Mass street protests and other highly contentious actions often capture headlines and public attention, but what remains after the news cycle moves on? Many times, grassroots initiatives crystallise during or after these intense moments of participation, leaving in their wake effective organisations that continue to make daily life more liveable in contexts of extreme vulnerability. Despite the persistence and impact of these ‘things that work’ – as we call them – they are often less visible and understudied. How do these initiatives emerge and sustain themselves in the communities in which they work? Using ethnographic methods, we investigate the case of a community centre formed in the wake of a land occupation in the urban periphery of Buenos Aires to answer these questions. We argue that grassroots initiatives build local power through everyday care-work: forming relationships, changing identities and providing valuable services and information.

This article examines the construction of statistics on labor emigration to France and the attempt of the Algerian state to integrate this emigration into development planning after independence. It draws on extensive primary sources in France, Algeria, and Switzerland, including colonial records, the ministries and offices of independent Algeria, international organizations and academic studies. To trace colonial legacies, it first considers the colonial expertise of the 1950s before turning to the Algerian emigration planning projects in the 1960s. Extending the work of James Scott and Timothy Mitchell, it argues that Algerian planners both recognized the biases embedded in colonial representations of migration, and sought to develop a form of statistical modernity that was critical and reflexive. They engaged in careful assessments of available data while simultaneously valuing it as a tool for action. In particular, critiques and reflections within the Algerian Ministry of Labor on the 1969 emigration planning model point to the need for a nuanced understanding of statistical modernity. Rather than perpetuating a colonial gaze on society, the introduction of this model primarily sought to address the limited informational capacities of the independent state. Demographic statistics thus became the main instrument for regulating emigration, but they were valued out of pragmatism rather than ideology. Given the limitations of other socio-economic indicators, such as unemployment rate, population statistics were among the few reliable sources available to allocate exit permits fairly across the regions of origin of prospective emigrants.

Towards the end of his al-Ghayth al-Musajjam fī Sharḥ Lāmīyat al-ʿAjam, Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363/764) aims a peculiar slight at his sometime teacher Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328/728), likening him to two famous executed heretics, al-Suhrawardī (d. circa 1191/587) and Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 759/142), in their shared ‘lack of reason’. Though often cited as evidence that al-Ṣafadī held his famous contemporary’s intelligence in low regard, the insult is more specifically aimed at his lack of discretion. In this article, I examine how Ibn Taymiyya is portrayed across the Sharḥ and argue that, when paired with insights from the book about al-Ṣafadī’s own language-centred hermeneutics, we gain a number of interesting insights into this prolific historian and adīb. The first is that he was closely familiar with and even mimicked aspects of the culture of ‘esoteric disclosure’, including in his criticism of Ibn Taymiyya and his indiscretion. Al-Ṣafadī also emerges as something of an exemplar of what Thomas Bauer has called Islam’s ‘cultural ambiguity’, whose final criticism of Ibn Taymiyya and of the heretics to whom he is likened is not any specific one of their beliefs, but rather their inability to exercise discretion in expressing them.

This article examines the geographical distribution of tuberculosis mortality in Italy from 1891 to 1951 and its relationship with industrialisation. During this period, industrialisation brought about profound changes, although it affected the north and south of the country unequally. During the same period, the incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis increased, and the disease became a major health problem. Tuberculosis spread mainly among industrial workers and in densely populated urban areas, where living and working conditions were often precarious. Overall, the incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis was significantly higher in the more industrialised provinces of the North than in the backward provinces of the South. This article shows a positive correlation between pulmonary tuberculosis mortality and the levels of provincial industrialisation.

The article examines intellectual and political debates on human rights that took place between the European Economic Community (EEC) and the Africa, Caribbean and the Pacific Group of Countries (ACP) in the context of the Lomé Convention between 1988 and 1991. In this period, the debate between the two groups exploded and resulted in intellectual compromises, and had significant political consequences for the practical implementation of Lomé. Drawing on recently declassified archival material from the Historical Archives of the European Union, as well as periodicals and archival materials from the United Kingdom and France, the article traces the intellectual and political evolution of the issue of human rights in between the global north and global south. As a development cooperation agreement, Lomé provided a space for representatives of the EEC and the ACP to advance and negotiate their own understandings of human rights, particularly their supposed universality and their connection to development.

Since the 1990s, Chinese parents of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (PWIDD) have been founding rehabilitation service non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to fill the social welfare gaps in disability services in their local areas. More recently, however, a new form of mutual aid organization – the parent organization, which focuses on family empowerment and advocacy – has emerged and diffused trans-locally, along with two national networks’ organizational incubation initiatives. Following an institutional approach to organizational studies and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 to 2023, this study traces the trans-local expansion of this novel organizational form in the emerging field of Chinese NGOs. We argue that parent organizations strategically orchestrate a form of institutional work – network entrepreneurship – characterized by three organizational processes: vertical connections between national networks and local member organizations, horizontal interactions among senior and new parent organizers, and the creative translation and adaptation of local parent organizations. Together, these three processes facilitate the trans-local diffusion of organizational resources, identity, ideas and practices. The findings make theoretical contributions by highlighting the institutional implications of peer organization networks, especially through the emerging subject position of “parent of PWIDD,” in the incubation and diffusion of a novel organizational form trans-locally.

Islands have a disproportionate role – as strategic locations, as imaginative or symbolic locales, as extractive zones and as ecological bellwethers – in oceanic imperial histories. They were and are places of ‘great practical use and metaphorical power’. And yet Newfoundland was seen (and continues to be seen) as marginal and peripheral, even if the biomass that was pulled out of its ocean fed – quite literally – a global network of exploitation. This article uses four overlapping maps to tell four overlapping stories: James Cook’s circumnavigation of the island in 1763–8; Lt David Buchan’s trek into the interior to contact the Beothuk in 1811 and 1820; William Eppes Cormack and Joseph Sylvester’s trek across the island in 1822; and finally, a series of story-maps created by Shanawdithit, who is apocryphally known as ‘the last of the Beothuk’. In doing so, it draws in Indigenous ‘storywork’ and cartographic histories and makes a case for storytelling as powerful methodology for examining overlooked colonial histories. These maps and stories highlight the complexity of encounter with a place rather than a coherence of colonial ideologies. Through the stories these maps help me tell, I hope to show how the peripheries of some people’s empires were the centres of other people’s worlds.