasingly discussed in relation to diversity, nationalism, and the integration of traditional knowledge with modern science. A recent article in this journal argues that IKS exhibits a Vedic Hindu-centric bias, marginalizing various knowledge traditions and fostering pseudoscience. This article discusses IKS from historical, demographic, institutional, and research perspectives, focusing on its origins, civilizational diversity, early studies of traditional knowledge, and funded projects. We observed that traditional knowledge research in India predated IKS, with support from multiple agencies. However, IKS, under a single institutional structure, provides a more structured ecosystem aimed at greater visibility, coordinated funding, innovation, and scientific validation. Such scholarship demonstrates the inherent plurality of the Indian civilization, which established a continuum of orthodox and heterodox philosophical schools, Buddhist and Jain systems, Islamic scholarship, indigenous communities, and regional practices. In our analysis of 102 IKS-funded projects, nearly 50 percent of the projects were aimed at scientific validation across health-related sciences (19.61%), agriculture and sustainability (14.71%), and materials science, metallurgy, and heritage engineering (13.73%). These priorities are aligned with contemporary national and global research agendas, including One Health, preventive healthcare, climate resilience, and digital technologies.

This essay explores the ethical stakes of hospitality through an unexpected pairing: the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida and the riverbank encounters in the classic children’s novel The Wind in the Willows. Levinas’s account of the face of the Other and Derrida’s reflections on unconditional hospitality illuminate the risks, demands, and vulnerabilities inherent in welcoming the stranger. Read alongside these thinkers, Ratty and Mole’s unfolding friendship becomes a parable of ethical openness that resists calculation, merit, and control. Their encounters reveal how hospitality is continually tested by fear and disruption, yet remains an imperative that unsettles the reasons for exclusion wrought by the social and political forces that shape our world. In an age marked by displacement and contested borders, this literary-philosophical dialogue invites us to imagine forms of welcome grounded not in worthiness, but in responsibility.

This piece critically meditates on the Super Bowl LX halftime show staged by Bad Bunny, aka Benito, and reads it alongside the 2025 Holberg Prize acceptance speech of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, aka Gayatri-di, with respect to the spatial politics of privilege. I read Benito’s fall from the roof of la casita to its ground floor with Gayatri-di’s descent from her apartment to the streets of New York City as an example of homelanding, wherein contact with, rather than xenophobic rejection of, strangers is a necessary prerequisite. I conclude by critically interrogating the exclusionary rhetoric around people singing in Spanish on the streets—whether onstage at Benito’s halftime show or on the streets in Gayatri-di’s neighbourhood.

Debates about toxic masculinity often become trapped within a false dichotomy where masculinity is either under attack or inherently harmful. This article challenges that binary by reflecting on one of popular culture’s most exaggerated masculine icons, He-Man. Across toys, cartoons, and later sequel series, Masters of the Universe repeatedly offers masculinity as a spectrum, staging a connection between strength and emotional vulnerability. Reading the franchise through its commercial origins, moral lessons, father-son relationships, and images of uncontrolled male rage, I argue that He-Man offers an unexpectedly useful model for thinking about masculinity. “He who holds the power is the master of the universe.” The central question concerns how that power is defined and exercised: through brute strength, or through empathy and understanding. The franchise’s significance lies in demonstrating how children’s media teaches boys to claim agency and exercise authority responsibly.

In 2025, unprecedented disruptions to federal cultural funding exposed longstanding structural vulnerabilities within the public humanities. This article examines how some state humanities councils—key institutions connecting national resources to local communities—are navigating this instability. Drawing on original interviews with executive directors from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Minnesota Humanities Center, and Connecticut Humanities, the essay identifies two distinct but complementary models of sustainability: an entrepreneurial model, in which organizations generate new revenue through mission-driven innovation, and a coalition model, in which broad-based alliances secure public funding through policy mechanisms such as state tax initiatives. While each model offers a viable pathway, neither fully addresses the fragmentation of support across the field. The article argues that federal funds, which make up the largest share of unrestricted operating support for councils, are fundamental to generating additional streams of revenue. The gap in private-sector engagement and the potential for developing structural interventions to align corporate and philanthropic investments at scale are also identified. Together, these approaches offer considerations for building a more resilient and integrated humanities funding ecosystem.

Black studies emerged in the late 1960s from student-led activism demanding the inclusion of African American history, culture, and intellectual traditions within higher education. Initially rooted in struggles for racial justice, the field has developed into a dynamic, interdisciplinary discipline that draws from Black feminism, history, literature, sociology, psychology, the arts, and religious studies to examine Black life and thought. This article traces the historical origins of Black studies and highlights its commitment to interrogating systems of oppression while affirming cultural agency and resilience. Today, Black studies remains vibrant but faces significant challenges. Many programs have expanded to include African diaspora and global perspectives, responding to issues such as systemic racism, migration, and transnational activism. At the same time, departments often struggle with limited funding, institutional marginalization, and pressures to justify their relevance amid shifting educational priorities. The rise of digital scholarship and social media has opened new opportunities for research and community engagement, yet these advances also demand resources and adaptability. Despite these obstacles, Black studies continues to serve as a transformative space for critical inquiry and social change, fostering dialogue that connects academic study to real-world struggles for justice and equity.

This article considers the ongoing culture wars in American higher education as an occasion to think about the durability of xenophobic worldviews. Straining against the notion that right-wing politics is fueled primarily by the resentments of those left behind by decades of inequality under neoliberalism, it suggests that xenophobia derives its durability from philosophical commitments that materialist and culturalist analyses fail to fully understand. It draws out the implications of taking such commitments seriously through an interpretation of US Vice President J. D. Vance’s narrative of his conversion to Catholicism.

In this article, I contend that through everyday activities such as chhalla mangna and badhai, hijras, kothis, and multiply marginalized working-class and/or caste-oppressed, transgressively feminine gender-variant people, enact a stigmatized form of “radical dependence.” In contemporary India, radical enactments of dependence are frequently misidentified as “begging” and are conflated with, and criminalized as, “extortion.” However, despite the suspension and criminalization of their economic demands through “begging” bans and “extortion” allegations, multiply marginalized gender-variant people place demands of economic justice on the public in India that are redistributive and reparative in nature. I observe that by flouting social mores of “civility” and “decency,” hijras, kothis, and multiply marginalized gender-variant people in India enact a socioeconomic strategy that can be named “radical dependence.” “Radical dependence” exposes systemic marginalization, structural oppression, and abandonment and makes it possible to raise demands for distributive and reparative justice in India. This article, apart from naming “radical dependence” as an enacted strategy, also advocates for an end to the misrepresentation and criminalization of “radical dependence” as “extortion” and/or “begging,” as well as the abolition of “begging” bans. It demands economic justice for caste-oppressed and working-class hijras, kothis, and multiply marginalized gender-variant people in India.

We all know someone who will not change their mind, no matter what evidence you show them. This article explains why—and why the problem is structural, not personal. Our minds filter information through a sequence of checkpoints that determines what we accept as true, and when. Once misinformation passes through those gates, correcting it becomes extraordinarily hard. This article maps that filter, names its three key components, and shows how understanding it could transform the way public communicators fight false beliefs. Drawing on linguistics, communication theory, and the social psychology of belief, it offers a cross-disciplinary framework that sits squarely within the humanities’ long engagement with language, persuasion, and the formation of public knowledge. The implications reach beyond academic study: policymakers, educators, journalists, and anyone responsible for communicating in conditions of public uncertainty will find here a practical account of why the usual tools of correction so often fail—and what a better-designed approach would look like. At a moment when the spread of false belief is among the most pressing challenges in public life, the humanities have a distinctive contribution to make—and this framework is an attempt to make it.

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.”