Search Results (720)

Zoomafia is frequently invoked in Italian public, advocacy, and institutional discourse to describe profit-oriented animal-related crime, but the term remains analytically broad and insufficiently connected to criminological theory. This narrative criminological review examines zoomafia as a cautious social-scientific lens for studying organized animal-related crime across heterogeneous illicit markets. Keyword-driven searches in Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and targeted criminological, legal, policy, and institutional sources were complemented by citation tracking and qualitative source selection. Peer-reviewed scholarship forms the analytical core, while legal, institutional, and advocacy materials are used selectively and with explicit evidentiary limits. Findings suggest that organized animal-related crime is best understood through market governance, brokerage, legal-illegal interface management, digital mediation, logistics, facilitation, evidentiary visibility, and variable convergence with other illicit economies, rather than through generic offence labels alone. The Italian perspective is analytically useful because companion-animal trafficking, dog fighting and betting circuits, clandestine horse racing, illicit slaughtering, wildlife trafficking, and online-facilitated trade can be compared within a shared frame that also exposes the limits of rhetorical mafia labelling. The article argues that zoomafia should not be treated as a self-proving mafia label, a new legal category, or a synonym for wildlife trafficking, but as a comparative framework for identifying organizational features, enforcement constraints, and evidentiary thresholds. The evidence base remains stronger on strategic recommendations than on robust comparative evaluation of enforcement effectiveness. 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

The article examines conservative rhetoric and discourse in Israel toward the LGBTQ+ community from a sociolinguistic perspective that conceptualizes language as an arena of socio-cultural struggle over identity, power, and normativity. Drawing on queer linguistics theory and identity politics, the study explores how language constructs reality through metaphors of illness, sin, and existential threat, as well as through theological framing and appeals to family and national values. These rhetorical strategies produce a social hierarchy in which heteronormativity is positioned as a “natural truth” while queer identities are labelled as deviant or threatening. From sociological perspective, the study reveals how conservative discourse establishes social boundaries and reinforces collective identity through the exclusion of the Other, thereby reproducing power relations and hierarchies. The article calls for the development of an alternative public discourse grounded in pluralism, inclusion, and the recognition of diverse identities as a means of strengthening democracy and social justice. While existing studies have examined conservative discourse toward LGBTQ+ communities primarily in Western contexts, this study contributes to the field by centering the Israeli case as a distinctive site of analysis, where conservative voices emerge from multiple and ideologically heterogeneous traditions: national-religious, ultra-Orthodox, and Muslim-Arab. By examining how rhetorically divergent speakers converge around shared mechanisms of exclusion, the study reveals that heteronormative discourse is not the product of a single ideological source, but a cross-sectoral phenomenon embedded in the specific political and cultural tensions of Israeli society. Full article

Democratic erosion often begins rhetorically before institutions show visible damage. Here we test whether large language models (LLMs) can detect early linguistic signals of authoritarian drift in political speech. Formal speeches by Adolf Hitler (1922–1939), Donald Trump (2017–2025), Nicola Sturgeon (2014–2023), Giorgia Meloni (2022–2025) and Viktor Orban (2022–2025) were scored using an 11-indicator taxonomy derived from the Levitsky–Ziblatt framework and evaluated independently by GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5-Pro and Grok-4-Fast, with near-perfect inter-model agreement. Principal Component Analysis revealed two poles: an authoritarian–populist cluster (Hitler–Trump–Orban) and a democratic-institutional pole (Meloni–Sturgeon). To quantify proximity to an authoritarian reference, we introduce the Authoritarian Reference Index (ARI), defined such that it captures both its alignment and intensity relative to the Hitler gold-standard vector. Trump exhibited the highest proximity to the reference (99.1% alignment, 80.7% intensity), followed by Orban, who mirrored the structural alignment (97.6%) with a moderated intensity (72.4%). In contrast, the democratic-institutional pole was distinguished by significantly lower intensity scores, with Meloni (16.4%) and Sturgeon (22.3%) remaining distant from the authoritarian magnitude despite varying degrees of structural overlap. These results show that extreme rhetorical peaks carry disproportionate diagnostic weight and that LLMs can expose structural authoritarian patterns relevant for democratic monitoring. Full article

This article examines how sacred vocabularies from Orthodox Christianity and Judaism function in racialised public discourse in Poland and Ukraine between 2020 and 2025. It asks how terms such as imago Dei/tselem Elohim, neighbour-love and chesed, holiness/purity, suffering/martyrdom, and exile/return are mobilised across pulpit, policy, and platform communication. Drawing on a corpus of 23 publicly available texts, the study applies comparative rhetorical discourse analysis informed by Burke’s concepts of identification and logology and Pernot’s account of the religious dimension of rhetoric, alongside a coding scheme focused on topoi, metaphors, frames, appeals, and boundary work. The findings show convergences in dignity claims, memorial warning, and care rhetoric under conditions of war and displacement but also clear divergences: Jewish discourse more often mobilises peoplehood as a rhetoric of continuity and communal protection, whereas Orthodox discourse more often ties sacred language to national-historical self-location, ecclesial autonomy, and opposition to russkii mir (“Russian world”). Across the retained corpus, dog-whistle-like discourse appears mainly as an object of quotation or denunciation, while explicit counter-speech is widespread. The article concludes that sacred language remains an active rhetorical resource for defining dignity, injury, solidarity, and belonging, although its function varies across arenas, traditions, and the corpus’s asymmetries. Full article

Transformational leadership (TL) remains a dominant framework in educational leadership, yet its effectiveness appears inconsistent across institutional contexts, including higher education (HE). This study develops a contingent explanation of TL using the Motivation–Ability–Opportunity (MAO) lens. Drawing on an integrative review of 19 empirical studies, the analysis examines how TL practices interact with organisational conditions to produce transformational or symbolic outcomes. The findings indicate that TL operates through three interdependent mechanisms: motivational alignment, capability development, and structural empowerment. However, these mechanisms are fragile and contingent upon contextual factors including governance autonomy, resource infrastructure, organisational culture, leadership-system maturity, and strategic orientation. When these conditions are aligned, TL fosters sustained engagement, innovation, and institutional learning. When they are misaligned, TL can devolve into rhetorical or symbolic practice, generating cynicism and inertia. The study contributes to the theory and practice of leadership in HE by reconceptualising TL as a conditional system rather than a universally effective leadership style, highlighting the importance of organisational context in enabling or constraining leadership impact. Full article

This article argues that Alejandro Amenábar’s first three features—Tesis (1996), Abre los ojos (1997), and The Others (2001)—constitute a systematic investigation of cinema’s fundamental operations through thriller form. These films employ different thriller subgenres to explore cinema’s psychic, phenomenological, and ontological dimensions, progressing from explicit apparatus representation (Tesis thematizes scopophilia) through phenomenological allegory (Abre los ojos uses virtual reality to allegorize cinema as dream machine) to ontological embodiment (The Others makes ghosts figures for cinematic images). Drawing on Martin Rubin’s concept of the thriller as metagenre, Lucien Dällenbach’s typology of the mise en abyme, and psychoanalytic film theory (Mulvey, Metz, Baudry), I show how the thriller’s sadomasochistic rhetoric, its aggressive manipulation of spectatorial response, makes it uniquely suited to metatextual exploration. The trilogy demonstrates that reflexivity intensifies rather than disrupts genre pleasure, challenging conventional oppositions between entertainment and critique, popular cinema and metacinematic practice. Full article

Background/Objectives: Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into dental diagnostics, promising improved detection, efficiency, and patient communication. While these developments offer potential clinical benefits, emerging commercial applications raise important ethical concerns. This study explores how providers of diagnostic AI systems frame their technologies in marketing materials, with particular attention to features designed to influence patient acceptance and increase revenue. Methods: An exploratory qualitative thematic analysis was conducted on publicly available promotional content from leading dental AI companies between September and October 2025. Materials were analyzed for recurring rhetorical strategies related to commercialization, persuasion, technological authority, and representations of objectivity. Ethical interpretation was guided by principlism, professional ethics, and virtue-based perspectives. Results: The findings show that AI is frequently marketed not only as a diagnostic aid but also as a tool for boosting case acceptance, return on investment, and practice expansion. Visualizations and performance metrics are used rhetorically to position AI as authoritative and objective, encouraging patient compliance while downplaying uncertainty and potential harm. These practices risk undermining patient autonomy, promoting diagnostic inflation and overtreatment, and compromising professional integrity by shifting attention from patient welfare toward commercial outcomes. Conclusion: Pervasive marketing of diagnostic AI amplifies existing tensions between professional integrity and commercial incentives in dentistry. Without appropriate safeguards, AI risks reinforcing a transactional model of care in which patients are treated as consumers and diagnostics become instruments of persuasion. To preserve trust and ethical practice, dentists and professional organizations must ensure that AI remains a supportive clinical tool rather than a commercial device, prioritizing transparency, informed consent, and patient-centered care. Full article

The question of the presence and active participation of artists of African descent is an obscure one in the art history of Mexico. We know that Black hands were vital participants in the arts of the Americas, and their contributions to Spanish American art were innumerable, but the full extent of this contribution remains frustratingly unclear. Relatively little scholarly research has focused on the Black artists of the colonial world; the most famous are the rare exceptions, including Juan Correa of Mexico (1646–1716). Even in this instance, however, misinformation and confusion abound. A distinguished painter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Correa was of a mixed-race family and was himself Afro-Mexican. The son of a physician from Cádiz, Spain and a free Black woman, Pascuala de Santoyo, Correa became one of the most prolific painters of his day with upwards of four hundred works identifiably of his oeuvre. He executed a number of works for the cathedral in Mexico City, while others were sent half a world away to Spain. The Correa family was one of the most active families of painters in colonial Mexico City, and his nephew Nicolás Correa was also a mixed-race artist of note. Yet, only recently has Correa’s Black heritage publicly marked his identity. While not overtly hidden from modern viewers, the assertion and emphasis of Correa’s status as Afro-Mexican is relatively new. This is the result of a long history of racial erasure(s), slippage, public disinterest, and modern narratives of Mexicanidad that began in the colonial period. Already a maestro pintor when the painters’ guild in Mexico City instituted new policies in the late seventeenth century designed to prevent artists of othered racial categories from achieving the highest levels of success, Correa stands out as an artist of Black heritage in Mexico who renders the African history of the Americas visible through his own personhood, but who participates in the invisibility of that African-ness in the visual canon. This article therefore proposes to begin from Juan Correa and cast a wide net to examine the invisibility of the Black artist in Mexico and the visibilities of race and rhetorical bodies in New Spain as the larger Viceregal territory. Full article

The biblical commentaries of Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444) represent a major contribution to the development of patristic exegesis. His Commentary on the Gospel of John demonstrates the close interaction between Christological theology, allegorical interpretation, and ecclesial polemic within late antique biblical interpretation. While Cyril’s exegesis has often been praised for its theological sophistication, modern scholarship increasingly recognizes that his interpretive framework also contains a pronounced anti-Judaic dimension. This study examines several key passages from Cyril’s Commentary on the Gospel of John in order to analyse how typology, supersessionist theology, and polemical rhetoric function together in his interpretation. Particular attention is given to Cyril’s portrayal of Jewish ignorance, his attribution of responsibility for the death of Christ, and his typological reinterpretation of Jewish law and history. The analysis demonstrates that Cyril integrates anti-Jewish rhetoric into a broader theological system in which the Mosaic law is presented as a provisional anticipation fulfilled in Christ and realized in the Christian Church. Full article

This article considers the literary exploration of women’s celibacy through the prism of science fiction, beginning with an overview of the genre’s often-retrograde engagements with the subjects of marriage, reproduction and heteronormative ideology. Alongside this genre context, a 19th-century Irish historical context is outlined, juxtaposing genre history with the ‘matrimonial’ rhetoric that arose following the 1801 Act of Union, which framed the merging of Ireland into the United Kingdom as a ‘marriage’ between Ireland and Great Britain, with Ireland represented as the bride. In the overlap between these two contexts, this article identifies several future-set Irish novels that address this rhetoric directly, while also tracing its (perhaps unconscious) impact in other texts, before moving on to consider one novel in particular: Mercia, the Astronomer Royal (1895) by Amelia Garland Mears. The article concludes by arguing that science fiction’s past missteps with regard to marriage and sex can be explained by the fact that traditional, patriarchal marriage is in fact fundamentally unsuited to a genre primarily concerned with the future, resulting in reactionary overcompensation. Full article

Central European, especially the Hungarian and Polish experiences, reveal a profound paradox, anti-immigration policy narratives, yet immigration laws and policies support reliance on migrant workforce (non-EU migrants). The question arises: why is that? The aim of this research is to examine the ways in which Poland and Hungary have managed the challenges of labor migration in the region, arising from the demographic crisis and labor shortages in the region. The research will use a socio-legal approach in the analysis of the changes in the laws of the two countries, government strategies, statistics, and political discourse in the period from 2023 to 2025. The assessment of the two countries will reveal a contrast in the political narrative and the implementation of the laws. Hungary maintains a narrative of strict migration and quotas, while at the same time liberalizing economic migration. Poland, on the contrary, has adopted a liberal yet selective migration strategy in the new laws that incorporate digital administrative tools, integration, and a points system for economic migrants. The research will reveal that both countries have moved from being net emigration countries to being net immigration countries, despite the political narrative. The research will conclude that the migration policies of the two countries have been influenced by the need to address the structural labor shortages in the region and not political ideologies. Experiences in Central Europe, specifically those of Hungary and Poland, show a unique contradiction of having anti-immigration politics and legislation providing for easier access to the countries’ borders to non-EU workers to solve problems of labor shortages. This paper will discuss the approaches of these two countries to dealing with labor migration in light of declining populations and increased need for migrant workers. Comparative socio-legal research is conducted in the course of this project, where recent legislative amendments, policies, statistics, and political discourse in relation to labor migration are reviewed within the period from 2023 to 2025. The research shows that while maintaining its conservative and securitized narrative, Hungary makes some concessions for economic migration through specific legal channels. Meanwhile, Poland has managed to build up an open and selective approach by combining labor market demands with digitization and points-based policy making. The results suggest that both nations operate in an environment of net immigration despite their official rhetoric implying otherwise. In conclusion, policies towards labor migration in Central Europe remain economic in nature, which produces contradiction between politics and reality. Full article

Industrial heritage adaptive reuse occupies a structurally privileged position for degrowth: heritage listing already institutionalises material sufficiency as a regulatory obligation, mandating low intervention and resisting the demolish-and-replace logic of resource-intensive development. Yet this regulatory floor imposes no ceiling on how protected structures are programmed or who benefits; the same statutory instrument can produce different schemes depending entirely on governance. This paper demonstrates that gap through two contrasting UK gasholder adaptive reuse projects: King’s Cross Gasholders in London (private-led, luxury residential) and Granton Gasholder in Edinburgh (council-led community park). Applying De Castro Mazarro et al.’s multi-scalar degrowth framework across building, neighbourhood, and city scales through document analysis and site observations, we identify structural mechanisms explaining why building-scale alignment fails to propagate upward. The findings indicate three governance conditions are necessary to convert the structural degrowth potential of industrial heritage into substantive outcomes: public control over development decisions, community participation extended to strategic priorities rather than design preferences, and explicit integration of degrowth values into upstream planning frameworks. Industrial heritage adaptive reuse is not inherently a degrowth practice, but it is one of the few urban development contexts where the regulatory preconditions for degrowth alignment are already in place. Realising that potential requires governance structures that treat sufficiency and collective wellbeing as binding objectives, not rhetorical claims. Full article

Objective: To analyse the rhetorical strategies employed in formal complaints regarding adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism assessments, specifically where no service failure was identified. Methods: A rhetorical analysis was conducted on 48 complaints determined to be not upheld overall, submitted to a UK NHS Trust between 2024 and 2025. Results: Complainants demonstrated high rhetorical sophistication, frequently deploying a “Triple Core” strategy: Causal Attribution (blaming the service for life failures), Emotional Impact Description (framing dissatisfaction as medical trauma), and Procedural Challenge (alleging administrative breach). A minority (18.8%) employed economic arguments, whilst 81.2% included specific outcome demands, such as a prescription or a specific diagnosis. Conclusions: Complaints in this area of clinical practice demonstrate sophisticated rhetorical construction, functioning as instruments of organisational pressure. The “Triple Core” strategy creates an epistemic conflict where clinical judgement is contested by the patient’s lived experience narrative. These findings suggest that high complaint volumes may reflect a systemic gap between public expectation and clinical criteria rather than safety failures. Full article

This study explores how Machiavellian leadership behaviors may become embedded in ethical mentorship relationships and how these dynamics influence trust formation, dependency, emotional ambivalence, and trust erosion within higher education institutions (HEIs). Drawing on destructive leadership and impression management perspectives, this study examines how ethical rhetoric and developmental language may function as mechanisms through which manipulation, reciprocity expectations, and dependency become normalized within organizational mentorship relationships. A qualitative research design was adopted, using semi-structured interviews with sixteen participants employed within multicultural HEIs in the United Arab Emirates. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis to identify recurring patterns related to mentorship experiences, ethical self-presentation, emotional tension, and evolving trust dynamics. The findings revealed five interrelated themes: “The Wolf in a Scholar’s Robe,” where mentors project ethical identities while pursuing self-interest; “Debts That Never End,” reflecting the use of gratitude and reciprocity to create ongoing obligation; “Trust Fractures,” characterized by the erosion of interpersonal and institutional trust following perceived manipulation; “Ambivalence of Gratitude,” capturing the emotional conflict between appreciation and resentment; and “Signals of Dual Image,” highlighting the contrast between public ethical performance and private exploitative behavior. Together, these findings demonstrate how ethical mentorship may simultaneously function as a source of professional support and a mechanism of subtle control. This study contributes to the literature by conceptualizing performative ethical mentorship as a potential mechanism through which manipulative leadership behaviors may become legitimized within academic institutions. It further extends current scholarship by integrating Machiavellian leadership, ethical mentorship, emotional ambivalence, and trust dynamics within an analysis of multicultural HEI environments in the UAE, highlighting how performative ethical leadership may gradually erode psychological safety, relational trust, and organizational confidence. Full article