Publications

This study attempts to widen the scope of African ecocriticism and emphasize the roles of nonhuman life forms in literary representations of sustainable environments. Using Joe Ushie’s poetry collection, A Reign of Locusts, for a discourse situated within the African material ecocritical problematic, the study submits that some African poets valorize their birthplaces’ natures not only in recognition of the agency of their places, but also in deployment of traditionalism against the failures of modernity. That is, such African poets often shift from the romanticization of their indigenous ecologies to activism against the force that modernity exerts on the environment. While recognizing the enduring force of modernity, the poets, through their poetics of nature, suggest that the promotion of traditional ways of relating to the earth is one of the ways in which humans can ensure a sustainable environment.

This introductory paper outlines and situates the special issue’s core concept of growth infrastructures, defined as socio-material arrangements oriented towards or facilitating the pursuit of economic growth. We argue that the quest for continuous economic growth is not merely a matter of policy or institutional design, but instead more deeply embedded in intersections of ‘hard’ physical objects and ‘softer’ social relations. Mobilizing scholarship from across the social sciences, we bridge the study of infrastructures with the study of (post-)growth, two research agendas whose disconnect has inhibited deeper insights into the infrastructural relations underpinning (post-)growth regimes. Deliberate foregrounding of the relational underpinnings of growth is necessary, we contend, to better account for how infrastructures and the politics of (post-)growth are socio-materially entangled.

The first twenty-one books of Albert the Great’s massive paraphrastic commentary on Aristotle’s De animalibus (completed in the 1260s) were followed by something very different in books 22-26, namely brief narrative descriptions of various animals arranged alphabetically and relying extensively upon Thomas of Cantimpré’s De natura rerum. The result is a peculiar composite that first articulates the general or common principles of animals—e.g., the manner of their reproduction, their nutrition, growth, shared behaviors, etc.—but then provides brief, narrative descriptions of different animal species which are sourced primarily from Thomas of Cantimpré’s encyclopedia (ca. 1256). In the following pages I examine Albert’s use in his De animalibus of Thomas of Cantimpre’s narrative descriptions in De natura rerum. I will show that although Albert often criticized Thomas’s text, he utilized it nonetheless to satisfy the requirements for a natural science and to make that science accessible to a wider audience.

The shift to hybrid work has introduced new organizational challenges for higher education institutions (HEIs), especially when balancing academic freedom, managerial oversight, digital infrastructure, and global mobility. This study explores how three German universities are developing hybrid work policies in the context of institutional complexity. Using the Field-Level Deduction framework and the institutional logics perspective, we examine how these universities balance professional, managerial, market, and digital logics in their formal policies on mobile work and workation. Drawing on a comparative case study of mobile work agreements and expert interviews with the involved key actors, we identify three emerging modes of creative assembly: (1) flexibility oriented toward academic freedom, (2) structured balance through procedural clarity, and (3) standardization with strong risk aversion. Although these universities operate under the same legal framework, their hybrid work models vary considerably, suggesting different ways in which institutional logics can be selectively coupled. The study provides exploratory insights into the diversity of hybrid work in German HEIs and introduces creative assembly as a conceptual lens for understanding how universities navigate institutional complexity. The findings are not statistically representative but serve the purpose of analytic generalization, offering conceptual insights. These insights lay the theoretical groundwork for future empirical research examining the effects of different assemblies on outcomes such as academic productivity, collegiality, student engagement, and international competitiveness.

Despite widespread concern about levels of administrative burden within universities, understanding of the associated dimensions and drivers remains limited. Addressing the resulting lacuna, this paper presents a granular analysis of what academic staff within one national university system regard as the key dimensions and specific drivers of the administrative burdens they encounter at work. The data underlying our analyses are drawn from responses to an in-depth survey on administrative workloads from 350 academic staff working at 37 Australian universities. Our findings reveal that while generic administrative responsibilities add administrative burden, such burden is perhaps most acutely felt in the core academic work domains of teaching and research. In terms of perceptions of drivers, we find that two major strategies that universities have pursued to gain efficiencies—administrative centralization and administrative service automation—have resulted in what is widely experienced by academic staff as an intensification of their administrative burden.

This article provides the first comprehensive account of the forms and functions of apologies in Nigerian English, with a view to examining the factors that condition speakers’ choice of the linguistic forms of apologies in different text types as well as potential differences between apologies elicited via discourse completion tasks and those found in corpus data. Analysing the data from a postcolonial pragmatics approach, the article identifies nativised forms of apologising due to influence from indigenous Nigerian languages and reveals that the linguistic forms of apologies produced by Nigerian English speakers are systematically conditioned by the communicative situation. It suggests that it is the written mode of language production that allows speakers to choose speech acts without time pressure rather than the type of data as such, which influences the choice of linguistic forms of speech acts. Thus, the study contributes to the description of pragmatic variation in Nigerian English.

Bodies are immanent element of socio-cultural negotiation. Since the 19th century, Egyptology has produced vast knowledge on the ancient Egyptian bodies (human, divine, animal), however, mainly by focusing on funerary aspects of ancient Egyptian culture. Different paradigm shifts and turns of the last few decades (hermeneutics, semiotics, social-constructivism, ontology etc.), echo through Egyptology, but are still not part of the dominant discourse. This is also the case for the so-called “body turn”, an important epistemological turning point, that came largely unnoticed in Egyptology. Previous body centred Egyptological publications are either too specific in their focus or too broad in their presentation of Ancient Egyptian corporealities. To balance this out and reflect the latest state of research, this volume brings together selected contributions from the fields of Egyptology and Northeast African Archaeology. The focus is on both conceptualizations of the bodies by ancient Egyptians and Egyptologists. The topics of the contributions cover familiar but also new aspects. They range from division of labour, disability, gender roles, erotic, magic, fragmented and narrated bodies, other-than-human corporealities, to questions of ethics and the place of Egyptology in current approaches to past bodies. Various textual, pictorial, and archaeological sources, as well as human remains, are analyzed both from synchronic and diachronic perspectives. From the theoretical and methodological point of view, the publication provides deeper insights into a number of different approaches and their application to the ancient material (among others: osteoarchaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, semiotics, new materialism, ontology, etc.), which makes the book an important reading for all career stage Egyptologists (students to professionals) and the broader interested public.

How do transnational actors handle institutional configurations in which they need or are expected to work together, even though cooperation is likely to diminish their distinctiveness? For officials of international organizations (IOs) whose mandates and memberships overlap, this tension can induce lasting identity stress. In this article, I argue that one way for IO officials to cope with this stress is by mobilizing ‘atrocity stories’ as boundary work devices. To exemplify the dynamics surrounding this widely overlooked inter-organizational practice, I examine a prominent case of ‘twin’ organizations: the relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. I draw on more than 40 semi-structured interviews to demonstrate that both IMF and World Bank officials field seemingly trivial atrocity stories to shore up their organizational identities while acknowledging obvious ideational and operational similarities between the IOs. Thus, they not only determine what are shared tasks and what are not, but also delineate who they are as representatives of two routinely and closely interacting IOs. The analysis clarifies how a reliance on atrocity stories can help actors to tame the identity stress that stems from their interactions.

While borders are on the rise in both political practice and academic research, more mundane practices of boundary work continue to make, remake and unmake transnational knowledges, spaces and identities. In this special section, we argue that global politics unfolds through boundary work, an understudied but highly effective set of ordering practices that shape the conditions for and dynamics of global (non-)cooperation. We leverage recent innovations in the study of boundary work in other fields to transcend the conventional portrayal of boundaries as instruments of exclusion and competition. Instead, we equally attend to their potential to facilitate inclusion and cooperation between otherwise differently positioned actors. Building on this conceptual foundation, the contributions to this collection offer novel, empirically grounded insights into diverse types of boundary work (competitive, collaborative and configurational) across several important transnational domains and institutional sites. These insights will be of particular relevance to practitioners of global politics, who regularly confront boundaries. Overall, we encourage scholars of International Relations to pay more attention to the constitutive effects and dynamics of boundary work in global politics.

Standard accounts of concepts in philosophy and in cognitive psychology hold that we learn a target concept by learning the concepts that constitute it. If this is the only model of learning we have, then only concepts that are complex or structured can be learned. I argue for an alternative to this framework by presenting a proposal for how we learn some atomic concepts. I show that we can learn a concept through descriptions without thinking that the concepts employed in the descriptions constitute the target concept. I develop this idea by using the notion of a mental file and by employing a general externalist explanatory strategy. In the view I develop, some concepts are akin to files in that the descriptions associated with a given concept are means of properly individuating the extension of the concept, and they are also means of connecting a concept to others, but they do not constitute the concept and can be revised or abandoned. I show how this discussion connects to issues in conceptual engineering.

Digital sovereignty has become a pivotal concern for Africa striving to reduce their reliance on foreign powers for data storage and processing. Central to these efforts is the development of digital infrastructure, including data centres, often established with the support of Chinese telecommunications companies (CTCs). In the context of the ongoing technological rivalry between the U.S. and China, this study contends that CTCs are playing a prominent role in shaping Africa’s digital future. Their involvement in infrastructure projects significantly influences the contours of digital sovereignty across the continent. Yet, amid growing Western concerns over potential cyber espionage and the export of digital authoritarianism through Chinese technology, this paper emphasises that Africa’s digital sovereignty and developmental priorities must remain paramount, regardless of which foreign partners are involved in the continent’s digital transformation.

In today's world, democracy is recognized as both a theoretical idea and a form of government that holds a unique position, largely unaffected by intense academic or worldly controversies. Presently, no scholar can dismiss or oppose democracy and expect to be taken seriously. However, in the Polis of Athens, the birthplace of democracy, the prominent philosophers were critical and often disparaging of this system of governance. This article seeks to demystify prevailing discourses surrounding Western democracy by illustrating how they frequently depend on hierarchizing citizens, peoples, and countries, as well as compartmentalizing human experiences. Moreover, it endeavors to demonstrate that the discourses of democracy and liberalism have often been used by Western powers to interfere in the global south and exploit its peoples. The article also offers a non-evaluative approach to studying democracy, taking into consideration non-Western experiences to preserve the concept’s utopian appeal.