In this article, I argue that public political theorists need to adopt a different attitude and audience. If they are to help their fellow citizens learn collectively to engage critically with their future to take care of it, they must write and talk not only to their fellow theorists but also to their fellow citizens. To do this, they would need to focus on the opposite of the strictures of their specialised academic discipline that rewards internal debate, arcane language, and abstract theorising. They must provide a clear, persuasive understanding and critique of contemporary social, economic, and political narratives and structures of power. What matters is persuasion, not exclusive expertise; a change of attitude, not method; and a plurality of approaches. Perhaps most importantly, what they teach, write, and say must be comprehensively open to all, not beholden to corporate interests and canons, and they must act as “gadflies” in their society—public critics in battles over ideas, values, and power relations. While history is vital for this future-oriented craft, to bow down before predecessors is to miss the radical imaginative potential of thinking (and teaching) collectively in the present to provide for a better future: to change the world by changing oneself and thus one’s fellow travellers in improving how we live and love together. This would also make public political theory genuinely political.

In this article, I claim that moral sentimentalism is a good approach for political philosophers wanting to engage in public political philosophy. I propose live action roleplay (larp) as a method to maximise the potential of this. In the first section, I present the urgency for public political philosophy through Jonathan Floyd’s recent article. I claim that Floyd’s presentation of public political philosophy is complemented by thinking of certain topics in political discourse as wicked problems. I argue that moral sentimentalism is an excellent fit for public political philosophy because of its goal of eliciting empathy. I present methods in political philosophy that have appropriate immersive properties, but claim that larp takes this a step further. In the final section, I look at why this is and suggest larp as a method for moral sentimentalists to engage in public political philosophy research.

Antibiotic innovation has slowed. Despite substantial public investment, research and development (R&D) remains insufficient to address rising antimicrobial resistance (AMR). In this historical review, we draw on quantitative and qualitative historiographic methodologies, as well as on testimony from key stakeholders, to reconstruct antibiotic innovation challenges and public interventions since 1980. Emerging in the 1990s and gaining traction around 2010, the “empty antibiotic pipeline” metaphor, as well as its market failure diagnosis, has played a key role in structuring the global R&D response. This reframing described AMR as an incentives-based innovation challenge, which suited industrial and high-income country interests. However, the introduction of so-called push and pull incentives has so far failed to halt the exit of large developers, sustain diversified R&D ecosystems, or address global access challenges. This article explores challenges and conflicts involved in the implementation of the incentives-based innovation approach alongside the ever-greater subsidies required to stabilise small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and attract larger pharmaceutical companies and investment from financial markets. Several SME bankruptcies since 2019 and the mothballing of novel compounds suggest that this is an unsustainable innovation model. This article also explores whether public interventions have been insufficient or whether there is a deeper problem with the central metaphor structuring global action.

Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, marks a pivotal shift in her branding and marketing from selling intimate relatability to selling spectacle. Once defined by her relatability and diaristic storytelling, Swift now embraces spectacle, excess, and self-mythologizing. For her most recent album, controversy over its marketing and content is polarizing, where some seeing her as unrelatable. On the album, Swift embraces strategies rooted in exclusivity, luxury, and provocative, explicit themes. Swift will not get any more relatable as she ascends to superstardom, and the question remains: Can an artist who rose to power by being relatable and intimate with fans still thrive when that very success makes them increasingly unreachable?

At midnight on October 3, Swift released her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl—a record that, in just 11 hours, achieved more streams than any other album of 2025—and by 7 AM the next morning, the internet was ablaze with some of its most scathing indictments of Swift’s songwriting. The Life of a Showgirl is the first album Swift has released after her record-breaking tour, The Eras Tour, and follows Swift’s 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, an album that is deeply introspective, poetic, and saturated with literary references of the most “tortured” kind. In comparison, the internet is right to notice the tone shift in The Life of a Showgirl. Swift’s writing on The Life of a Showgirl gets into character as adroitly as she does on Folklore, Evermore, and The Tortured Poets Department. The difference is, where the culture has been settling into Swift’s nineteenth-century preoccupations and allusions for the last five years, she has now stepped into a mid-twentieth century story-world with the likes of Jacqueline Susann and her 1966 cult classic, Valley of the Dolls.

Who’s Taylor Swift, anyway? In this article, the author will discuss her two most recent albums, The Tortured Poets Department (2024) and The Life of a Showgirl (2025), through the lens of women’s musical and literary madness. This article argues that The Tortured Poets Department was, in essence, a mad scene akin to that of Lucia or Ophelia, and The Life of a Showgirl is what happens when a heroine returns to sanity—if she can be allowed to return at all.

“The Fate of Ophelia,” the opening track on Taylor Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl, includes an unsettling Shakespearean allusion. Ophelia was the jilted lover of the melancholy prince in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a woman whose life ends in suicide. Swift’s song says her fiancé, Travis Kelce, saved her from the fate of Ophelia, positioning her previous boyfriends as moody philosophers and the fun-loving jock Kelce as the anti-Hamlet. This song also recuperates Swift as a reader of Shakespeare after the startingly bad account of Romeo and Juliet in “Love Story,” the song that started Swift’s career.

Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl is littered with musical nostalgia, harkening back to previous musical eras. Songs such as “Opalite” reference these musical genres of the past with specific combinations of musical parameters such as chord progressions, unusual vocal and instrumental timbres, and subtle text cues. In this essay, I will explore several different ways in which music theorists and musicologists have theorized nostalgia, before demonstrating the musically nostalgic effectiveness of the song “Opalite.” I conclude by speculating on this musical nostalgia as a possible broader reflection of current American culture.

This article examines the ceramic art practice manga allpa awana by Amazonian Kichwa women in Ecuador, focusing especially on three elderly women from Sarayaku in Sucumbios, who exemplify how elder women embody the millenary knowledge this art form withholds. This practice is inseparable from the Kichwa cosmovision, which centres the harmonious relational existence within Kawsak Sacha—the living, breathing, and sentient forest. Practising manga allpa awana therefore demands not only artistic skill but also a scientific and relational understanding of the forest. By foregrounding the material, spiritual, and epistemic dimensions of this relational art and science, the authors propose a decolonial rethinking of both “art” and “science,” showing how Indigenous relational knowledge transcends hegemonic approaches to these fields. Furthermore, the practice challenges an external colonial model that seeks to homogenise and erase the multiple worlds of the pluriverse. In this light, safeguarding manga allpa awana constitutes a central pillar of Indigenous resistance for the protection of territories, biodiversity, planetary life and futures of liberation.

This article suggests directions and approaches for amplifying and deepening the work of the humanities in communities beyond the academy, with specific attention to public readerships and scholarship in literary studies globally. It argues that in the academic humanities, scholars work with materials that resonate with broad public audiences, but the scholarship they produce in their interpretation of those materials—in the case of literary studies, literary texts—does not often enough reach or resonate with wider audiences. Drawing upon the concept of “resonance” as distinctly theorized first by literary critic Wai Chee Dimock and more recently by sociologist Hartmut Rosa, this article describes how scholarship in literary studies might open itself up to the possibility of resonant relationships with readers who are not formally trained in the field but whose thoughtful and deeply held convictions, commitments, and articulations of experience are valuable to the exchange of ideas around which intellectual life is constructed. This article details two possible answers to the methodological question of what would be necessary for the further development of a publicly engaged literary criticism, one emphasizing interpretation as a broadly shared project in the humanities sector and the other focusing on targeted publicly engaged peer review.

What is the value of public philosophy? “Philosopher-first” accounts suggest that the ideas that academic philosophers produce can, when disseminated, be useful to the wider public. However, such accounts assume that there is a gap between the interests and activities of professional philosophers and those of the wider public, which must be overcome by translating philosophy into more accessible terms. This article offers an alternative account—the “public-first” account. On this account, philosophy is a necessary part of everyday life. Each of us relies upon a background of conceptual resources that shape our interpretations, expectations, and behaviours in the world. Professional philosophers might be useful in analysing, maintaining, and fixing our conceptual infrastructure. However, there is no gap between philosophy and everyday life, which must be overcome. Whilst most defences of public philosophy argue that it is beneficial to the public, on the “public-first” account, public philosophy is also vital for the discipline of philosophy itself. If philosophers want to adequately evaluate their philosophical theories, they must appeal to a much wider and more diverse range of human experience than that of professional philosophers themselves. As such, public philosophy is necessary for properly conducted philosophical inquiry.

Public communication about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is widely acknowledged as a cornerstone of global, national, and regional strategies to tackle this urgent health threat. However, much like AMR itself, efforts to communicate about it are hindered by complex and intersecting challenges. This scoping review synthesises insights from 88 scholarly manuscripts published between 2015 and 2024 to explore critical issues in AMR communication and identify potential options to address them. We distil nine overarching themes that underpin effective public communication and engagement, with particular significance for engaging with disadvantaged and vulnerable communities. These themes encompass (1) social science theoretical frameworks, (2) varied sociocultural contexts, (3) public engagement and dialogue, (4) linguistic considerations, (5) messaging strategies, (6) media use and its impacts, (7) large-scale public campaigns, (8) creative communication approaches, and (9) evaluation. We discuss each theme and outline related recommendations, collectively advocating a re-imagining of AMR communication as a civic, cultural, and reflexive practice that is attuned to the complexities of diverse contexts and cultures, and designed to enhance societal relevance and impact.

Taylor Swift has dreamt of two things: fame and success, and a quiet life with someone she loves. She dreams of making it and of escaping it. The problem is that these dreams seem to conflict. Achieving one can feel like giving up on the other. Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, finds both dreams well represented. She wants immortality and a basketball hoop in the driveway. She also has a new insight for reconciling them. Happiness can be made, she tells us. And if you make it with another person, you might be able to live two dreams that once felt impossible to fit together.

When announcing The Life of a Showgirl on the New Heights podcast, Taylor Swift called her 12th album “exuberant and electric and vibrant.” In the weeks leading up to the album’s release, fans wondered what this would mean for Swift’s notoriously vulnerable Track 5. How would we reconcile an “infectiously joyful” album with the admittedly somber concept of Track 5’s “Eldest Daughter”? One theory lies in the location of “Eldest Daughter” in the tracklist, specifically positioned as a Track 5 and following “Father Figure.” It maintains the vulnerability traditionally associated with the position, but does so in a way that redefines it: “Eldest Daughter” is Swift’s first Track 5 not to be rooted in pain or doubt, but instead offering hope and reassurance. Thie vulnerability of Swift’s Track 5s allows her listeners to experience others’ (specifically Swift’s) stories of pain (or hope), which in turn provides them with a language to verbalize their own pain, a necessary step for healing and growth.

Nature-based solutions (NbSs) are increasingly recognised for their potential to address climate change and biodiversity loss, but their role in mitigating antimicrobial resistance (AMR) remains underexplored. AMR and climate change share environmental drivers, such as pollution, ecosystem degradation, and industrial agriculture, yet responses often remain fragmented and technocratic. This paper draws on a global roundtable series convened under the British Academy’s “Just Transitions for AMR” initiative to explore how NbS can support more just, equitable, and integrated responses to these intersecting crises. Bringing together 46 experts from public health, environmental science, agriculture, governance, and social sciences, the roundtables facilitated interdisciplinary exchange across Africa, Asia, and Europe. The paper synthesises insights across four thematic areas: conceptualising Just Transitions in NbS, identifying co-benefits for scaling NbS for climate and AMR mitigation, addressing implementation barriers, and proposing future directions. Findings emphasise the need to reframe NbS as socially embedded practices co-designed with communities, rather than as technical fixes. Participants called for investment in place-based approaches, participatory monitoring, and governance structures promoting inclusion. The paper concludes by aligning NbS with One Health and Just Transition principles, urging a shift from isolated interventions to systems-oriented transformations that redress power imbalances in environmental and health governance.

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a serious health threat and strains of TB resistant to first-line therapies account for significant TB-related morbidity and mortality. Widely recognized as a disease of poverty concentrated in low- and middle-income countries, drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) is a result of deep-seated deprivation and the shortcomings of under-resourced health systems. Traditionally, the response to TB, and particularly DR-TB, has been focused on dealing with the infection and preventing onward transmission, for example, through isolating people with TB in sanatoria or specialized hospital wards. Recently, activists and policy makers have recognized the need to put people affected by the disease at the center of TB programs, but this is just the beginning of the necessary “just” transition from inequitable and unsustainable approaches to addressing TB to ones that are inclusive, community-centered, and resilient. In this article, we examine antimicrobial resistance in TB and highlight the need for a multisectoral, justice-oriented approach that goes beyond biomedical paradigms—we propose a “just” transition that addresses the unequal burden of human suffering and injustices that have become systemic in TB programs. We see a “just transition” as involving long-term structural changes to technologies, policy, infrastructure, scientific knowledge, and practice.

This essay approaches Palestine not as a laboratory or a problem to be solved, but as a paradigm that elucidates the persistent and cumulative violence of settler colonialism, genocide, and dispossession. The author explores the collapse and distortion of time under siege, the fragmentation and resilience of bodies amid relentless violence, and the radical power of storytelling in the face of attempted erasure. Weaving together images from Gaza’s hospitals, refugee camps, schools, prisons, and graveyards, this essay documents both the horror and tenacity of everyday Palestinian life. It situates the ongoing Nakba within global trends of authoritarianism and repression, including the assault on academic freedom and criminalization of solidarity. Ultimately, this essay argues that Palestinian defiance, memory, and narrative offer vital lessons in apocalyptic times.

What it means to create a world in which “many worlds fit,” as the Zapatistas declared, has increasingly been taken up across the humanities and social sciences, introduced by decolonial theorists. This article focuses on some of the practices that allow for the enaction of the pluriverse: prayer and attachments to sacred space. I focus on a prayer camp organized by the Coalition to Save the Lemay Forest to the south of Winnipeg, showing that broadly construed notions of prayer can be understood as a pluriversal methodology wherein worlds are navigated through shared—yet still positionally aware—attachments to place. In the prayer camp, prayer—as plea/appeal, practice, action, communication, or commitment—is comfortable with divergent cosmological perspectives, rooted in (un)common attachments to sacred space: both in shared goals of protecting the space and honoring its legacy but also through an engagement with an “uncommon commoning” of that which is sacred and/or otherworldly. I argue that the sacred is an integral part of coalition building within the space; in turn, coalition building can also serve to reinvigorate connections to sacred space and worlds.