Genealogy, Volume 10, Issue 3 (August 2026) – 41 articles

This article addresses the underrepresentation of religion in historical accounts of apartheid’s gendered political economy. It asks how colonial missionary discourse and apartheid law interacted in constructing and regulating Black womanhood, and how intersectionality and Bosadi hermeneutics can expose and contest the theological legitimation of Black women’s labour, sacrifice, and endurance. The study uses a qualitative historical-theological and contextual biblical method. It analyses selected historical scholarship, South African legislation, the Constitutional Court’s Mahlangu judgment, and Proverbs 31:10–31 and Ruth, through the lens of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality and Madipoane Masenya’s Bosadi hermeneutics. The analysis finds that mission Christianity and the apartheid state were neither identical nor uniform, but influential Christian ideals of domesticity, respectability, service, and feminine sacrifice could converge with a racialised system that restricted African women’s land, mobility, residence, labour, and family life. Proverbs 31 and Ruth are therefore treated as contested resources: they can affirm women’s agency and economic intelligence, but they can also be appropriated to moralise overwork and precarious survival. The article contributes an integrated historical-theological account that links law, labour, religion, and biblical reception without reducing African women to passive victims. It recommends that churches and theological institutions audit the distribution of labour and authority, support decent work and shared care, and interpret biblical texts with women whose lives are shaped by racialised and gendered inequality. Full article

How do ordinary place names make a major river legible as heritage? This article examines Yellow River toponyms as everyday infrastructures through which hydrological space becomes spatialized memory in contemporary China. The study uses a nested mixed-methods design rather than treating every record as equivalent evidence. Its administrative frame contains 2249 unique current statutory township-level units in 178 county-level targets across all nine Yellow River province-level regions. A record-level audit links 1039 of the original 1314 survey records to 1008 unique current units, while 1215 units contain at least one place-specific interpretive field. Six non-exclusive tags identify hydrological space, multi-ethnic interaction, transport and trade, historical memory, state governance, and cross-cutting heritage activation. An E0–E3 rubric separates administrative identity from externally corroborated explanation, traceable survey narrative, and structural context. Forty-five cases form an evidence-graded pool, but only seven core and eleven qualified cases carry the main qualitative argument. Hydrological and historical narratives are the most widely supported layers, while interpretive coverage remains geographically and evidentially uneven. Place names make river heritage through localization, multilingual translation, mobility, temporal layering, and administrative circulation. Official standardization can preserve recognized forms, but it also produces selective legibility by making some variants, scripts, meanings, and origin accounts easier to retrieve than others. The article contributes to critical toponymy and critical heritage studies by showing how ordinary names mediate between local memory and national spatial infrastructures. It reframes the Global East as a setting where heritage is produced through accretion, translation, and database-mediated standardization, not only spectacular renaming. Full article

This study is a secondary analysis of qualitative research that explored how transracial adoptees experience consciousness using the adoptee consciousness model. The original study involved focus groups in which 23 United States-based, adult transracial adoptee participants discussed their lived experiences of adoptee consciousness. Those focus group transcripts were transcribed, de-identified, and coded by the original research team. The secondary analysis research questions are (1) Who supports transracial adoptees during adoptee consciousness? and (2) How do they support transracial adoptees in the consciousness process? The secondary analysis methodology applied Thematic Analysis to identify patterns and themes from the original dataset transcriptions. Findings shed light on how participants in the study experienced support and/or lack of support. The findings offer guidance on how families, friends, and mental health professionals can provide meaningful support to transracial adoptees as they move through awareness of their understanding of adoption and their identities. Full article

Based on three years of sustained personal observations and extensive on-site interviews, this study is the first to investigate the bird totem worship customs of the Dong ethnic minority in southeast Guizhou, China. The Dong-inhabited regions of southeast Guizhou possess a long-standing tradition of bird totem worship, which has permeated every aspect of local people’s daily life, serving as a living museum where ancient bird totem worship continues to thrive in the present day. Through investigation and research, we can clearly perceive that bird totem worship here is no longer merely evidence of primitive thinking as previously discussed in academic circles, nor is it an endangered intangible cultural heritage. Instead, it represents emotional resonance with a more modern spirit and open-ended identity construction. Faced with the era of the internet and new media, they have broken free from the constraints of totem concepts and taboos, instead embracing creative totem will, totem activities, totem behaviors, and intelligent totems, thereby endowing totems with new belief content and forms of expression. They have transcended the preconceived concepts and fixed thinking about totems in academic discourse, making it an important vehicle for maintaining community relations, strengthening ethnic solidarity, inheriting ethnic culture, and continuing local civilization. Through the contemporary reconstruction of collective behavior, the traffic empowerment of internet short videos, and complex functional transformations, they have constructed a brand-new totem value system in the context of the internet and new media era, organizing a multi-dimensional, comprehensive social ecological view and civilizational value system. It is precisely through this continuous evolution, expansion, and activation in response to changing times that totems have acquired sustained vitality and creativity, providing a vivid case study for the contemporary transformation and creative development of ancient totemic beliefs. This is also the significant importance of field investigation—it enables us to gain entirely new value cognition and different theoretical perspectives from the living site of totem practices. Full article

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that centres Indigenous queer (henceforth, Indigiqueer) and Indigenous older people and Elders’ voices to explore the everyday tensions between protecting Indigenous cultural protocols against colonial incursions and the challenges presented by shifts in essentialist understandings of gender in the country now called Australia. There is to date very little written that address this topic, although there are two seminal works that investigate the matters more broadly, one by leading Aboriginal scholar Professor Bronwyn Carlson, and another by Noongar Wardandi scholar Professor Braden Hil. Our study uses a set of vignettes based on two interviews with Indigiqueer people and a yarning circle with Indigenous older people and Elders. The interviews and yarning circle are structured as a discussion between community members to provide some preliminary analysis about contemporary dynamic intergenerational debates within Indigenous communities in which competing understandings of culture, gender, safety, and responsibility coexist. For participants, intergenerationality is seen as central to both harm and healing, feelings of belonging and ostracism and ultimately to current and future Indigenous and Indigiqueer survivance and thrivance. Indigenous older people and Elders demonstrate an openness to different sexualities and an acceptance of sexuality-diverse people but are hesitant to allow gender-diverse people to participate in gendered community activities such as playing the didgeridoo (yidaki). To the contrary, Indigenous queer (henceforth Indigiqueer) participants articulate their fears regarding safety, exclusion, care and social isolation emerging from exclusionist gendered binary protocols. Younger generations are seen by all participants as sites of potentiality, that in combination with the power of shared storytelling and mutually constructed understandings, enable a shift towards greater acceptance, openness, and visibility. The paper also reveals the ways in which Indigiqueer people navigate spatial, cultural and social differences between regional and urban spaces, that are seen as differentially accepting of either their Indigeneity or their gender and sexuality diversity. The study’s findings also demonstrate the importance of Indigiqueer-controlled spaces and culturally safe organisations, that are grounded in community-led practices of care, belonging, and self-determination. Full article

Entrepreneurship in South Africa is widely recognised as a critical driver of economic inclusion and job creation. While existing research highlights the role of formal education in enhancing entrepreneurial capability, less attention has been given to how entrenched gender norms, historical inequalities, and informal learning processes shape entrepreneurial visions. This study aims to investigate how gender dynamics shape entrepreneurial visions beyond formal educational attainment, particularly in contexts of persistent structural inequalities and high unemployment. The study adopts a qualitative research design. Using purposive sampling, 60 participants were selected and organised into three focus groups. Guided by Social Feminist Theory, the analysis foregrounds gendered social structures as central to the formation of entrepreneurial visions. Data were analysed thematically to explore recurring patterns related to structural uncertainty, informal learning, gendered perceptions of risk and confidence, and the reframing of entrepreneurial aspirations. The findings reveal that entrepreneurship often emerges in response to structural uncertainty rather than purely from opportunity-driven motives. Informal learning through community networks, lived experiences, and adaptive strategies constitutes a central source of entrepreneurial knowledge, particularly for women. Women participants frequently reported constrained growth aspirations shaped by structural barriers and questioned their own legitimacy, while men tended to benefit from broader institutional networks and greater perceived entrepreneurial confidence. The study highlights the need for policy interventions that extend beyond formal education. It recommends recognising informal competencies, addressing structural constraints, and developing gender-responsive support systems that validate diverse entrepreneurial pathways. Such interventions are essential for fostering inclusive entrepreneurship and reducing inequality in South Africa. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by foregrounding the role of gendered social realities in shaping entrepreneurial visions. It further demonstrates how informal learning processes inform these visions beyond formal educational attainment. Full article

This article argues that Foucault’s work demonstrates a historical trend moving towards an exclusion from space. This exclusion is predicated on a gaze that has systematically moved further away from the corporeal body to include the digital realm. This study deploys Foucault’s conceptualisation of ‘heterotopia’ as a tool for analysing the transformations in the relations between spaces and bodies. The article investigates Foucault’s work on space throughout his oeuvre to demonstrate that such an investigation reveals an emergent focus on bodily surveillance in relation to space, emerging with disciplinary power. Foucault’s analysis reveals that the emergence of biopolitics and regulatory controls allowed for the emergence and proliferation of exclusionary practices from spaces and institutions beyond the body. His later work on liberal governmentality and security reveals an even more dramatic reorganisation in power’s approach to space, which allows for a hyper-specific approach towards determining the inclusionary and exclusionary criteria from space. Foucault’s contemporary interlocutors demonstrate that this trend towards exclusion has been exacerbated and expanded even further beyond the body by the turn towards digital criteria for inclusion/exclusion from heterotopic space. The relation between Foucault’s spatial analyses and the emergence of digital ‘spaces’ provides new insight into the analysis of the contemporary relation between digital data, corporeal bodies, and heterotopic spaces. Full article

Bereavement in Southern Africa is not a private event. It is rather a shared and communal experience, shaped by rituals, faith, and relationships. In Botswana, mourning is influenced by Botho, a way of life that says, “I am because we are,” where a whole community carries the pain of loss together and takes responsibility for the bereaved. These communal rituals bring comfort, meaning and a sense of belonging, helping families accept death and move towards healing. Yet research also shows a harder side: many mourning practices are gendered and favors male gender. Widows often face long, strict rituals, social isolation and suspicion, rooted in patriarchy and ideas about impurity or danger, which can harm their emotional, social, and economic well-being. This article uses conceptual/theological analysis within pastoral theology and African relational ethics to examine these practices and to explore how churches and caregivers can honor culture while resisting injustice. Drawing on work of Botho African pastoral care and gender, it shows that the same communal systems that care can also exclude and marginalize widows. The article proposes a Gendered Botho Pastoral Care Model that calls Christian communities to sustain communal solidarity and shared mourning, challenge patriarchal and violent widowhood rites, reinterpret rituals in life-giving ways, and build resilience, dignity and agency for widows, so that mourning spaces become places of healing, justice and restored humanity Pastors for widows in Botswana and across Southern Africa. Full article

The scholarship on Chinese womanhood has highlighted a split female subjectivity and fostered an enduring image of Chinese women as victims. Going beyond this image, the current study sought to explore how Chinese female doctors construct a polyphonic individual selfhood through flexible practices of coordination and adjustment on the continuum between work and family commitments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 female physicians working at a private hospital in Shanghai. Analysis of the data revealed that these professional women presented themselves as individuals striving for career development who also had to address gender stereotypes in their workplaces. Based on our findings, we argue that female medical workers in China shape an inclusive notion of the gendered self by mediating work and family commitments and integrating them into a polyphonic form of subjectivity. Full article

African immigrant men in the United Kingdom (UK) experience forms of suffering that transcend both the clinical framework of acculturation stress and the political narrative of racial victimhood. Existing scholarship frequently overlooks how race, religion, and gender historically entangle to construct diasporic identities. This paper investigates how African immigrant men in the UK navigate the constitutive forces of race, gender, and religion in constructing and resisting diasporic identities. The paper develops “Ntu Fracture” as a theological–anthropological framework to diagnose the wounding of diasporic masculine personhood at the level of vital relationality. The framework draws upon Bantu philosophy (Ntu, ubuntu) and Yoruba cosmology (àṣẹ), placing them in critical dialogue with Fanon’s sociogeny and Butler’s concept of precarity. Utilising a qualitative desktop methodology, the findings suggest a fractured subjectivity among African men in the UK driven by three main mechanisms: (1) institutional racism as recognition-severing, (2) immigration enforcement as obligation-interruption and (3) parenting surveillance as domestic colonisation. The paper concludes that the lived experiences of African religious communities within the UK’s hostile environment stem from historical constructions of race, religion, and gender, categories experienced as unified entities that collapse conventional distinctions between the sacred and the secular. Full article

Indigenous languages in Southern Thailand are increasingly affected by modernization, digital communication, and language contact, yet the relationship between kinship terminology, social organization, and linguistic sustainability among Indigenous Austroasiatic-speaking communities remains insufficiently explored. This study addresses three research questions: (1) how Tan’ean and Jaahaai kinship systems differ in their semantic structures and classificatory patterns; (2) how kinship terms reflect cultural worldviews, social organization, and relational values of the Manni and Mueng’ra communities; and (3) what challenges influence the transmission and sustainability of kinship-related linguistic knowledge. This study aims to comparatively analyze consanguineal and affinal kinship terminology in the Tan’ean language of the Manni ethnic group and the Jaahaai language of the Mueng’ra ethnic group, focusing on how kinship systems encode cultural worldviews, social relations, and adaptive strategies under contemporary change. Guided by Componential Analysis and Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory, this study employed a qualitative ethnolinguistic approach. Data were collected through genealogical elicitation, in-depth interviews, and participant observation with 40 key informants from Trang, Phatthalung, Satun, Songkhla, Yala, and Narathiwat provinces. The data were analyzed through semantic feature identification and comparative interpretation of kinship structures. The findings demonstrate that, despite shared Austroasiatic heritage, Tan’ean and Jaahaai exhibit distinct kinship systems reflecting different cultural logics. In response to the first research question, the findings reveal that the Manni system resembles the Hawaiian type, emphasizing egalitarian relations, generational categories, and inclusive incorporation of affinal relatives, whereas the Mueng’ra system shows Crow–Omaha characteristics, including generational skewing, gender-specific markers, hierarchical classification, and stronger influence from dominant regional languages. Regarding the second research question, the findings demonstrate that kinship terminology functions as a cultural mechanism for organizing social relationships, identity, and intergenerational obligations, reflecting different models of Indigenous social organization. For the third research question, the study identifies language contact, changing social conditions, and reduced intergenerational transmission as challenges affecting the continuity of Indigenous kinship knowledge. Therefore, the study recommends community-based orthographies, participatory digital learning platforms, and policies supporting Indigenous linguistic rights to strengthen language revitalization, cultural continuity, and Indigenous communities’ capacity to adapt to social transformation. Full article

Immanuel Kant is synonymous with modernity, enlightenment and secularity. This reputation is earned through the incredible influence of his three weighty critiques, which have laid the intellectual, moral and aesthetic foundations for modern philosophical thought. Despite this reputation, many scholars in recent years have argued that Kant’s intellectual contribution to secularism, moral universality and political republicanism ought to be approached more critically. The ‘other’ Kant is also one of the progenitors of the modern concept of race. Kantians have defended Kant against charges that race is essential to his entire critical project. This essay moves beyond the stalemate between race scholars and Kantians by reading his concept of race together with his philosophy of religion. Drawing on critical approaches to religion, race and secularism, this essay argues that race is constitutive of his philosophy. More specifically, it demonstrates how race and religion are deeply entangled in Kant’s construction of Jews and Judaism as the constitutive outsiders of Euro-Christian modernity. Full article

Names and naming are some of the ways by which Igbo families and communities of Southeastern Nigeria construe and express ideation about their origins, kinship, intergroup relations, social and spiritual roles, and identity. The names that most Igbo families and communities bear provide information about their ancestry, historical ties, and the experiences and circumstances that define their existence as a distinct people. Among the Igbo, names are not merely a means of identification; they are perceived as carriers of history and social experiences. Igbo communities and families use names to identify the descendants (umu—children) of a particular progenitor, indicate the specific number of in-group members that share common ancestry or social bond (name + number marker), indicate the spatial location of a community, and indicate the spiritual roles of a community or family. Igbo families in particular use the names they bear to frame the social experiences and situations that surround the birth of a child (nwa), peculiar professions associated with a family, and peculiar social, economic or spiritual roles associated with some families, among other uses. Thus, based on the tenets of anthropological/cultural linguistics, this study will examine the social and cultural–cognitive factors that shape how the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria derive community and family names. While insights from anthropological linguistics provide the framework for the study of the names in the social and cultural contexts, the cognitive dimensions of this study derive from the framework of Cultural Linguistics (CL). This ensures that the cognitive aspects of the names are integrated into the analysis. Many of the existing studies on Igbo names and naming practices have centred chiefly on personal names, while only a handful have focused on community and family names among the Igbo. This study, which draws chiefly from anthropological linguistics (AL) and Cultural Linguistics (CL), aims to address this lacuna. Full article

There has been a significant rise in the number of individuals searching for genetic relatives using home-based DNA kits alongside online historical records, archival sources, and family stories. Initial studies suggest that these experiences can have profound psycho-social and emotional impacts on self and identity. However, research to date has not examined the experiences of older adults who uncover previously unknown relatives and how these discoveries influence their identities in later life. To address this gap, this study draws on life course and identity theories. We conduct three ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses to examine how age, the context of discovery, and the subsequent relationship with the newly discovered family member (or proxy) affect three conceptual identity domains: familial belonging, cultural identity, and sense of self/uniqueness. Data are drawn from an international online survey of 293 amateur genealogists aged 55 years and older who located a previously unknown close genetic relative within the past five years using DNA testing. We also synthesize and integrate emergent themes from 50 in-depth qualitative follow-up interviews. Findings show that reported identity changes are associated with stronger relationship quality, more frequent contact, emotionally driven motivations (compared to curiosity), and more complex searches, net of covariates. Qualitative data elucidate the expansive, fluid, and sometimes ambiguous nature of identity reconstruction following unexpected family discoveries today. Full article

Books play an important role in supporting identity, yet inaccurate or incomplete metadata in library catalogs can limit the discoverability of culturally representative works. This qualitative instrumental case study examined how metadata assigned to juvenile fiction books featuring Black characters, purchased from 2017 to 2021 in a regional comprehensive public library, reflected book content and influenced discoverability. The following research question was derived from the research problem and the purpose of the study: What is the metadata searchability of juvenile books that feature Black characters in a regional comprehensive public university library catalog in the southeastern United States? This study used document analysis to compare bibliographic metadata with thematic content of the chosen books to identify gaps in the catalog. Findings indicated that metadata frequently captured broad topical content while omitting deeper themes related to Black identity, possibly reducing the discoverability of these works through catalog searching. The results demonstrate the need for more representative metadata practices to improve access to culturally significant literature and provide librarians with a framework for evaluating and strengthening metadata assignment to support visibility in library collections. Full article

The claim that gender diversity is a leadership issue rather than a women’s issue circulates widely in transformation policy and university planning, yet it is rarely given historical or epistemic grounding, and almost never an African one. This article asks how ceremonial and ritual authority was gendered in selected African cultural institutions, through what mechanisms colonial rule reconfigured that gendering, and what follows for contemporary leadership theory and for African higher education and public governance. The study is conceptual and qualitative. It applies genealogical documentary analysis to a purposively assembled corpus of forty scholarly and policy texts published between 1976 and 2026, analysed in three phases of descent, emergence and residue. The framework combines the coloniality of gender, Foucauldian genealogy, Weberian authority and relational leadership read alongside Ubuntu, and it operationalises two constructs defined at the outset: authority as an installed position and authority as a relational function. Six findings are reported. Authority was installed rather than possessed, distributed across complementary gendered offices, and carried by statuses detachable from anatomy; ritual office formed a distinct register; colonial indirect rule masculinised public office and bureaucratised what had been relational; and the women’s-issue framing is the residue of that sequence. Seven recommendations follow, centred on measuring the distribution of authority rather than headcounts alone. Full article

Educational practices in primary schools are not formed in isolation from social and cultural heritage. In Malaysia’s multi-ethnic society, shaped by colonial history, diverse migration genealogies, and intergenerational transmission of familial and community values, the pedagogical orientations of teachers and the learning dispositions of students are deeply embedded in historical and cultural processes. This study examines how family–community genealogies, cultural heritage, and intergenerational educational narratives intersect with teacher training practices, specifically learner autonomy promotion, teacher-as-facilitator orientation, and flexible learning environment creation, to shape pedagogical practice in a multi-ethnic primary school in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. A qualitative interpretive research design was employed. Eight participants, seven experienced primary school teachers and one student representative were purposively selected from a multi-ethnic primary school in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews guided by four thematically organised dimensions drawn from the genealogy of education framework and analysed using Braun and Clarke’s six-phase thematic analysis. Four interconnected themes emerged: (1) convergent cross-genealogical endorsement of learner-centred pedagogy despite diverse ethnic community educational inheritances; (2) the teacher-as-facilitator role as the most genealogically resonant pedagogical shift from colonial transmission traditions; (3) flexible learning environments as inspirationally valued but materially constrained sites of genealogical negotiation; and (4) the perceived inseparability of facilitative practice and positive student learning outcomes. The findings illuminate how historically situated family–community genealogies shape the reception and enactment of contemporary pedagogical practices in Malaysia’s post-colonial, multi-ethnic primary school context. Full article

Senior leadership turnover in Christian Higher Education Institutions (CHEIs) necessitates the identification of effective self-leadership practices that preserve intergenerational memory and Reformed traditions. Using a qualitative interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), this study explored the lived experiences of five senior-level administrators averaging 22.2 years of leadership experience in CHEIs. The findings identified five core themes shaping their leadership: (1) efficiency and Self-Awareness, characterized by the use of digital boundaries and organizational systems; (2) fulfillment, derived from a deep sense of “calling” and the institutional mission; (3) fortitude, built on theological principles of God’s sovereignty to navigate administrative stress; (4) applicability and Intellectualism, rooted in the Reformed confessional heritage and “treasure trove” of creeds; and (5) integration, where spiritual practices, such as breath prayers and scripture-based cues, are woven into professional routines. Crucially, the research revealed a significant disconnect where leaders utilized robust self-leadership strategies for professional growth but often struggled to apply parallel techniques (such as goal setting or self-observation) to their personal spiritual disciplines. The study concludes by proposing a Spiritual Self-Leadership Framework that integrates the Five Solas of the Reformation with self-leadership theory to provide a roadmap for individual sanctification and institutional flourishing. Full article

Marriage remains a central social institution among the Vatsonga, functioning not merely as a union between individuals but as a cultural institution through which gender identities, kinship relations, ritual obligations, and communal belonging are constructed and transmitted across generations. While scholarship has extensively explored marriage and gender in African societies, limited attention has been paid to the genealogical processes through which Vatsonga marriage rituals have historically shaped gender identities within changing social, political, and religious contexts. This article examines marriage as a site of gender construction by analysing the relationship between ritual practices, identity formation, and social belonging among the Vatsonga of Southern Africa. Using the genealogical approach of Michel Foucault and the theories of African feminists and decolonials, this study employs interpretive qualitative methodology, which entails the analysis of interdisciplinary literature in African philosophy, anthropology, gender studies, theology, and ritual studies. As a result of this analysis, it becomes evident that marriage rituals continue to play a great role in constructing masculinity and femininity, as well as kinship and community. At the same time, however, these rituals are dynamic and have undergone changes in light of colonialism, Christianity, urbanization, migrations, constitutional democracy, and modern concerns regarding gender equality. This article does not present marriage rituals of Vatsonga as static and monolithic practices, but rather shows their historical contingency, cultural dynamism, and continuous negotiation amid social change. Therefore, this study calls for critical engagement with marriage rituals in order to protect culture as well as to ensure gender equality and the dignity of all parties involved. With regard to the application of genealogy to marriage practices of Vatsonga, this article brings new perspectives to current debates on ritual, gender construction, African epistemologies and the decolonisation of marriage studies. Full article

The classical Chinese poem The Ballad of Mulan and Riyoko Ikeda’s iconic shōjo manga series The Rose of Versailles are two important East Asian cultural texts that are compared in this article to examine feminist resistance and gender negotiation. The protagonists of both stories are women who work in very patriarchal environments while also opposing, subverting, and eventually overcoming traditional gender norms. This paper argues that both texts enact what could be called a “dialectics of compliance and resistance”—that is, a simultaneous negotiation between conformity to institutional norms for survival and resistance through exposing and challenging those same norms in which heroines must adopt masculine codes to survive institutional structures, but in doing so reveal those structures as arbitrary and historically contingent—through the analytical lenses of feminist literary criticism, queer theory, postcolonial gender studies, and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. The article explores the mechanics of cross-dressing as a political act, the ideological ambivalence ingrained in narrative closure, the construction of female heroism, and the divergent yet convergent ways in which each text positions itself relative to its own socio-political moment. They do this by drawing on close textual reading and cultural-historical contextualisation. In the end, the paper argues that The Ballad of Mulan and The Rose of Versailles share a feminist imaginary that resonates strongly with current discourses on gender, identity, and resistance, even though they come from different cultural and generic traditions and are separated by more than fourteen centuries. Full article

This study investigates how personal and family names function as systems of heritage transmission in communities of South West Region, Cameroon and Cross River State, Nigeria. While African onomastics has documented naming traditions, cross-border comparative research on naming as a linguistic–anthropological system remains limited. Using qualitative methods—interviews, participant observation, and ritual documentation—the study analyses the semantic, morphological, and socio-cultural dimensions of indigenous names. The findings show that naming practices operate as structured cultural mechanisms that encode lineage affiliation, birth circumstances, moral expectations, spirituality, and social belonging. The study develops a motivational classification framework demonstrating how names sustain intergenerational knowledge and social cohesion while adapting to religious change, migration, and modernization. By linking linguistic form to social function, the article contributes a comparative perspective to African onomastics and highlights naming as a key resource for cultural continuity in borderland societies. Full article

This paper seeks to illuminate the historical and biological intersections between Druze traditions and the silent architecture of Freemasonry within the Balkan milieu, a region historically defined by a constellation of preeminent scientists, writers, and artists whose legacies were forged within the crucible of Masonic thought. Central to this inquiry is the reconstruction of a familial intellectual lineage and genealogy of the author’s ancestor that maintained, for generations, a quietude of profound exchanges with esoteric custodians in France. These subtle conduits suggest the operation of “invisible networks” bound by an unstated ethical and philosophical cipher. To probe the biological currents beneath these traditions, the study unveils genetic evidence of the K1a5a haplogroup, a Levantine signature found within the domestic sphere. By examining this familial case study, the work suggests that the preservation of “the Secret” is not merely an intellectual endeavor, but a biological inheritance, where genetic markers and initiatory silence converge across centuries. The continuity of these invisible networks is historically evidenced by the 1926 Belgrade Masonic Peace Congress, led by French and German Grand Masters. This Legacy directly connects to its centennial peace declaration scheduled in Belgrade for late Juni 2026, showcasing the enduring role of the region in trans-regional diplomacy. Full article

At no time in history has social change been as rapid as it is today. Developments in digital technologies have profoundly transformed everyday life, including motherhood experiences. This study examines intergenerational continuity and change in motherhood experiences related to pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare in Mardin, Türkiye, a culturally diverse region where long-standing traditional social relations coexist with rapid social transformation driven by modernization, urbanization, educational expansion, digitalization, and changing gender relations. This socio-cultural context provides a valuable setting for exploring how motherhood has both persisted and changed across generations. The study employed a qualitative phenomenological design based on subjective experiences. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 60 women from two generations (mother–daughter pairs) using purposive and snowball sampling methods. The interview data were analyzed using MAXQDA 24 through thematic analysis. The findings indicate that motherhood continues to be shaped by enduring patriarchal norms while simultaneously being redefined through medicalization, professional expertise, digitalization, and the ideology of intensive mothering. Important continuities remained, particularly regarding maternal responsibility and gendered divisions of care, whereas substantial changes emerged in digitalization, medicalization, parental roles, family planning, anxiety, child-centeredness, and sources of parenting knowledge. Full article

Place names do more than label streets—they encode the priorities of the institutions that assign them. This article examines how urban naming practices and heritage governance interact in Changchun, Northeast China, a city whose built environment bears the accumulated imprint of the late imperial era, the Manchukuo colonial period, socialist construction, and contemporary heritage tourism. Drawing on the concept of “place genealogies,” we bring critical toponymy and critical heritage studies into dialogue to analyze how these historical layers have been preserved, transformed, or marginalized in the city’s official commemorative record. Using a mixed-methods design combining archival research, critical discourse analysis, GIS-based toponymic mapping, and semi-structured interviews across three generational cohorts, we identify a pattern we term the functional prioritization of memory: historical periods are foregrounded in heritage development in proportion to their present-day utility, while others are systematically underrepresented. Situating Changchun within the “Global East” framework, we argue that this selective approach reflects a distinctive mode of heritage governance—characterized by pragmatic curation and continuity rather than the sharp commemorative reversals observed in other postsocialist contexts. The findings advance an integrative analytical vocabulary—place genealogies, functional prioritization of memory, genealogical management—that extends critical toponymy beyond its current concentration on Central and Eastern European contexts and contributes to a more globally comparative framework for studying urban memory governance. Full article

This article theorises Hmong migration through the concept of resettled histories, understood as the social and political processes through which histories of war, flight, loss, survival, and belonging are carried into new places, translated into new institutional languages, and contested across generations. Rather than approaching Hmong mobility as a linear movement from Southeast Asia to Western resettlement countries, the article situates Hmong migrations within longer histories of upland mobility, imperial and colonial governance, Cold War militarisation, refugee camps, and contemporary diasporic reconstruction. In response to scholarship on collective memory, postmemory, diasporic memory, refugee critique, digital diaspora, and Asian American studies, the article clarifies that resettled histories are not simply memories preserved after migration. They are histories that become socially active after resettlement through community organisations, veteran memorialisation, Hmong New Year celebrations, oral-history projects, clan networks, digital platforms, political mobilisation, and intergenerational debate. The article also foregrounds differences among Hmong communities by gender, generation, religion, class, political position, national location, and relations to Laos, China, Thailand, France, Australia, and the United States. By engaging contemporary Hmong scholarship and Hmong-produced archives alongside foundational migration and memory theory, the article shows how displaced communities do not merely adapt to host societies; they also struggle to have their histories recognised, narrated, and transmitted. The Hmong case demonstrates that resettlement may provide legal security without ending the historical life of displacement. It therefore offers a lens for rethinking migration as the movement and reconstruction of histories, not only the movement of people. Full article

Scholarship on Nazar Eshonqul has primarily interpreted his fiction through the frameworks of absurdism, symbolism, and postmodern alienation. In this article, I make a different claim: that his title story, Maymun Yetaklagan Odam (“The Man Led by a Monkey”), and the stories that cluster around it in the 2008 collection can best be read as a sustained meditation on genealogical rupture: what happens to a family and a community when the lines along which memory, value, and identity are supposed to pass are broken. The study is based on memory studies (Halbwachs, the Assmanns), postmemory theory (Hirsch), cultural trauma theory (Alexander, Caruth), and theories of narrative identity and habitus (Ricoeur, Bourdieu, Hall) and reads these in conjunction with recent work on post-Soviet narrative and inherited trauma in similar literary works in order to interpret the painter, his monkey-led-man canvases and his estranged son in close detail. The study argues that the monkey functions as a symbol of inheritance detached from its origin, a transmission that lives on mechanically, without meaning. The narrative fictionalises the violent social changes that were part of twentieth-century Central Asian life and which emptied the spaces of familial and cultural continuity, resulting in alienation, social amnesia and an identity that no longer knows how to tell itself. This reading situates Uzbek modernist fiction within broader debates on genealogy and memory, showing how literary narrative can more effectively illuminate disruptions in cultural inheritance than discursive analysis alone. Full article

This paper reports on the findings of a large-scale survey (N = 1406) in Australia examining what ‘history’ means to practising family historians. Using the Typology of Historical Consciousness as a second-level analytical framework, the study identifies and categorises the diverse ways in which family historians conceptualise and define the discipline. Findings reveal that the majority of respondents articulate a traditional historical consciousness (50.5%), characterised by identity-seeking, generational connection, and a conception of history as inherited continuity. A substantial proportion (27.3%) demonstrate genetic historical consciousness, framing history as a dynamic developmental process linking past, present, and future. Exemplary and critical historical consciousness each account for approximately eleven percent of responses, indicating that lesson-extraction from the past and epistemological scepticism toward inherited historical narratives are minority, though analytically significant, orientations within this population. The study contributes empirical data to ongoing international conversations around the definitions, meanings, and purposes of history, and has implications for how academic historians and heritage institutions engage with the large and historically active community of non-professional historians. Full article

This article is a conversation-style paper between two takatāpui weaver-scholars presenting the creative praxis behind the 2026 exhibition in Kirikiriroa, Aotearoa, titled Whatua He Whiringa Takatāpui. The exhibition included five takatāpui weavers across Aotearoa who wove together queer Māori communities to reject the colonial binaries of traditional and contemporary, art and craft, and male and female. With multiple activations and ceremonies held in the gallery space, Whatua He Whiringa Takatāpui fostered mana takatāpui, and takatāpui community and thrivance from the harakeke roots in Kirikiriroa. Some of the taonga created in this exhibition are inspired by taonga tawhito, or Māori ancestral treasures, which collapse space–time and allow descendants to connect to the ancestors of generations past. With two such taonga, a kuia’s kete and an 18th-century kaitaka, the authors meet their respective elders to share kōrero that could not—and did not—happen in their lifetimes. How does our creative practice allow us to theorize alongside our grandmothers and generations past? Full article

This paper adopts a multisemiotic perspective to examine the significations of monuments in city spaces in Calabar, Nigeria. Data were generated through photo documentation, participant observation and semi-structured interviews in a three-year fieldwork involving 34 participants. Drawing from interactions between the designers, the monuments and the social audience, findings present the monuments as multisemiotic significations of the benefits derived from Western education, gains from missionaries’ activities and their interface with the locals, abolition of the slave trade, sociocultural heritage, histories and identity, potential in tourism and carnivals, and an emerging shift from African traditional religion to Anglo-Christian beliefs. These representations are dialogic expressions of lived experiences and histories of residents that (re)construct memorials of their past and provide a guide for the present and project expectations of the future. The symbolic images integrate localised intentions of the designers drawn from the environment and the people, with appropriate interpretations by the social audiences to situate their indigenous significations within varying global discourses on monuments. Full article