Genealogy, Volume 10, Issue 3 (August 2026) – 32 articles

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

The novel Mehrobdan Chayon by Abdulla Qodiriy has been studied mostly as a historical, social and literary text, and its representation of motherhood and women as agents of cultural transmission has received little scholarly attention. This article suggests that Qodiriy presents motherhood not primarily as a biological relationship but as a cultural institution, in which Uzbek society is reproduced across generations in terms of literacy, religious and literary canon, comportment and marital expectation. The analysis, based on close reading of three figures, i.e., the neighbourhood girls’ teacher, Nigor oyim; the educated daughter, Ra’no; and the marital-futures-managing woman, Mohlar oyim, and an interdisciplinary cultural-studies approach, demonstrates that the maternal line functions as the novel’s mechanism of cultural continuity, transmitting both knowledge and social constraint. The article adds a Central Asian case to the study of motherhood and rethinks Qodiriy’s domestic scenes as the place where Uzbek womanhood is reproduced and reformed. Full article

A Orhan Pamuk’s first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons (Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları), published in 1982, follows three generations of an Istanbul bourgeois family from the late Ottoman period to the 1970s. Set during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey, the novel explores the social and cultural tensions accompanying Turkish modernization. This article examines father–child relationships in the novel through the theoretical framework of multiple modernities. Rejecting the assumption that modernization follows a singular Western model, the study approaches Turkish modernization as a historically specific and layered experience shaped by local social and cultural dynamics. Within this context, the article focuses on paternal authority, masculine identity, intergenerational expectation, and memory across three generations of the family. The study further analyzes how photographs, domestic spaces, rituals, and everyday narratives preserve the symbolic presence of the father after death, allowing paternal authority to persist across generations. The article argues that the novel presents a representative portrait of an Istanbul bourgeois family negotiating the tensions between tradition and modernity during the Ottoman–Republican transition. Full article

Genealogy is about the things that are transmitted from one generation to the next: blood, name, property but also grief, guilt, belief and dread. A genealogical reading of Stephen King’s fiction suggests that this is the last category of inheritance that preoccupies the writer’s imagination and that the entire oeuvre is more concerned with the transmission of fear and supernatural power through kinship, community and place than with the terror of the haunted subject alone. In King’s fiction, fear is inherited rather than merely experienced, supernatural power is transmitted rather than acquired and horror is reproduced through families, communities and social institutions. This study, which uses King’s novels as evidence rather than as objects of close reading and draws on genealogy studies, cultural and collective memory theory, trauma studies and family-systems thinking, traces four recurrent genealogical structures: the family lineage of fear; the inheritance of supernatural capacity as a form of cultural transmission; the ancestral burden carried by communities and reproduced through their memory; and the consolidation of these into durable genealogies of identity, power and trauma. King’s fiction thus provides an underutilized archive for genealogy studies: a popular genre in which cultural fears of lineage, descent and social reproduction are performed at the interface of the affective and the supernatural. In all these novels, the struggle to break free from what one has inherited is hard and it is this struggle that the present study examines. Full article

Encounters between Africa and Europe have occurred since ancient times, yet a decisive turn in these relations occurred during the height of European imperial and colonial expansionist explorations from the 15th century. The central question behind this article is how did Europe succeed in emasculating Africans and Africa? Through a multi-focal analysis combining systems-thinking and intersectionality approaches to analyzing these encounters, this article makes the following findings—Europe constructed an asymmetrical relationship in which race, gender, religion, and class were instrumentalized and weaponized, erasing or blurring the distinctions between the sacred and the secular to achieve the total domination and control of Africans while assuring themselves of access to all African resources. Full article

Traditional namesake practices are indisputable naming conventions among the Bende people, through which old names are maintained without infiltrating the community with new ones. It is believed that, when a person who had lived earlier on, had led an impactful life, there is the need to keep their memories immortalized in the life of another, rather than creating an entirely new one. Thus, the Bende people in Abia State have been consciously identified by the recurring naming identity pattern in which as many as qualified people can bear a particular name in a particular extended family. This peculiar onomastic practice has been so misunderstood by others that it has become imperative to study and investigate why certain names are repeated, by whom, and to also identify the cultural events that herald such processes. To achieve this, this study adopted a descriptive qualitative research design to investigate the linguistic and cultural significance of namesakes. Forty participants were selected, using purposive sampling from the area of study, through whom data was elicited. Participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions were primarily used for data collection. The collected data were translated and analysed using thematic analysis to identify and categorise patterns. This study was based on socio-onomastic theory, and revealed the names recycled, the reasons behind them, the cultural significance of this onomastic practice, the conditioning of names in Bende, the namesake ritual, and the perceptions of the namesake pattern by the community. Full article

This study examines the rituals and identity formation processes of a women’s motorcycle group in Adana (Türkiye) through an autoethnographic perspective. While motorcycles are often associated with male-dominated cultures, women riders have increasingly established their own communities and collective practices. Drawing on participant observation, the study introduces the concept of “ethnomotography” to describe autoethnographic research conducted within motorcycle culture. Data were collected through long-term participation in group activities, meetings, rallies, and everyday interactions as a member of the group between September 2022 and June 2024. The findings demonstrate that group identity is constructed and maintained through a series of rituals that resemble “rites of passage”. These rituals include initiation processes, the symbolic use of club insignia and vests, participation in weekly meetings and rallies, collective social responsibility projects, and mechanisms regulating membership continuity. The findings demonstrate that these rituals function as cultural mechanisms through which belonging, solidarity, and collective identity are produced. At the same time, the study shows that while the women’s motorcycle group provides an important space for mutual support, visibility, and empowerment within a predominantly male motorcycle culture, it also selectively reproduces organizational norms commonly associated with motorcycle clubs. Finally, the study suggests that belonging may persist beyond formal organizational membership, indicating that ritual participation produces identities that extend beyond institutional boundaries. By introducing ethnomotography as a perspective for studying motorcycle cultures from within, this research contributes to discussions of ritual, gender and identity. Full article

For over a century, the South African secular state refused to legally recognise Islamic marriages (nikah), primarily due to their potentially polygynous nature. This statutory exclusion left Muslim women without civil legal protections during marriage, upon divorce, and at the death of a spouse. This article examines the fifteen-year strategic litigation campaign led by the Women’s Legal Centre (WLCT), which culminated in the landmark 2022 Constitutional Court judgment. Utilising a qualitative analysis of public court filings, legal pleadings, and judicial decisions, the author explores how marginalised Muslim women used civil courts to bypass and challenge the exclusive authority of conservative male clerical councils (ulama). The article analyses this legal trajectory through two primary theoretical lenses: Robert Cover’s concept of jurispathy (the state’s suppression of a community’s laws) and Afro-feminist frameworks. The findings reveal a critical tension in state-led legal reform. While the 2022 judgment secured vital financial and proprietary protections for women, it simultaneously introduced the limitations of ‘state feminism’ by replacing informal religious control with a rigid state bureaucracy. The paper argues that developing an authentic decolonial family law requires a jurisprudence that enforces the material and financial rights of African Muslim women without forcing their religious unions to conform entirely to Western, secular concepts of civil marriage. Full article

Family health history (FHH) is an important tool for cancer risk assessment, yet its clinical utility is undermined by incomplete data, particularly among historically marginalized communities whose family records have been systematically disrupted by slavery, forced displacement, and undocumented status. I conducted a cross-sectional online survey of 1885 US adults affected by cancer to examine associations between genealogy engagement and FHH confidence and to assess variation across sociodemographic subgroups. Genealogy research was the single strongest modifiable predictor of FHH confidence, with participants reporting genealogy research more than twice as likely to report high confidence compared to those who did not (OR = 2.07, 95% CI 1.72–2.50), a relationship that persisted after full adjustment for age, sex, race, income, and education. Despite comparable rates of genealogy engagement, Black and Hispanic respondents reported substantially lower FHH confidence than White respondents. These findings suggest that while interest in genealogy is already widespread and self-motivated in the population, current clinical tools for FHH collection are inadequate to leverage this interest equitably. Next-generation FHH tools should be designed to reflect the dynamic, collaborative features of genealogy platforms rather than static medical forms, and their development must be grounded in community-centered design principles that prioritize populations for whom incomplete family history poses an added burden. Full article

This study analyses the Reformed liturgy as a site of ritual contestation that both shapes and facilitates the reconstruction and transformation of gender roles and identities in African contexts. Rooted in genealogical and decolonial scholarship, it examines how a ministry, long-reformed yet fundamentally integral to African-congregational communities, continues to express masculine forms of agency already present in reformed worship that influence perceptions of power, belonging, and identity. The emphasis is on Reformed communities in Southern Africa, where the arrangements of liturgical practices, preaching, eldership, sacramental administration, and life-cycle rites persist in grappling with a colonial past from an African epistemological perspective. This study examines the intersections of baptism, marriage, funerals, and ordination with customary rites such as lobola (bridewealth), initiation, and ancestor veneration, drawing on liturgical theology, ritual studies, and African gender scholarship to reveal both reproductive and resistant dynamics while simultaneously reshaping a new order within these practices. This article examines the ways in which worship facilitates continuity, rupture, and transformation within African gender identities, while seeking to situate Reformed liturgy within an African context of ritual ecologies rather than to contrast them. This approach may enhance decolonial discourse by illuminating contemporary discussions on liturgical studies and gender. Full article