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.

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.

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.

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.

This paper examines how, why, and with what consequences Hindu nationalists have made nari shakti (women’s empowerment) central to their political agenda. I make four arguments, each of which I develop in a separate section of this paper. The first section argues that both secular feminists and Hindu nationalists supported secular civil rights on questions concerning the family historically. Neither one appropriated the other. As I argue in the second part of this paper, both secular feminists and Hindu nationalists have drawn on religious idioms to mobilize women. Feminism appropriated elements of nationalism, which led Hindu nationalists to appropriate feminism. More significant are the consequences: this appropriation benefitted Hindu nationalists at the expense of feminists. The third part of the paper describes state supported nari shakti programs which are the most important instance of Hindu nationalist appropriation and redefinition of women’s empowerment. In section four, I describe a form of women’s activism which resists appropriation and contests ethnic majoritarianism and religious nationalism.

Plants, botanical gardens, and plantations played significant economic and social control roles in British colonial history, establishing monocultures and promoting scientific enquiry. Enslaved Africans, though integral to this system, have been largely erased from the discourse. Assigned marginal lands by British plantations, they cultivated provision grounds known subsequently in Jamaica as kitchen or backyard gardens growing food crops to supplement meagre rations. These spaces fostered food self-sufficiency, community well-being, and anti-colonial resistance. On these grounds, enslaved Africans tended foods brought from Africa, guarded medicinal plant knowledge, and when industrious, grew surpluses to achieve economic independence and escape poverty. Their nutritious, culturally relevant diets contrasted with inadequate plantation rations, now believed to be a contributory factor of non-communicable diseases prevalent in their descendants today. Over centuries, provision grounds evolved into small farms that became mainstays of domestic food production in Jamaica, sowing the roots of food indigeneity. This article traces the growth and economic impact of these grounds, their eventual decline, and their repositioning in Jamaican society. It examines their influence on food security, diets, foodways, health, and livelihoods, arguing that these grounds planted seeds of resilience and harvested hope for later generations.

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 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.

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.

This article provides a narrative review of the inspiration, design and implementation of a Stanford Medical School course titled “From Diagnosis to Dialog: A Doctor’s Real-Time Battle with Cancer.” In 2024, I was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer as a never-smoker. Within a month of diagnosis, I designed a course based on my own case in which each session begins with a personal reflection, followed by a guest speaker or panel discussion and concluding conversation with students. The curriculum addresses medical topics including epidemiology, treatment and the future of cancer care while centering the lived realities of diagnosis, mortality, access to care, nutrition, spiritual care, mental health and caregiving. This pedagogical project foregrounds a first-person pathography that situates the perspectives of Asian patients and physicians within broader conversations about cancer narratives that often remain at the margins of biomedical education. The article highlights several themes emerging from the course related to the Asian experience and Asian health, and concludes with reflections on feedback from students and viewers who engaged with the publicly available YouTube recordings of the course.

While increasing numbers of academics have begun to produce pedagogical materials for asynchronous online use, few institutions offer specific training on how to produce effective online content. Here, two academics from the Open University, the UK’s largest university and a global leader in distance education, offer an accessible overview of how to design and write online courses, drawing on both pedagogical research and their own extensive experience of designing and authoring learning materials in this format. The case study used is a suite of open-access online courses, HeadStart Classical Studies. Among the elements covered in this “how to” guide are: the careful plotting of Learning Outcomes; scaffolding of the learning journey; use of active learning methods; accessibility; and personalised communication with the learner. Along with a compelling “hook” these are all key for establishing and sustaining student engagement. Various examples and tips are offered with a view to providing an insight into the practicalities of course design at the micro- as well as the macro-level. Screenshots and planning documents are shared as illustrations both of the finished product and of the various stages by which courses are developed. The role of evaluation is also discussed.

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.

The impact of nature’s rights on the legal system and in the world depends in part on perceptions of its compatibility with anthropocentric rights. The presumption that the protection of nature’s rights excludes human action has limited its perceived place and usefulness. Siting nature’s rights in cities contests this presumption. To do so, this article puts rights of nature and the human right to the city in conversation. It draws mostly on Ecuador, the only country with both types of rights enshrined in its constitution. While these appear to be very different sets of rights, this article analyzes three points of convergence. The first is the centrality of critiques of an extractivist model of collective life. The second is the insistence on the maintenance of various forms of difference, including different ways of living, which is meant to disrupt the political, economic, and cultural circuits of extractivism. The third is an ambiguous orientation toward established structures of political authority. Based on these convergences, this article argues that rights of nature and the right to the city may help to politicize the production of urban nature and broaden possible socio-environmental futures.

This article explores the use of performance in museum spaces as a way to encourage museum visitors to have embodied and experiential opportunities with exhibitions. Drawing on a South African museum theatre performance case study, called Unwrapped (2025), the notion of embodiment will be explored. The use of performance allows possibilities for participation and tangible interaction with the displayed items encouraging a different encounter with the museum exhibitions, rather than only prioritising sight. Museum theatre, thus, encourages a three-dimensional experience of the museum space, which the digital cannot fully create, by filling the space with multiple bodies all sharing in the present moment as they engage with museum narratives, objects, and new memories.

This essay theorizes the creole garden as a transoceanic literary and cultural form. While the creole garden has been well documented in Atlantic contexts through the work of Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Walker, and Édouard Glissant, its Indian Ocean iterations remain undertheorized. Through a close reading of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s novel The Dragonfly Sea (2019), the essay examines how the garden in the Indian Ocean novel illuminates historically specific configurations of creolization shaped by African, Arab, Asian, and European présences. Bringing together plants, herbs, and flowers from around the Indian Ocean world, the novel’s cemetery garden on Pate Island reframes practices and metaphors of transplantation to focus on woman-centered forms of acclimatization, embodied botanical knowledge, and creative expression. Linking the garden and the book as creative forms, Owuor’s novel performs the same rhizomatic interdependence it depicts, interplanting multilingualism, intertexts, and narrative strategies that sustain the text’s creativity and enact a strategic literary opacity.

This case study presents the early stages of a deep mapping initiative in Charleston, South Carolina (USA). A foundational landscape for exploring the socioeconomic and political structures in the United States from the late 17th century to the present, the evidence for Charleston’s history is held in a variety of repositories, local and state agencies, and information curated by local communities and organizations. This rich resource mosaic creates an environment rich in information but complicated by varying levels of accessibility. The “Spatial History of Charleston” (SHOC) is a long-term mapping initiative that collates historical information about the Charleston area within a spatial and temporal framework. Within this endeavor lie interconnected issues related to scale, access, ownership, agency, and agenda. Employing a community-centered approach, SHOC seeks to navigate concerns about access, agency, ownership, and agenda, establishing a platform that increases access to data about and by communities, thereby democratizing information and facilitating integration and synthesis.

This paper examines Ecuador’s Rights of Nature following the Los Cedros Constitutional Court ruling in 2021. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it explores how legal recognition of ecosystems as rights-bearing subjects intersects with Andean cosmology, conservation governance, extractive pressures, and local livelihoods in cloud forest communities, and how storytelling translates these changes into lived practice. It traces the historical and political context of the case while showing how Ecuador’s landmark environmental and legal achievements are increasingly threatened by authoritarian political reforms. The paper argues that preserving these gains is both a national and global imperative, requiring local and international solidarity to defend the rights of Nature, democratic institutions, and the communities that protect them. It calls for ecological justice grounded in interdependence among human and more-than-human life, emphasizing that the future of Rights of Nature depends not only on constitutional recognition but also on sustained collective action. By situating Los Cedros within broader struggles over democracy, conservation, and extractivism, the paper demonstrates how legal victories remain fragile without continued public engagement, institutional accountability, and transnational support, offering lessons for environmental justice movements confronting similar threats around the world today.