This article conceptualises voice as a constellation, examining how objects, images, and sounds (or their absence) speak to the lived experiences of displacement. Drawing from a British Academy-funded project with a Syrian artist collective and a women-led social entrepreneurship initiative in Istanbul, we explore the affective assemblages of loss, belonging, and forced displacement through an ethnographic mode of listening. Bringing together a crocheted life jacket, a painting, and a piece of music that cannot be played, we consider how a politics of listening can offer new ways of understanding forced displacement and agency beyond voice as speech or narrative. We advocate for an approach that foregrounds thick solidarity, collective expression, and intersubjective relations of vocality.

Contemporary human-centered organization and management practices endanger the planet’s health, affecting the life and death of multiple species—including humans. Drawing on insights from multispecies ethnography and feminist new materialism, this article contributes to the business ethics literature by developing a theoretical framework for multispecies organizing as a matter of care. Going beyond existing understandings of human-animal relations, we show how ethico-political dynamics shape multispecies relations in three ways: how we and other species relate to ecologies-in-place (affective relationalities); what we and other species do (vital doings); and, finally, what kinds of worlds we—through our ethical sensibilities—commit to bringing into being (ethical obligations). Using an illustrative example of a rewilding site in England, this article shows how multispecies organizing plays out in a specific ecology-in-place. Our argument has important implications for the conception and contemporary practices of the organizational ethics of life and death.

Fusing the aesthetics of futurity with the lush beauty of the natural world, planned eco-city developments like Forest City and Penang South Islands, both in Malaysia, promise luxury enclaves against climate change and the environmental stressors of existing cities. This article analyzes CGI architectural renderings used to promote and sell eco-city projects in Southeast Asia. Eco-city renderings, we argue, produce semio-capitalistic value by translating the familiar concepts of “green,” “eco-friendly,” and “sustainable” into something far more inchoate: feelings. They do so through their supersaturation with signs of greenness in a design strategy we label “semiotic overdetermination.” Selling “green” as a feeling, eco-city renderings capitalize on present-day anxieties over urban decay and commodify “the ecological” as a rich resource of pleasurable qualitative experiences. The result, we contend, is to reinforce a neoliberal mode of subjectivity that equates consumption with somatics and reduces climate responsibility to individual consumer decisions.

Who is deemed deathworthy, and how is this status produced? What discourses, affects, and histories enable the industrialization of premature Black death while rendering it largely invisible? Rooted in a decolonial queer feminist epistemological framework, this article examines how discursive and affective strategies in U.K. print media and immigration policies during the European “refugee crisis” (2013–2016) justified routine death-making at sea. Conceptualizing Blackness as a relational political and epistemological tool, the article reveals how media and state actors—drawing on racialized mythologies of young single Black men and appeals to imperial nostalgia—constructed these men as objects of panic, disgust, resentment, and fear. Applying collocation analysis and visualization techniques, the article theorizes “affective-racialized networks”—discursive formations that circulate and accumulate affective meanings across space and time, shaping public perception and legitimizing policies of deterrence, externalization, and active abandonment. These networks sustained the routinized deaths of Black migrant men at sea, reinforcing Europe’s imperial border regimes. By foregrounding the mutual constitution of race, affect, and temporality, this study expands migration scholarship’s engagement with race, demonstrating how racial logics operate beyond geopolitical and temporal boundaries through transnational circuits of meaning, power, and governance. The article argues that centering Blackness and affect is essential to understanding how racialization functions and how Black deaths are rendered normative within global bordering practices.

Affective ties encompass a broad family of emotional phenomena, including love, affection, attachment, and devotion. Affective ties may appear deeply personal, and they most certainly are. But they are also important resources for the exercise of political power in international politics – not only as vulnerabilities that can be exploited for coercion but also, and more significantly, as means to mobilise action and sacrifice. Viewed from the vantage point of political agents, affective ties are thus power resources whose distribution in the international system shapes their strategies and choices. Viewed from the perspective of the system, the international realm is not only characterised by struggles over material capabilities or ideas but also competition over affective ties. Correspondingly, nationalism is not simply an identity. It is a collection of techniques and practices for generating and capturing affective ties that has emerged as a highly effective contender in this contest, with crucial implications for how the international system is organised. That being said, other forms of eliciting affective ties also persist.

There is a longstanding belief amongst scholars of psychophysiology that activation is positively associated with attention. However, recent work on news avoidance suggests that activation from negative content is linked to decreased attention. The current study seeks to investigate these different expectations and suggests that both increased and decreased activation can be linked to both attention and avoidance. Using an experiment that employs skin conductance levels and heart rate to evaluate subjects’ media selection choices, the author finds that even as deactivation is most likely to precede the decision to turn away from content, roughly 30% of the time activation precedes turning away. These findings confirm prior conclusions from the psychophysiological communications literature, and in the news avoidance literature, but it also highlights the need for more nuanced expectations where activation and media selection are concerned.

This introduction to the special issue on food charity, religion, and care in Vietnam compares grassroots philanthropy in Vietnam with broader trends toward religious humanitarianism happening across Asia. The co-editors of the special issue examine why food charity has become popular in urban areas like Ho Chi Minh City by exploring how food holds spiritual, moral significance for both donors and recipients. This survey illuminates how grassroots philanthropy in Vietnam can offer a comparative study for spirituality, ethics, and food practices across Asia, as well as religious humanitarianism globally.

Although psychopathic personality traits are widely reported to be related to reduced reactivity to emotion-eliciting situations, findings are not consistent. It has been argued that these differences could be related to variations in the way psychopathy is measured. To examine whether measurement variance resulting from the use of clinical assessment versus self-report assessment could be driving such differences, this systematic review and meta-analysis investigated the comparability of relations between psychopathic traits and responsiveness to emotion-inducing tasks for clinical versus self-report measures. The systematic review resulted in eight studies and 131 effect sizes, which included studies of emotion categorization, emotion regulation, decision-making, and executive functioning tasks. Robust Variance Estimation correlated effects models revealed no significant differences between effect sizes for clinical (PCL-R) versus self-report (PPI, SRP, and LSRP) assessment-based psychopathic traits and emotion tasks. Despite the small number of studies that included both clinical and self-report assessments of psychopathy, these results do not provide any evidence for an assessment-based difference in correlations with emotional responsiveness across tasks. The findings also show no associations between scores on emotional responsiveness and indices of psychopathy. Future research on emotional responsiveness in psychopathy should include both assessment types to be able to increase the research basis for the comparison.