This essay traces the emergence of a linguistically and culturally bifurcated public literary-cultural sphere in Sri Lanka from the early twentieth century to the postcolonial present. It looks at key “moments” in the history of literary-cultural public discourse and argues that different visions of what a Sri Lankan identity could be jostled for influence. However, the colonial political economy under which this literary-cultural sphere developed, and the ensuing majoritarian political developments in post-independence Sri Lanka, overdetermined the linguistically and culturally segregated “form” this literary-public sphere eventually developed. Through the critical exploration of this history, this essay demonstrates that the literary and the political imaginations reproduce each other and that the literary-cultural public sphere is best understood as a contingent space shaped by ideological and political forces that can be both progressive and regressive rather than a normatively progressive or “open” space of public engagement.

This article examines three key debates about Black humor during the Harlem Renaissance, framing them as public “symposia” that reflect conflicting views on comedy’s role in Black cultural and political life. It argues that Harlem Renaissance comedy can be grouped into three categories: repression, rebellion, and revision. While scholars often interpret Black humor as a tool for survival or subversion, this article contends that it is rooted in cynicism—a “Black cynical reason” aware of the illusions of racial capitalism but skeptical that self-aware satire could resist them. Harlem Renaissance comedy critiqued white supremacy but also created internal tensions within the Black community, highlighting the complex relationship between resistance and complicity. The article explores this dynamic through three debates: the 1926 Crisis exchange between W. E. B. Du Bois and Carl Van Vechten, reflected in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Comedy: American Style; the 1926 Nation debate between Langston Hughes and George Schuyler, explored through Schuyler’s Black No More; and Ralph Ellison’s 1958 exchange with Stanley Edgar Hyman in the Partisan Review, examined through Ellison’s essays. The article concludes that while Harlem Renaissance comedy advanced sharp critiques and inspired future activism, comedy itself struggles to produce putative political or social change.

In Bangladesh’s southwest delta, climate adaptation unfolds less through mass migration or master plans than through everyday routes. In August 2023, 40 young people from 5 flood-prone villages mapped 120 geotagged journeys to water points, schools, clinics, markets, and cyclone shelters. Their stories reveal “routes of care” patterns of movement that sustain families and keep communities rooted under pressure. Three practices recur: staying, where repair and mutual support enable life in place; leaving and looping back, where seasonal departures strengthen ties through return; and protection, where circuits of water, health, and education provide survival. These everyday mobilities challenge the binary of migration versus immobility and explain why national strategies such as Tidal River Management and the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 succeed only when aligned with lived routes. Four design principles emerge: map real paths first, value staying as care, support looped mobility, and integrate water, health, and schooling.

Since 2018, the Chicory Revitalization Project (CRP) has used vernacular poetry published in Baltimore’s Chicory magazine (1966–1983) as the centerpiece of a public humanities project. Chicory existed at the intersection of the liberalism of the War on Poverty, which funded it, and the radical esthetics of the Black Arts Movement, which inspired it. After digitizing the magazine, the CRP has used Chicory as the basis of poetry workshops, public events, a traveling exhibition, and a new magazine. Through our work, we have come to see the vernacular poetry in Chicory as emotional history and the basis for intergenerational dialogue in the present. More accessible than canonical poetry, vernacular poetry reflects its historical moment through emotion. Building on this emotional connection, we encourage young writers and activists in Baltimore to engage in intergenerational dialogue with the poems and project stakeholders. When we read, interpret, and respond to poems written in the same place decades apart, an essentially civic question arises: What has changed or not? What is the role of place-based art in social justice?

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest global health threats, demanding urgent action. However, the threat of AMR and the ability to respond to it are far from evenly distributed. In many parts of the global South, where infectious diseases are more common, healthcare systems are weaker, and the social conditions that shape health are more precarious, the effects of AMR are felt more acutely. Because AMR arises within these unequal conditions, rapid action alone is insufficient; attention to how costs and benefits are distributed, who is prioritised, and whose voices are heard is essential to ensure that efforts do not inadvertently deepen existing inequalities. Hence, as the world prepares to tackle this “complex wicked problem,” it needs to ensure that we not only make a quick transition but also a just one. The first step in ensuring a just AMR transition is examining the fairness of our current strategies. This study critically reviews the National Action Plans of the countries in the WHO Western Pacific Region to examine the extent to which ideas of justice are considered. Findings reveal that there are limited considerations for how the burden and benefits of actions are shared; decision-making is dominated by external and national actors within human health. Access to antibiotics is restricted across the spectrum without adequately expanding and strengthening alternatives. As NAPs undergo revision, there is a need to more consciously and explicitly integrate considerations of justice and equity to avoid unintended harm and ensure effective outcomes.

Since 2017, the world has been talking about the Uyghur people as a “Chinese minority” suffering mass violence at the hands of the Chinese government, which researchers and some countries describe as genocide. While China refutes these accusations and refers to them as “internal affairs,” both China and the rest of the world present the Uyghurs as an “ethnic minority,” thus deliberately denying the Sino-Uyghur colonial relationship that has lasted since the military invasion of East Turkestan in late 1949 by the People’s Liberation Army with the full support of Stalin. As an indigenous people under settler colonialism, the Uyghurs reject this categorization as a “minority,” which contributes to the eradication of their national identity and indigenous sovereignty.

This article examines how antimicrobial resistance (AMR) policies designed for livestock farming in Europe—and particularly France—have been limited by narrowly defined reduction targets. Although these policies have significantly decreased antibiotic use, they have also upheld a productivist agricultural model that continues to threaten human and animal health and the environment. By aligning AMR mitigation efforts with a biosecurity paradigm that is highly compatible with industrial livestock systems, the reduction in antibiotic use has not yielded all the anticipated benefits. Based on this assessment, we propose three avenues for fostering a just transition relevant to all sectors involved in AMR governance: transcending the dominant “One Global Health” paradigm; shifting power from institutional stakeholders to the public affected by AMR; and reimagining post-antibiotic futures that extend beyond prevailing dystopian narratives.

America’s history and culture wars have escalated at pace since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. And while the President’s second term has been marked by a rapid stream of executive orders and supporting remarks, articles, and statements affecting all aspects of life, it has demonstrated a particular interest in the nation’s cultural assets and has coalesced on the Smithsonian Institution. This article argues that Trump’s attention to the Smithsonian Institution has arisen because 2026 is the 250th anniversary of American independence. It presents archival evidence from the Smithsonian alongside contemporary analysis to demonstrate that the political playbook being utilized by President Trump has an extensive history. To make its point, the article offers a case study of The West as America, an exhibition that was shown in 1991 at the Smithsonian and generated such political controversy that it ended up being the subject of extensive questioning in Congress. The article aims to show the clear similarity between political and public responses to the 1991 exhibition—which was designed to commemorate a national anniversary but occurred in a period of heightened history wars—with conservative attempts to regulate culture in 2025, ahead of “America 250.” It exemplifies how important historical inquiry is in informing decisions and responses to processes of cultural production in the current era.

Who’s Taylor Swift, anyway? In this article, the author will discuss her two most recent albums, The Tortured Poets Department (2024) and The Life of a Showgirl (2025), through the lens of women’s musical and literary madness. This article argues that The Tortured Poets Department was, in essence, a mad scene akin to that of Lucia or Ophelia, and The Life of a Showgirl is what happens when a heroine returns to sanity—if she can be allowed to return at all.

At midnight on October 3, Swift released her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl—a record that, in just 11 hours, achieved more streams than any other album of 2025—and by 7 AM the next morning, the internet was ablaze with some of its most scathing indictments of Swift’s songwriting. The Life of a Showgirl is the first album Swift has released after her record-breaking tour, The Eras Tour, and follows Swift’s 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, an album that is deeply introspective, poetic, and saturated with literary references of the most “tortured” kind. In comparison, the internet is right to notice the tone shift in The Life of a Showgirl. Swift’s writing on The Life of a Showgirl gets into character as adroitly as she does on Folklore, Evermore, and The Tortured Poets Department. The difference is, where the culture has been settling into Swift’s nineteenth-century preoccupations and allusions for the last five years, she has now stepped into a mid-twentieth century story-world with the likes of Jacqueline Susann and her 1966 cult classic, Valley of the Dolls.

Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, marks a pivotal shift in her branding and marketing from selling intimate relatability to selling spectacle. Once defined by her relatability and diaristic storytelling, Swift now embraces spectacle, excess, and self-mythologizing. For her most recent album, controversy over its marketing and content is polarizing, where some seeing her as unrelatable. On the album, Swift embraces strategies rooted in exclusivity, luxury, and provocative, explicit themes. Swift will not get any more relatable as she ascends to superstardom, and the question remains: Can an artist who rose to power by being relatable and intimate with fans still thrive when that very success makes them increasingly unreachable?

“The Fate of Ophelia,” the opening track on Taylor Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl, includes an unsettling Shakespearean allusion. Ophelia was the jilted lover of the melancholy prince in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a woman whose life ends in suicide. Swift’s song says her fiancé, Travis Kelce, saved her from the fate of Ophelia, positioning her previous boyfriends as moody philosophers and the fun-loving jock Kelce as the anti-Hamlet. This song also recuperates Swift as a reader of Shakespeare after the startingly bad account of Romeo and Juliet in “Love Story,” the song that started Swift’s career.

Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl is littered with musical nostalgia, harkening back to previous musical eras. Songs such as “Opalite” reference these musical genres of the past with specific combinations of musical parameters such as chord progressions, unusual vocal and instrumental timbres, and subtle text cues. In this essay, I will explore several different ways in which music theorists and musicologists have theorized nostalgia, before demonstrating the musically nostalgic effectiveness of the song “Opalite.” I conclude by speculating on this musical nostalgia as a possible broader reflection of current American culture.

When announcing The Life of a Showgirl on the New Heights podcast, Taylor Swift called her 12th album “exuberant and electric and vibrant.” In the weeks leading up to the album’s release, fans wondered what this would mean for Swift’s notoriously vulnerable Track 5. How would we reconcile an “infectiously joyful” album with the admittedly somber concept of Track 5’s “Eldest Daughter”? One theory lies in the location of “Eldest Daughter” in the tracklist, specifically positioned as a Track 5 and following “Father Figure.” It maintains the vulnerability traditionally associated with the position, but does so in a way that redefines it: “Eldest Daughter” is Swift’s first Track 5 not to be rooted in pain or doubt, but instead offering hope and reassurance. Thie vulnerability of Swift’s Track 5s allows her listeners to experience others’ (specifically Swift’s) stories of pain (or hope), which in turn provides them with a language to verbalize their own pain, a necessary step for healing and growth.

Taylor Swift has dreamt of two things: fame and success, and a quiet life with someone she loves. She dreams of making it and of escaping it. The problem is that these dreams seem to conflict. Achieving one can feel like giving up on the other. Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, finds both dreams well represented. She wants immortality and a basketball hoop in the driveway. She also has a new insight for reconciling them. Happiness can be made, she tells us. And if you make it with another person, you might be able to live two dreams that once felt impossible to fit together.

What it means to create a world in which “many worlds fit,” as the Zapatistas declared, has increasingly been taken up across the humanities and social sciences, introduced by decolonial theorists. This article focuses on some of the practices that allow for the enaction of the pluriverse: prayer and attachments to sacred space. I focus on a prayer camp organized by the Coalition to Save the Lemay Forest to the south of Winnipeg, showing that broadly construed notions of prayer can be understood as a pluriversal methodology wherein worlds are navigated through shared—yet still positionally aware—attachments to place. In the prayer camp, prayer—as plea/appeal, practice, action, communication, or commitment—is comfortable with divergent cosmological perspectives, rooted in (un)common attachments to sacred space: both in shared goals of protecting the space and honoring its legacy but also through an engagement with an “uncommon commoning” of that which is sacred and/or otherworldly. I argue that the sacred is an integral part of coalition building within the space; in turn, coalition building can also serve to reinvigorate connections to sacred space and worlds.

This essay approaches Palestine not as a laboratory or a problem to be solved, but as a paradigm that elucidates the persistent and cumulative violence of settler colonialism, genocide, and dispossession. The author explores the collapse and distortion of time under siege, the fragmentation and resilience of bodies amid relentless violence, and the radical power of storytelling in the face of attempted erasure. Weaving together images from Gaza’s hospitals, refugee camps, schools, prisons, and graveyards, this essay documents both the horror and tenacity of everyday Palestinian life. It situates the ongoing Nakba within global trends of authoritarianism and repression, including the assault on academic freedom and criminalization of solidarity. Ultimately, this essay argues that Palestinian defiance, memory, and narrative offer vital lessons in apocalyptic times.

This is a paper about three problems that public political philosophers are likely to encounter and how some underrecognized forms of public philosophy might help overcome them. After clarifying what I take public political philosophy to be, I present the three problems—the problem of academic overrepresentation, the problem of the critical intellectual, and the problem of novel values. These problems are especially acute for a particular form of public philosophy—namely, writing for a general audience. I describe four alternative models of public political philosophy—the organizing model, the participatory model, the policy model, and the bureaucratic model—and give examples of each. For each model, I describe some of its pros and cons, and in particular how it handles (or does not) the three problems. I conclude with some suggestions about the significance of the discussion for philosophical education.

The “public turn” in the humanities constellates a moment of critique, identifying literature’s dis-embedded and elite orientations, mostly institutionalized by academics and the reigning world systems. The reified literary space and its ultimate syllabification have completely dematerialized literature, even de-radicalizing postcolonial studies, Black studies, and Dalit studies into dis-embedded academic practices. The questions I pose inquire whether the postcolonial literary enterprise mostly relies on elite “europhonic” expressions of the aesthetic, while ignoring a vast corpus of vernacular and local texts that narrate the struggles and visions of the actual publics and the counterpublics (Fraser 1992 and Warner 2005). The heterodox and subaltern dimensions of the publics—the counterpublics—also expose the conformist and majoritarian character of the publics. This project, therefore, argues for the restoration of the publics in literature while at the same time problematizing the ideological and hegemonic kernel of the category of the publics itself. As the idea of the counterpublics signifies a greater materiality of dissent within the category of the publics, this paper empirically examines the vernacular Sahajiya literature of Bengal (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries), which involves the voices of the Bengali counterpublics, including the subaltern Bauls and the Fakirs who embodied the Sufi-Sahajiya or Sufi-Vaisnab heterodox traditions of vernacular cosmopolitanism.