Publications

In Zambia, religious nationalists exploit legal and policy ambiguities to construct abortion and LGBTI+ rights as un-Zambian and un-Christian. This delegitimization narrows the scope of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) to family planning. Drawing on forty-five in-depth interviews with Zambian stakeholders and international aid officials, we argue that while these ambiguities constrain reproductive justice, they also allow activists to advance SRHR by building coalitions that connect advocacy for abortion rights, LGBTI+ rights, and reproductive justice to promote health service access and bodily autonomy for all. In Zambia and elsewhere, such activism and coalition building merit greater attention and support.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Health and Society explores how digitalization is reconfiguring practices of health and medicine. Digitalisation requires health and medical practices to address and utilise the interrelated challenges posed by increased quantification (e.g., data-intensive medicine), ubiquitous connectivity (e.g., remote access to care providers), and the unprecedented power of algorithms (e.g., communicative AI). Developing important social scientific analyses of the contemporary sociotechnical configuration of health knowledge, therapeutic relationships and medical decision-making, the handbook puts forward theories and methods to inform the development, implementation and governance of Digital Health. It will therefore be an invaluable resource for shaping desirable futures in health and care.

Digital transformation is widely promoted as a solution to healthcare chal-lenges such as ageing populations, chronic diseases and pandemics. This has led to rapid advances in the field of digital health, driven primarily by the computer and health sciences, which are developing devices and interventions. However, digital transformation in healthcare is not always easy to implement. Repeated calls for digi-tal transformation and their technology-centric solutions fail to adequately address issues of implementation, adoption and unintended consequences. What is over-looked is the factor that moderates digital transformation, namely the society in which it takes place. It is important to recognise that society and social practices are not simply passive objects that can be transformed in a linear way. Instead, they are reflexive and responsive to experimentation and intervention. Designing and manag-ing digital transformation in healthcare therefore requires an understanding of soci-ety. The Handbook of Digital Health and Societybrings together leading social science perspectives – from sociology, media studies, STS, psychology, philosophy, political science and more – to explore the complex relationship between technology and soci-ety, and to shed light on the conditions under which digital transformation can be successful, ethical and deliver social value. The Handbook thus complements the dom-inant disciplines in the field of digital health and provides essential guidance for envi-sioning and developing appropriate and desirable solutions to current healthcare challenges.

The archaeology of war has often focused on combatants and weaponry, prioritising the conflicts themselves over their aftermath. Yet in today’s world, with ongoing and emerging wars, archaeology must also address the precarity and long-term consequences of armed conflict for all parties involved. This edited volume examines how the short- and long-term impacts of warfare appear in the archaeological record from prehistory to the medieval period. For the defeated, consequences may include poor diet, ill-health, physical trauma, and higher mortality – visible in bioarchaeological evidence. Victorious communities may benefit from plundered resources, leading to wealth and improved living conditions. Conflicts can also trigger migrations, whether through forced displacement or deportation, well-documented in historical texts but harder to trace in periods without written records. Finally, warfare can leave settlements and landscapes destroyed, rendering them less hospitable. Understanding the trauma of war requires examining its corporeal and material dimensions. This volume explores who gains and who suffers in the wake of conflict, through case studies from prehistoric Iberia, ancient Egypt and Nubia, Roman Britain and Pannonia, the Middle Danube “Barbaricum”, the Late Antique Balkans and eastern Mediterranean, Viking Scandinavia, and medieval Anatolia.

Performing Waste offers groundbreaking insights into the vibrant interdisciplinary field of waste studies through the lens of performance and artistic practice. This pioneering collection examines how waste and wasting are performed across diverse media and genres, from Afrofuturist musical works to contemporary scrap art installations. Distinguished international scholars present original research using situated methodologies, including ethnographic approaches, to analyse compelling case studies that span global contexts. The volume explores eco-trauma and toxic kinship in artistic works, investigates the relationship between extractivism and knowledge production, and examines critical sites like the Polish-Belorussian border and e-waste processing in Ghana and Peru. By reframing familiar environmental narratives and introducing novel perspectives on waste agency, materiality, and performance, the collection challenges conventional understandings of our discarded materials and practices. Each contribution illuminates how waste performance can help us reimagine ecological relationships and envision alternative futures beyond extractivist paradigms. This volume is an essential reading for students and scholars in environmental humanities, posthumanist theory, decolonial studies, eco-arts, media studies, and performance studies, as well as anyone concerned with creative responses to our global waste crisis.

In this debate piece, we examine representations of postmenopausal motherhood in print media and online content of private clinics in India to show how the visual vocabulary of assisted reproductive technology (ART) reifies patriarchal logics of motherhood through a dance of science and spectacle. In particular, we draw on Franklin’s (2013a) notion of ‘embryo watching’ and Thompson’s (2005) ‘ontological choreography’ to argue how biomedical imaging technologies curate embodied encounters of ART and local-moral worlds where gerontological reproductive futures can be imaged and imagined. Crucially, we illuminate the ambivalent biopolitics of this (media) framing, where older women’s bodies are simultaneously expressed through the promissory language of fertility and an erasure of sexuality. Ultimately, keeping in mind the current decade (2021–2030) as one focused on determinants of healthy ageing, this article sheds light on the policy blind spot of a persistent neglect of the sexual and reproductive health of older women in India.

This article advances ‘trialectics’ as a nondualist methodology for Global International Relations (IR), addressing the persistent dualisms that continue to shape both conventional and critical approaches to world politics. While acknowledging Hegelian dialectics’ movement towards subject–object unity, this article argues that its methodological trajectory remains structured through binary relations of identity and non-identity. By contrast, trialectics foregrounds a third, mediating dimension – single hidden oneness – that underpins and transcends apparent contradictions and complementarities. Drawing on Daoist and Advaita philosophical traditions, trialectics conceptualizes reality as simultaneously one and many, allowing for experiential moments of subject–object collapse that move beyond binary thinking without erasing plurality. As a nondualist methodology, it reorients Global IR towards the study of global relationality, challenging geocentric divisions such as West/non-West while recognizing the entangled character of self, other and nature. This article further demonstrates the practical significance of trialectics through environmental governance, showing how a nondualist orientation reframes apparently competing priorities as expressions of a deeper relational unity rather than as binary trade-offs. By integrating methodological innovation with practical application, trialectics contributes to the development of a post-binary Global IR capable of investigating global politics beyond entrenched spatial, epistemic and civilizational divides.