Histories of environment and histories of technology have moved in exciting, interdisciplinary directions in recent years, with increasing recognition that both environments and technologies are made and remade, gaining meaning only in specific historical settings. With historical scholarship weighted towards examples from the North Atlantic world, this volume provides a collection of grounded case studies from across the modern world that interrogate the relationship between environment and technology in developmental practices and discourses. Development projects have often involved assumptions that humans can create and wield technology to harness, improve or protect the non-human environment. This volume will not simply discredit these assumptions by revealing their nefarious effects on our society and planet, but instead historicise them by locating them within specific power structures and epistemologies. The connections and conversations between dispersed cases raised here point us to more nuanced conclusions about the causes and effects, the objects and subjects of history, in this dynamic interaction between environment, technology, and development.

The identification and development of talent have long been a central target of policy making in various domains, including education, sports, the arts and business. Given the importance of talent for success in a competitive global market, governments and businesses across the globe continually devise strategic policies to identify, attract and preserve both national and international talent. Most of these talent-related practices and policies (implicitly) assume that a person's talent is predetermined and fixed, that it is readily identifiable and that effective talent development requires early identification and specific, targeted training. However, these assumptions are problematically unsupported by recent empirical and conceptual scientific research. Instead, the research shows that talent development is dynamic and context-dependent, and that early identification is an unreliable predictor of future performance. We outline the conceptual ambiguity and empirical flaws involved in current talent-related practices and propose three specific solutions to improve policy.

Terrestrial run-off is increasing in temperate lakes due to climate change and can lead to loading of colored dissolved organic matter (cDOM) and nutrients, thus reducing light availability and increasing carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Run-off events are highly irregular, resulting in temporal resource variability that may determine the energy flow in planktonic communities. To understand the effects of run-off variability on natural plankton communities, we conducted a mesocosm experiment at SITES AquaNet in Lake Erken, Sweden. Treated mesocosms received equal total amount of cDOM and nutrients but at different frequencies and magnitudes (Daily, Intermittent, Extreme), while keeping an untreated Control. Here, we performed three surrogate prey incubation experiments with fluorescently labeled bacteria in the mesocosms to study the trophic strategies of nanoflagellates under the run-off scenarios. Our results show that phototrophic nanoflagellates increased under Daily and Intermittent additions of cDOM and nutrients at early stages but declined thereafter, likely due to light limitation and grazing by rotifers. Heterotrophic nanoflagellate biovolume was highest in the beginning, while the grazing rate on bacteria was highest in the middle of the experiment when bacterial abundance was highest. The mixotrophic nanoflagellate abundance was generally low and unaffected by the treatments, despite high bacterial densities and reduced light, while the highest abundance was found in the Control. The overall development of nanoflagellates was modulated by microzooplankton grazing pressure over time. Our study contributes to better understanding the influence of future global change, including variable terrestrial run-off scenarios, on food-web interactions considering both bottom-up and top-down processes.

One of the key sites for understanding the scale of the mobility and intercultural contact between continental Europe (Poland and northern Germany) and Jutland and southern Scandinavia (including Öland and Gotland) in the Iron Age is the previously unpublished cemetery at Store Frigård on Bornholm. The 1256 graves, dating from the early pre-Roman Iron Age to the late Roman period (500 BC–AD 400), make Store Frigård the largest and longest-functioning cemetery on Bornholm and in the entire Baltic area. In the graves were recorded at least 650 metal finds (ornaments and parts of clothing, tools and weaponry). As an example of trans-regional contacts, the paper analyzes iron brooches with a long true spring and a large, cast bronze ornament on the bow, Kostrzewski type K brooches, the so-called ‘Scandinavian belts’ and, as a local pattern, brooches type Slusegård 7c. The presence of cross-regional clothing ele¬ments can be interpreted as an indication of the diffusion of cultural patterns, exchange and/or trade, and the mobility of people (including artisans), as well as long- or short-dis¬tance exogamy and alliance building. All such contacts had to be undertaken by sea. The positioning of Bornholm in the Baltic meant that it could be used as a starting point or as a ‘pit-stop’ for longer cruises. The problem is that there are no remaining boats or ships from the younger pre-Roman and early Roman periods, but maritime attempts to reconstruct a much earlier boat from Hjorstpiring have shown that it could have made even longer cruises. With a boat paddled by a well-trained crew, it was possible to cover a distance of between 40 and 55 nm in a long day depending on weather conditions. This would easily have allowed a crew to cover the distance between the Swedish coast (Schonen) and Bornholm, which is only 20 nm, where the distance is shortest. A much longer journey (56 nm), but also possible, would be the route from Nexø to Mielno or Kołobrzeg in central Pomerania, Poland. The route from Gotland to Bornholm, despite the much longer distance (about 160 nm in a direct line), also seems quite feasible. In this case, the easiest way would be to sail to Öland and then stick to the Öland coast and then Sweden. Such a voyage, however, would require much more time and, above all, crew effort, and numerous pit-stops would be needed. This route is reflected in archaeological materials, for example, in the Scandinavian belt fittings discussed here. A direct trip from Gotland to the Gulf of Gdańsk would be much more difficult. The problem here is the long distance, some 160 nm, and the lack of stopping facilities along the way. Perhaps imports from Gotland made their way to the Vistula estuary region by a circuitous route, via the “reloading station” at Bornholm. However, Scandinavian or Baltic imports from the younger Pre-Roman period are accumulated almost exclusively in the lower Vistula region, and there are only few traces, if any, in Central Pomerania. The direct route from Bornholm to the Gulf of Gdańsk is longer, about 170 nm, and just as difficult, unless the captain chooses to sail to Central Pomerania in one jump, and then all the way along the coast. Such voyages were most likely to have taken place in summer due to better weather conditions, milder waves and greater visibility of the sky and destination, allowing for better navigation. The relatively small amount of goods that could be taken in a fairly small paddled boats indicates that the mobility had other, more personalised reasons than a regular, profit-oriented trade with a strictly commercial function.

This article examines the lessons that the European Union’s Eastern Enlargement and the rural transitions it encouraged in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) hold for an enlarging EU and for Ukraine. Rural development policies in CEE were marked by institutional monocropping and a depoliticized approach to market building. Over two decades later, the EU has adopted a similar approach towards Ukraine but demands more market liberalization from Ukraine before accession than it did from CEE states. At the same time, unlike most CEE countries prior to accession, Ukraine pursues a more protectionist developmental path that directly challenges EU strategies. This divergence questions the adaptability of current EU rural developmental models to post-war Ukraine. The article updates expectations on the impact of Ukraine's EU membership on the Common Agricultural Policy and contributes to the literature on the political economy of EU accessions, the effects of EU Enlargement on Ukraine, and the adaptability of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy.

The financialisation of US rental real estate has accelerated since 2008, facilitated by state intervention at multiple levels. The corporate consolidation of rental housing and the profit-maximising practices pursued by corporate landlords have exacerbated pressures on tenants in the already hypercommodified housing sector. In response, some tenants have launched ‘multibuilding campaigns’ that exploit emerging oligopolies by harnessing collective power across buildings owned by the same corporate entity to force concessions and legislative change. Drawing on fieldwork carried out over 2022 and 2023, this article explores the potential of multibuilding organising through the Veritas Tenants Association’s rent debt strike against San Francisco’s largest landlord Veritas Investments, Inc., and the K3 Tenant Council’s campaign against K3 Holdings in Los Angeles. These struggles illustrate how the corporate landlord structure enables multibuilding organising – an ‘upward scale shift’ in both organising and tactics that shows potential to increase tenant leverage in the context of rental housing and state financialisation. They also demonstrate that, given the increasing entanglements between the state and financial markets, tenants are more likely to transform the terms and conditions of their housing through multibuilding organising than through reliance on the state as an intermediary. The article sheds light on how different levels of government simultaneously facilitate and internalise financialisation while introducing tactical and organising interventions to the burgeoning literature on corporate landlord contestation that suggest transformative potential.

The authors investigate the role of employee voice in corporate governance for corporate environmental impact. This issue is important given the potentially serious employment implications for corporations seeking to transition to lower carbon economic activity and the urgency of moving toward a carbon neutral economy. Using secondary and interview data from Germany, the authors use Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to demonstrate that strong employee voice in corporate governance is a key factor in reducing the environmental impact of corporations. The authors also illustrate distinct strategies by which labor representatives at the company level enact institutionally granted power resources for environmental issues. This work contributes to academic debates on labor and the natural environment literature. In particular, it highlights that, alongside unions, labor representatives at the company level constitute an important source of employee voice for environmental transformation.

The Covid-19 pandemic created a dual crisis for civil society organizations (CSOs): heightened demand for social support alongside restrictions that limited their capacity to mobilize people. This study investigates how volunteer-based CSOs fostered civic engagement amid these constraints, providing new empirical insights into their capabilities and limitations during times of crisis. Bridging research on both the demand and supply sides of civic engagement, we draw on three original studies – a comprehensive survey of CSOs, a large-scale population survey, and a survey experiment – to map responses to the crisis at both the individual and organizational levels. Our findings reveal persistent social inequalities in volunteering and mutual support, with CSOs primarily engaging men, highly educated individuals, affluent citizens, and those already active in organizations. Despite these pre-existing inequalities, CSO outreach significantly boosted engagement, particularly in more formal settings. This study contributes to ongoing debates about the role and transformation of civil society during periods of crisis, highlighting the challenges and opportunities that CSOs encountered as they navigated the pandemic.

This paper investigates how two politicized issues – migration and climate change – mobilize citizens across European countries. Building on the concept of issue-specific mobilization potentials, we examine citizens’ willingness to support petitions related to the two issues using an original behavioral measure embedded in the 2024 European Parliament Election Study. We document variation in political engagement and examine how opposing stances on issues owned by the left or the right mobilize citizens, how citizens’ agreement with issue positions affects support, and whether grievances, participation cultures, politicization levels, and the ideology of the national government can explain national-level variation. Our results indicate substantial variation in petition support across countries and issues, with the right-wing petition on migration attracting the most support. However, our country-level measures do not explain this variation well. Overall, our findings highlight the need for more nuanced, issue-specific approaches to understanding cross-national patterns of political participation.

In this article, I argue for an ethnographic engagement with trans-exclusionary feminism. Using my fieldwork in a gender-critical collective in the United Kingdom as an example, I show how feminist anthropology can give insights into the motivations and emotional trajectories of gender-critical feminists. By contextualizing the highly affective emic notion of female solidarity, I show how feelings mobilize the trans-exclusionary view that womanhood can only ever exist for cis women. I argue that it is a responsibility of feminist anthropology to contribute to knowledge that can be useful in disputing exclusionary feminisms. Taking this research as a case in point, I believe that this is done most effectively through an intentional ethnographic engagement with proponents of exclusionary feminist politics.

This study provides empirical evidence that key audit matters (KAMs) are informative for future negative accounting outcomes. We employ FinBERT—a deep learning model designed for natural language processing that allows human-like text comprehension—to demonstrate that goodwill-related KAMs are predictive of firms' future impairments. Our findings reveal that utilizing KAMs as a stand-alone predictor for future impairments provides meaningful predictive power. By exploring the semantic content of reported KAMs, we find that their predictive power is primarily driven by text passages covering how both the firm and the auditor exercise judgment in the accounting and auditing of goodwill. Furthermore, we show that KAMs are incrementally predictive beyond several firm-level determinants and disclosures in annual reports. Finally, our additional analyses indicate that (1) KAM-predicted impairment probabilities are relevant to capital markets, (2) KAMs are useful for predicting the magnitude of goodwill impairments, and (3) the predictive power extends to other KAM topics. Collectively, our findings enhance the understanding of the informational content of KAMs, which is a key rationale for their introduction.

The tribe Cunonieae comprises five genera and 214 species of shrubs and trees currently distributed in the Southern Hemisphere and the tropics, exhibiting an amphi-Pacific disjunct distribution shared with Araucariaceae, Myrtaceae, Nothofagaceae, Podocarpaceae, and Proteaceae, among others. To address the central question of how historical geological forces have shaped the distribution of plant diversity in the southern hemisphere, we aimed to provide evidence from the biogeographical history of Cunonieae. We generated the most densely sampled phylogenetic trees of Cunonieae available to date, with 121 samples and 81 species, based on 404 new sequences of plastid and nuclear DNA regions with high hierarchical phylogenetic signal (matK, trnL-F, rpl16, and internal transcribed spacer (ITS)). We included 184 samples of Rosids to estimate divergence times using fossil calibration points. For biogeographic inference, we employed a time-stratified model including fossils as tips. Cunonia and Pterophylla were paraphyletic in the ITS tree, and Cunonia was paraphyletic in the plastid tree. Pancheria, Vesselowskya, and Weinmannia were monophyletic, the latter with conflicting nuclear and plastid phylogenies. The crown group Cunonieae was dated at ~56 Ma, and its ancestral areas were Antarctica and Patagonia. Antarctica acted as a bridge between Australia and South America before the consolidation of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and the extinction of the lineage in Antarctica from the Oligocene to the Miocene. Following that, Cunonieae spread to lower latitudes via Zealandia/Oceania and Patagonia/South America. Geological changes during the Pliocene facilitated a further burst in diversification along the Andes, in Madagascar, and in New Caledonia, where at least three colonization events occurred.

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), introduced as the EU’s main macro-financial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, is an off-balance-sheet fiscal agency (OBFA) that has been hailed as Europe’s Hamiltonian moment and raised great expectations for future fiscal integration. Building on the emerging Critical Macro-Finance literature, we scrutinise both the RRF and the debt instruments it issues. We find that its innovative legal construction yielded ‘Schrödinger’s OBFA’: The RRF has an ‘institutional ambiguity’ which places it simultaneously on and off the EU budget to mitigate the EU fiscal rules. Moreover, as it lacks ‘immortality’ due to its exceptional and temporary nature, it is alive and already dead from a financial market perspective. As Schrödinger’s OBFA, the RRF’s institutional status places inherent limitations on the EU’s ongoing process of incremental fiscal integration and makes it incapable of issuing securities that could assume the status of European safe assets.

Background

Impingement of spinous processes (SPs) is commonly diagnosed in the equine athlete. For diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, local injections are performed at the level of the space between adjacent spinous processes in affected horses.

Objectives

To assess the accuracy of different techniques for the local injection of the interspinal space in the equine thoracolumbar spine.

Study Design

Ex vivo experimental study.

Methods

Equine thoracolumbar spine specimens were used to compare three techniques for needle insertion (midline; bilateral abaxial; unilateral oblique), two needles (20G—1½″; 20G—3½″) and two volumes (5 mL; 20 mL) for local injection of the interspinal space. Additionally, needle insertion based on radiographic, ultrasonographic guidance, or palpation was assessed. Computed tomographic analysis and anatomical dissection were performed to evaluate the distribution of the injected volume.

Results

The most accurate injection of the interspinous ligament was achieved when the midline injection method using a 20G—1½″ short needle and a volume of 5 mL was used. Wide distribution of the injected volume was observed when the bilateral abaxial injection technique was utilised. The unilateral oblique injection technique led to significantly asymmetrical unilateral distribution of the injectate. Radiographic guidance did not increase the accuracy of the injection.

Conclusion

The midline injection method is the most reliable technique for the targeted injection of the thoracolumbar interspinal space.

The concept ‘cultural racism’ is influential in scholarship on East–West mobilities in Europe. Balibar coined this term by observing that an essentialisation of ‘cultural difference’ has replaced the ‘biologist focus’ of historical racism. A neat separation between the role of ‘biology’ in history and of ‘culture’ in the present, however, insufficiently grasps how both feature within repertoires of racialisation. Here, we examine this for the racialisation as ‘Eastern European’ in Germany – including by looking at its histories, contemporary trajectories and material effects. Drawing on qualitative research, we trace how ‘Eastern Europeanness’ is produced in two employment sites – elder care and sex work – in which women from Europe's East often work. We find that shifting attributions of bodily and valued-based difference or proximity are mobilised in imaginaries of ‘Eastern Europeans’ in these sectors. These ambiguities constitute a key continuity in the gendered racialisation as ‘Eastern European’, which sustains the extraction of cheap social reproductive labour over generations. This racialisation also has material effects: working in these professions takes a toll on the worker’s physical and mental health. On this basis, we propose a research agenda that thinks racialisation not only from its dichotomies but also from its ambiguities.

This article critiques debates in International Relations (IR) on revisionism and contestation of ‘international order’. It argues that these are overfocused on a binary view of ‘revisionism’ and ‘status quo’ and shows how ‘contestation’ takes place within ‘status quo’ states discursively. To this end, it uses the case of Japanese party-political discourses on ‘Ukraine’ and ‘international order’. Conducting a discourse analysis of election manifestos from 2022, it shows how the Japanese parties seldom reproduce the internationally widespread story of the international order being under threat in Ukraine, instead connecting ‘Ukraine’ and ‘international order’ to issues of significance in domestic Japanese politics, such as remilitarisation and opposition to nuclear weapons. This constitutes an example of how the latter is discursively contested by the former even in what has been called a ‘status quo’ state. Moreover, these are ways that do not conform to those commonly associated with ‘revisionist’ states and actors.

Do populist politicians use simpler language to get closer to ‘ordinary’ citizens? Current studies – both qualitative and quantitative – are divided on whether populist actors actually use simpler language. Analysing a large corpus of text of German parliamentary debates from January 1991 to September 2021, this article aims to resolve this controversy by measuring language complexity in parliamentary discourse. The article hypothesizes that populist actors use simpler language, following their ideal of a simplified world between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The analysis, however, positively refutes that, and instead shows that right-wing populist actors use the most complex language. Left-wing populists seem to use somewhat average language complexity. At the same time, the study finds that language complexity decreased significantly in the German parliament over time. Additionally, this article shows that language complexity is context-specific and people-dependent. As such, this article also discusses simple language as a tool for substantive and surrogate representation.

Authoritarian states are intensifying bloc-building efforts. While the authoritarian regionalism literature suggests that membership in these “clubs of autocrats” can bolster domestic support for authoritarian leaders, such external recognition can also pose challenges, especially when aligning with “toxic” authoritarian partners. We argue that authoritarian regimes attempt to solve this problem by crafting strategic narratives and communicating them through regime-loyal media to the general public. The study examines strategic narratives of bloc building used by Russia and China in the first year after the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022. Using “text-as-data” methods and qualitative analysis, we find important similarities and differences in the narratives of these two countries. Both use narratives highly critical of the United States and NATO. However, while Russia has crafted a “fortress narrative” that focuses on external threats and non-Western resilience, China promotes a “bridge narrative,” advocating for spanning geopolitical gaps and championing global integration. Both narrative strategies converge in their criticism of shared adversaries but diverge in their portrayals of the blocs they lead.

Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird ein standardisierter Fragebogen zur Erfassung kooperativer Lernprozesse in (Hoch-)Schulen präsentiert, der unter Bezugnahme auf bisherige Erkenntnisse gruppenbezogene Lernprozesse in der Selbsteinschätzung von Lernern multidimensional abbildet. Die Prozesse wurden im Hinblick auf kognitive, metakognitive und sozial-relationale Gruppenaktivitäten erfasst. Nach Pilotierungsstudien wurde der Fragebogen mit insgesamt 30 Items im Rahmen eines kooperativen Lernsettings in Universitätsseminaren eingesetzt. Die durchgeführte kooperative Lernphase wurde von den Studenten ( N = 333 in 114 Gruppen) entlang der genannten Dimensionen bewertet. Darüber hinaus wurden der Lerngewinn und die Zufriedenheit sowie die Fähigkeit zur Perspektivenübernahme in der Selbsteinschätzung erfasst. Die Ergebnisse der faktorenanalytischen Validierung zeigen, dass auf Individualebene zwischen den unterschiedlichen Dimensionen differenziert werden kann; auf Gruppenebene gelingt dies nur mit Einschränkungen. Dass Zusammenhänge mit der Perspektivenübernahme sowie dem Lernzuwachs und der Zufriedenheit aufgezeigt werden können, verweist auf die weitere Konstrukt- und Kriteriumsvalidität. Dennoch müssen bei der Interpretation einige Limitationen berücksichtigt werden.

A recently discovered source for infection of slaughter pigs, and thus entry for bacteria into the food chain, is the installed drinking equipment in lairage pens of pig abattoirs. To mitigate this, nano-coating of stainless steel, currently used in human medicine fields as well as in other parts of the food chain, appears as promising technology. In this study, silicon dioxide nano-coating was applied to six drinkers and installed for one and three months in a lairage of a pig abattoir, while results were compared with those of drinkers that had not been nano-coated. Laboratory examination of eight sample types related to the drinkers was conducted for total aerobic plate count, Enterobacteriaceae count, Pseudomonas spp. count, Salmonella presence, pathogenic Yersinia enterocolitica presence, Listeria monocytogenes presence and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus presence. The nipple drinker, which the pigs take into their mouth for drinking, was then examined using scanning electron microscopy and elemental analysis. The nano-coating did not produce statistically significant reductions in the loads or presence of these bacteria compared to the same but uncoated drinking equipment used under the same conditions. Further studies should focus on the implementation of combined methods, such as nano-coating and sanitary treatment, as well as modifications to the coating itself, to produce meaningful reductions of the bacterial loads on/in abattoir lairage drinking equipment.