Search Results (12,750)

This article examines how B. R. Ambedkar’s 1956 Buddhist conversion is re-narrativized in Mahar Dalit life writing as a foundational religious event that simultaneously embodies rupture and continuity. Drawing on three Marathi Dalit texts, Akkarmashi, Baluta and The Prisons We Broke, all examined in their published English translations, and situated within the theological framework of Ambedkar’s Buddha and His Dhamma, the study argues that Dalit authors transform the conversion event into a sacred narrative structure organized around suffering, awakening, and liberation. Rather than representing a simple rejection of religion, these narratives reconfigure the religious imagination by producing a form of counter-sacrality that both contests and reconstitutes the sacred: the suffering of the caste order is retrospectively sanctified as the necessary prehistory of collective rebirth, while the 1956 conversion is preserved as a permanently reactivatable origin point for ongoing religious and political life. The study proposes Dalit sacred time as a distinct analytical model of subaltern religious temporality, characterized by three features. By foregrounding a non-Western, intercultural case, the article engages directly with questions of continuity and contestation in the relationship between literature and religion, showing how literary texts can generate new forms of religious meaning beyond established traditions. Full article

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been increasingly used in criminal justice systems across the world. To achieve objectives set out through Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adoption of technology is inevitable and undeniable. The press release dated 25 February 2025 from India’s Ministry of Law and Justice, quoting Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi to make a “justice system that will be fully future-ready”, confirmed that the Indian law enforcement agencies are integrating AI into policing and law enforcement to enhance crime detection, criminal investigation, etc. It is intended to enhance their capabilities in solving criminal cases and delivering justice speedily and more efficiently. However, the usage of AI tools in such contexts presents a double-edged sword, as evidenced by their application in a number of cases across the world like Christopher Gatlin, Nijeer Parks, the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART), and in India during the 2020 Delhi riots cases. As reported by the Washington Post, in Christopher Gatlin’s case it was found that the police arrested him on the basis of the facial recognition programme matching his face with the captured video footage. He spent 17 months in jail before his release by the court, observing that the police failed to conduct fair investigation. A similar incident was reported by NJ.com and CNN Business. In the investigations following the 2020 Delhi riots, Delhi Police effected over 1900 arrests in 758 riot-related cases, relying predominantly on AI-driven facial recognition matches. Subsequent court scrutiny in decided cases raised questions about reliability, leading to widespread acquittals and discharges of the accused in 82% of decided cases as of early 2025. In certain cases, AI-driven solutions have failed, leading to criminal prosecutions of innocent people based on AI-generated evidence. This study examines the reliability, validity, and ethics of AI technology in the criminal justice system in India’s unique socio-legal and political environment. The researchers analyse three interrelated axes. First, a comprehensive review of the international algorithmic policing literature to identify successes and failures. In addition, cases of AI-assisted investigations during the Delhi riots show how facial recognition systems and other AI techniques were used for inquiry. Finally, stakeholders’ perspectives, including a preliminary survey of 27 legal experts showing strong consensus on classifying AI-FRT outputs strictly as corroborative evidence and highlighting BSA insufficiencies for addressing opacity and explainability, help identify practical, procedural, and normative fault lines. Researchers noted that while AI has the potential to revolutionise resource-constrained investigative agencies, its unquestioning and uncritical adoption risks amplify pre-existing biases, undermine presumptions of innocence, and shift the burden of refuting algorithmic inference onto the accused. Independent algorithmic audits, transparent documentation of error rates and confidence thresholds, statutory guidelines on AI tool use and admissibility, and sustained capacity-building throughout the justice delivery chain are needed to integrate it into the Indian criminal justice system. Without such measures, the very tools designed and introduced to enhance accuracy threaten to undermine the fundamental norms of the criminal justice system such as fairness and due process. This fills a gap in doctrinal analysis of AI-specific evidentiary admissibility in non-Western contexts like India. This study aims to propose policy reforms, enhance judicial discourse, and promote a more circumspect trajectory for AI adoption in Indian law enforcement by mapping the potential and risks of algorithmic evidence in a non-Western legal order. Full article

This study examines the positioning of biblical narratives within international relations scholarship, with particular emphasis on their function as cultural resources shaping identity, geopolitical discourse, and soft power dynamics. Although religion has gained increasing recognition within international relations, the extent to which scriptural narratives are systematically integrated into analytical frameworks remains insufficiently defined. To address this issue, the study employs a mixed-methods research design that combines a systematic literature review with bibliometric analysis. Bibliographic data were retrieved from the Scopus and Web of Science databases through a structured query linking biblical terminology to diplomacy, geopolitics, and religion–politics interactions, and were analyzed using the Bibliometrix package in R. The analysis draws on two datasets comprising 135 publications from Scopus and 88 from Web of Science, spanning 1989 to 2026. The findings indicate that scholarship examining biblical narratives in international relations is moderately developed and interdisciplinary, yet remains fragmented, with geopolitical themes predominating. Biblical narratives are consistently present but are primarily embedded within broader analytical categories such as identity, discourse, and legitimacy, rather than being treated as central variables. The results further suggest that religious content is often incorporated in indirect or implicit forms, reflecting a broader tendency to approach religion as a contextual rather than a constitutive element. Overall, the findings indicate that biblical narratives function primarily as interpretive and symbolic frameworks in international relations, while their analytical potential remains only partially developed, underscoring the need for more systematic integration of cultural and religious analysis in the study of global politics. Full article

The terms democracy and the pedagogy of the possible name an approach imagining schools as sites where more just, inclusive and participatory collective life can be practised, particularly in early childhood. The entry brings three traditions into dialogue. (a) Critical pedagogy, particularly in its post-structuralist, Foucauldian, and post-Marxist readings, engages with Rancièrian critiques of pedagogical mastery and offers a vocabulary for examining how power, knowledge, subjectivity, and hegemony are produced and contested within educational life. (b) Freinet pedagogy, extended through Fernand Oury’s Institutional Pedagogy, contributes a politically grounded, practice-first repertoire of cooperative techniques, classroom institutions, and democratic forms of organisation. (c) Educational commons approaches frame knowledge, space, time, and pedagogical relations as shared goods, collectively produced, cared for, and democratically governed by a community of teachers, children, and families. In this perspective, the child is approached as a commoner and agent in the here and now. The educator, in turn, is understood as a fellow commoner and reflexive practitioner, capable of acting beyond the logics of both the state and the market. Together, they co-shape the everyday life of education. Eight shared dimensions, namely the relational, the political, praxis, agency, anti-enclosure, prefiguration, community, and the schoolized mind, traverse all three traditions, with care as their transversal thread. The framework is conceived as a hospitable theoretical and practical space, not as a self-contained doctrine. It is heuristic in orientation, bringing these traditions into conversation because each contributes a complementary layer to democratic educational life. Full article

In the Anthropocene, the environmental crisis necessitates a radical repositioning of the human-nature relationship. This paper examines the sijo poetry in Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s For Nirvana through an interdisciplinary framework bridging Zen philosophy with material ecocriticism. The study elucidates how Musan deconstructs anthropocentric exceptionalism by restoring agency to the non-human world. Textual analysis reveals three arguments. First, elemental forces like wind and waves are subjectified as primordial teachers through mujō-seppō (non-sentient beings preaching the Dharma), dismantling sovereign human scriptural authority. Second, visceral encounters with animals and insects critique logocentric domination, proposing “epistemological silence” and “radical humility” as alternative eco-politics. Finally, bodily decay and trans-corporeal porosity are reframed as generative pathways toward a radical “ecological Nirvana”—a physical matrix of cyclical renewal. By synthesizing Jane Bennett’s vital materialism with Dōgen’s Zen vision of “walking mountains”, this study deploys a Zen materialism lens that enriches Western theory with the Buddhist soteriology of compassion (karuna). Ultimately, Musan reconfigures Nirvana not as an escapist transcendence, but as a profound somatic descent into the material mesh, where ultimate spiritual realization lies in the ego’s total dissolution into the “walking, talking minerals” of a sacred, suffering ecosystem. Full article

This article presents the late eighteenth-century origins of debates concerning the Christianization of the Romanians, focusing on the controversy between Franz Joseph Sulzer and the representatives of the Transylvanian School. It argues that this early dispute already formulated key interpretative models later developed in modern historiography. Rather than being limited to the issue of Roman continuity, the debate also addressed questions of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, ritual affiliation, and the influence of South-Danubian and Bulgarian Christianity. The study further examines the political use of Sulzer’s arguments in the context of the Supplex Libellus Valachorum, as well as the role of Petru Maior in transmitting and reshaping the controversy for the nineteenth century. By reassessing both the original texts and their later reception, the article highlights the need to reconsider the historiographical construction of Romanian Christianization narratives. Full article

Deaf people experience significant barriers to education, healthcare, employment, and information access, resulting in inequities across a myriad of contexts. To better understand these disparities, our all-deaf research team conducted semi-structured interviews with deaf and hearing (parents, caregivers, and educators) adults across Ecuador, exploring how structural, institutional, and social factors influence daily life and well-being. Participants (n = 36) described systemic exclusion from education and employment, limited access to interpreters and assistive technologies, and constrained autonomy due to insufficient family support and institutional resources. These barriers compound health risks by restricting access to care, information, and social participation. Participants’ narratives highlighted how political and economic instability, institutional neglect, and discrimination create structural vulnerabilities that extend beyond individual-level factors. Findings underscore the importance of public health interventions that address structural and communicative inequities, including inclusive education, accessible health services, and community-based support, to improve health equity and quality of life for deaf populations in Ecuador. Full article

Background: Telehealth is increasingly positioned as a solution for healthcare access among older adults; yet for transgender older adults, its application remains undertheorized, inconsistently implemented, and frequently reductive. Structural barriers, including provider incompetence, administrative misgendering, insurance precarity, and the clinical invisibility of aging transmasculine bodies, shape this population’s relationship to telehealth in ways that existing frameworks have not adequately addressed. Objective: This study examines the structural conditions shaping transmasculine and gender-nonconforming older adults’ engagement with healthcare and telehealth, and centers their visions for transformed, justice-oriented virtual care. Methods: Four semi-structured focus groups (n = 14 transmasculine and gender-nonconforming older adults, ages 40–67) were conducted via Zoom in June 2024 and analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis. The study was designed according to community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles. This study followed the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research guidelines to ensure methodological transparency in reporting. Results: Analysis yielded five themes: (1) the provider competency crisis; (2) administrative violence and the architecture of misgendering; (3) insurance, politics, and the precarity of access; (4) the aging transmasculine body as uncharted clinical territory; and (5) participants’ collective vision for relational, community-centered care. Conclusions: We introduce the Campfire Model of Relational Telehealth, a conceptual framework comprising five empirically derived pillars: gathering, warmth, collective knowledge, safety, and accountability. The model argues that telehealth must move beyond transactional encounters toward a relational ecosystem of care grounded in justice, belonging, and structural transformation. We conclude with a call to action for providers, policymakers, and researchers to dismantle structural barriers and advance telehealth that cultivates dignity, belonging, and equity. Full article

Prior research suggests that health messages can affect men and women differently, yet these differences and their underlying mechanisms remain insufficiently understood. Based on the premise that many health messages are implicitly gendered, this randomized controlled experiment (N = 1116), conducted in a high-risk real-world context, investigates the effectiveness of implicitly gendered messages on psychosocial determinants of protective behaviors, including cognitive, attitudinal, and motivational dimensions, as well as behavioral intentions. Twelve public health messages, derived from commonly used communications and theoretical frameworks, were first evaluated according to their perceived masculinity or femininity, and their effects were then experimentally tested across participants. Results indicate that messages strongly aligned with gender stereotypes produce the largest differences in effectiveness between men and women. For example, authority-based messages (a masculine stereotype) are more effective among men, whereas messages emphasizing social reciprocity or concern for others (feminine stereotypes) are more effective among women. These effects emerge only when recipients are likely to engage in systematic processing, particularly when their political stance diverges from that of the message source (the French government). The results support the gendered message–recipient gender congruence hypothesis, rather than alternative explanations based on gender-specific processing styles, with substantial practical implications. Full article

Practice-oriented or practice-based research is growing in popularity in the social, built environment and health fields for its important role in driving transformative changes at policy, programme/service and practice levels. As planning is a practice with performative characteristics occurring in a socio-political-legal context, practice-oriented research has been utilised to inform and help shape change. However, to be truly effective, practice-oriented research must be connected to day-to-day practices. In this article, we present our experience of using a Community of Practice (CoP)—that brings together people with shared interests and professions—to exchange learning and experiences and to help create knowledge to advance professional practice. In our case, we established a Community of Practice of Planners (CoPP) to help translate stage one findings into tailored knowledge resources to open up a dialogue and raise awareness on Planning for Disability Equity and Inclusion. In this article, we describe the method of CoP, how it works, including our reflections and learnings. We suggest that CoP are an underutilised method in planning practice and research. We argue that the CoP approach should be in a researcher and planner’s toolbox for more transformative progress in equity and inclusion in planning. Full article

Thematic analysis of large-scale political discourse remains a challenge due to semantic complexity and overlapping policy areas and changing diplomatic vocabulary. Although large language models (LLMs) offer promise for scalable thematic classification, their reliability in politically sensitive contexts requires systematic validation against expert human annotations. We evaluate LLM-based thematic classification of United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) speeches across a decade (2014–2023), using 7680 human-annotated themes mapped into 12 policy domains. Our results show that DeepSeek R1 achieves the highest accuracy 77% (F1 = 0.73), followed by ChatGPT, Gemini and LLaMA, with strong performance in lexically stable domains but substantial degradation in semantically overlapping categories such as governance and international cooperation. A unique dimension of our work is timeline analysis, which shows that the performance of LLMs over the years varies strongly and the precision decreases during times of rhetorical transformation, including pandemic-related discussions and the discourses of cooperation determined by the Russia–Ukraine conflict. By linking domain-level ambiguity and geopolitical shifts to temporal instability, this study introduces a dynamic robustness perspective for evaluating LLMs in computational political discourse analysis. Full article

Health tourism represents a dynamic sector operating at the intersection of medical services, international patient mobility, and tourism development. Despite its growing prominence, the academic literature frequently conflates health tourism with medical and wellness tourism—a conceptual ambiguity that complicates the establishment of robust, sustainable legal frameworks. Addressing this gap, the present paper conceptualizes health tourism as an overarching framework that encompasses recovery, wellness, and medical sub-sectors. Within this comprehensive paradigm, we explore the contemporary landscape of health tourism in Northern Cyprus through a stakeholder-driven qualitative lens. Utilizing a qualitative case study design, data were gathered via semi-structured interviews with 40 key respondents representing healthcare, travel, public administration, academia, and related professional domains, and subsequently subjected to thematic analysis using NVivo 15 software. The findings reveal that the sector in Northern Cyprus is heavily skewed toward medical tourism, with a concentrated focus on in vitro fertilization (IVF), cosmetic surgery, dental care, and bariatric procedures. Conversely, wellness and rehabilitation tourism remain largely untapped strategic niches. The analysis further indicates that sectoral growth is constrained by structural bottlenecks, including fragmented governance, limited international recognition, transport and accessibility barriers, inadequate accreditation systems, lack of stakeholder synergy, and ethical concerns regarding advertising and patient safety. Moving beyond standard environmental sustainability, this research underscores that long-term destination resilience requires ethical governance, clinical quality controls, patient-rights advocacy, transparent legal frameworks, and community-level economic integration. Ultimately, this study proposes an integrated, stakeholder-centric paradigm tailored to the unique socio-political and structural realities of Northern Cyprus, offering actionable policy recommendations that enrich the discourse on sustainable medical tourism from a small-island perspective. Full article

This study critically investigates the scientific literature on the intersection of management accounting and intellectual capital using a bibliometric performance analysis and science-mapping approach. Drawing on a sample of 59 publications from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, the paper maps the intellectual structure, key contributors, and thematic evolution of the field. This study conceptualizes management accounting not merely as a neutral technical system but as a socio-political mechanism that shapes how intellectual capital is rendered visible, measurable, and governable within organizations. The findings identify five dominant research clusters (intellectual capital and corporate strategy, management accounting and performance, green intellectual capital, digitalization and value creation, and management control and intangibles), revealing how accounting practices actively participate in constructing organizational realities and legitimizing particular forms of value and knowledge. The analysis highlights that measurement and reporting practices privilege certain dimensions of intellectual capital while potentially obscuring others, raising critical questions about power, visibility, and accountability in knowledge-based economies. In particular, the growing emphasis on digitalization and sustainability reflects shifting governance regimes in which accounting systems extend their influence over organizational conduct and strategic decision-making. By integrating bibliometric techniques with a critical interpretive lens, this study contributes to the literature by reframing management accounting as a key site where knowledge, control, and organizational value are negotiated. It also identifies gaps for future research, particularly regarding the ethical and political implications of accounting for intangible resources in increasingly digital and transparency-driven environments. Full article

Nuclear contamination challenges assumptions that harm can be contained through technological control, political borders, or bodily separation. Across the Asia-Pacific, radioactive exposure moves unevenly through racialised, gendered, and colonial histories, rendering some bodies more vulnerable to ecological violence than others. Nuclear regimes continue to depend upon theological logics of purity, sacrificial exclusion, and protected innocence. This article develops a spirituality of fermentation through Asian eco-feminist theology and the Korean practice of sakhim. Fermentation becomes a practice of sustaining wounded life through endurance, permeability, and communal care. From this spirituality of fermentation, I develop the concept of Vital Fluidity as an ethical and theological framework for understanding how life continues through shared vulnerability, where bodies, nourishment, and histories remain deeply entangled. The article contributes to intersectional debates in theology, religion, gender, and ecology by approaching contamination through relation rather than separation. Under nuclear conditions, ethical responsibility emerges through practices that hold grief, contamination, memory, and nourishment together within shared existence. Fermentation therefore becomes a practical theological model for living with nuclear bodies. Full article

Journalism in Albania unfolds in a fragile media environment where political pressure, economic insecurity and intimidation are part of everyday professional life. This study examines how Albanian journalists experience job-related stress and how they cope with it. Using a qualitative design, the study draws on 14 semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis to identify the main stressors and response strategies described by participants. Findings show that occupational stress is not episodic, but normalized within journalistic practice. Journalists reported three major stressors: political interference, financial precarity, and direct threats linked to reporting on crime and corruption. To manage these pressures, they relied on both problem-focused strategies, such as careful verification, legal consultation, and strategic reporting practices, and emotion-focused strategies, including peer support, emotional compartmentalization, and maintaining boundaries between work and family life. Full article