This essay examines the integration of accompaniment methodology with public humanities and policy work through case studies from activist research in New Orleans. The concept of accompaniment involves providing active, supportive engagement alongside marginalized communities to address systemic barriers and foster mutual understandings. This essay highlights how accompaniment can provide support in navigating bureaucratic challenges and inform immigration policy. It also explores how accompaniment can inform public humanities work, like the development of a digital timeline and physical exhibition documenting Black labor history in New Orleans. This approach underscores the transformative potential of combining accompaniment with public humanities to enhance community empowerment, inform policy, and challenge systemic inequities. By engaging with community experiences and integrating insights from both historical and contemporary struggles, this essay chronicles the development of accompaniment methodology and shows how this approach can enrich public humanities scholarship and policy work, creating more inclusive and responsive solutions to social challenges. Accompaniment serves as a vital tool for bridging academic inquiry with social justice, making public humanities research more relevant, ethical, equitable, and impactful.

This paper offers a reading of the infamous mutual critique between Kant and Herder by criticising the standard account of their tense relation, which attributes a priority of reason to the former and a priority of language to the latter. As Kant thinks that judging can only be realised through its expression in language, and Herder conceives of a linguistic act as the self-conscious positing of meaning, they equally reject any sharp separation of thought from its expression in language. The central difference lies in their opposing accounts of the relation between reason’s striving for metaphysical knowledge and the latter’s linguistic guise.

We introduce a new model equation for Stokes gravity waves based on conformal transformations of Euler's equations. The local version of the model equation is relevant for the dynamics of shallow water waves. It allows us to characterize the travelling periodic waves both in the case of smooth and peaked waves and to solve the existence problem exactly, albeit not in elementary functions. Spectral stability of smooth waves with respect to co-periodic perturbations is proven analytically based on the exact count of eigenvalues in a constrained spectral problem.

While increased focus in recent decades has been paid to conceptions of time in archaeological interpretation, comparably less attention has been afforded to the way in which we ourselves conceive of time in the construction of chronologies to periodize the past. In this paper, I focus on the tripartite chronology utilized by scholars of the Precolumbian Maya as a case study to explore the potential of a critical approach to archaeological chronologies and periodizations. By examining the chronology's origins and the intellectual histories which underpin it, I demonstrate that the issues at stake are more than questions of temporal accuracy but, rather, matters of reflexivity. Through a process of ‘sublimation’, problematic assumptions and mentalities upon which periodizations were originally constructed are obscured in contemporary usage, leading to the perpetuation of outdated tropes and a conceptual path dependency in narratives of the past. Conversely, appreciating the arbitrary nature of chronological demarcations and treating such frameworks as negotiable and open to revision is a powerful tool in opening up new interpretive possibilities to the narration of the past.

Research in decentralized computing, specifically in consensus algorithms, has focused on providing resistance to an adversary with a minority stake. This has resulted in systems that are majoritarian in the extreme, ignoring valuable lessons learned in law and politics over centuries. In this article, we first detail this phenomenon of majoritarianism and point out how minority protections in the nondigital world have been implemented. We motivate adding minority protections to collaborative systems with examples. We also show how current software deployment models exacerbate majoritarianism, highlighting the problem of monoculture in client software in particular. We conclude by giving some suggestions on how to make decentralized computing less hostile to those in the minority.

In this paper, we study the cyclicity of the shift operator $S$ acting on a Banach space $\mathcal {X}$ of analytic functions on the open unit disc $\mathbb {D}$. We develop a general framework where a method based on a corona theorem can be used to show that if $f,g\in \mathcal {X}$ satisfy $|g(z)|\leq |f(z)|$, for every $z\in \mathbb {D}$, and if g is cyclic, then f is cyclic. We also give sufficient conditions for cyclicity in this context. This enable us to recapture some recent results obtained in de Branges–Rovnayk spaces, in Besov–Dirichlet spaces and in weighted Dirichlet type spaces.

This article examines the ways in which Brazil's African foreign policy during the Ernesto Geisel administration (1974–9) utilised notions of ‘racial democracy’ and the nation's Africanity in framing itself as an intrinsic partner to the continent across the Atlantic. It does this through an analysis of Brazil's involvement at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC’77, 15 January–12 February 1977), hosted in Lagos, Nigeria. The international event celebrated past and present contributions of Black and African cultures to global civilisation. An assessment of the Brazilian government's delegation to FESTAC’77 shows how the Geisel administration attempted to depict Brazil as a harmoniously integrated society, where, through a historic process of mixing, the nation's racial identity was united into an equitable whole. In contrast, the propagation of these ideas at FESTAC’77 left the regime's racial ideology vulnerable to attack from international and domestic audiences.

This paper examines folk perceptions of language in the Greater Boston Area. In particular, it seeks to understand which areas are associated with a “Boston” accent, and whether associations are changing given recent shifts in ethnic and economic demographics. A total of 111 Greater Boston residents completed a survey and map task asking what constitutes a “Boston” accent, who has one, and in which areas one can be heard. Results show that the majority of participants perceive the neighborhood of South Boston to be the geographic epicenter of the “Boston” accent, and generally associate accents with historically White working-class areas, despite sometimes changing demographics within them. There is also evidence that participant ethnic background may play a role in perceptions of speech in some areas, with White men less likely to choose South Boston, widely viewed as gentrifying, as accented, and Black and Asian participants less likely to choose the increasingly ethnically diverse neighborhood of North Dorchester. These results demonstrate the importance of eliciting folk perceptions from residents of color to obtain a fuller picture of the language attitudes in a given community.

The article uses the scandal surrounding Jackson Yee, a state-endorsed celebrity and household name in China, as a case study to critically examine how the “government–industry–fan–platform” alliance co-conducts what we call “collaborative celebrity PR” to rescue co-opted stars from scandal. We find that the relationship between the four agents is symbiotic but that the government plays the most important “arbitrator” role. We argue that the state-endorsed celebrities face an inherent dilemma of “power(lessness)” in which they have to dedicate more effort towards propaganda and behave in a moral and exemplary way to please the government to gain more political capital and power and minimize their own precarity. We also highlight the uncertainty and risks using celebrities in its pop propaganda can bring to the CCP: if a state-endorsed celebrity cannot be saved, the scandal can damage the legitimacy and reliability of the Party propaganda.

Il volume di Elisabetta Bianchi (B.) e Roberto Meneghini (M.), Il Foro di Traiano nell'Antichità. I risultati degli scavi 1991–2007, esamina i risultati degli scavi condotti, tra il 1998 e il 2007, dalla Sovrintendenza ai Beni Culturali del Comune di Roma (attuale Roma Capitale) nel Foro di Traiano, focalizzando principalmente l'attenzione sulle strutture murarie dell'immenso complesso, scoperte ex novo o riesaminate alla luce dei nuovi rinvenimenti, e sulle loro originarie decorazioni. L'opera si propone, come sottolineato nella Premessa, come prosecuzione e completamento di una prima monografia, ad opera del solo M., pubblicata nel 2021 nella stessa collana, incentrata sulla storia del complesso traianeo nel Medioevo e nel Rinascimento, delineata sulla base dei sopracitati scavi 1998–2007.1

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) is best known today for pioneering a novel synthesis between social anarchism and ecology in the 1960s. Both his writing and his activism had a substantial impact on the young New Left and the radical ecology movement, and were in polemic dialogue with radical environmentalists, anarcho-primitivists, and deep ecologists. This article explores the development of Bookchin’s early political thought within the framework of a “postwar environmental moment” and uncovers how he uniquely politicized ecological science in the 1950s. I argue that Bookchin’s early writings were a critical response to both the dire environmental issues of his time and the limitations he perceived in Old Left politics. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Bookchin’s understanding of ecological science was not simply a product of a turn to anarchism, but was directly linked to debates among 1950s ecologists, typically overlooked in the recent scholarship on Bookchin.