Drawing on pedagogical tools utilized in clinical scenario simulation and emergency preparedness training, the authors describe an innovative method for teaching clinical ethics consultation skills, which they call a “tabletop” exercise. Implemented at the end of a clinical ethics intensive course, the tabletop enables learners to implement the knowledge and practice the skills they gained during the course. The authors highlight the pedagogical tools on which the tabletop exercise draws, describe the tabletop exercise itself, offer how to best operationalize such an exercise, reflect on the method’s strengths and weaknesses, and provide insights for others who may want to implement their own tabletop for ethics consultation education.

This paper addresses the need for, and ultimately proposes, an educational framework to develop competencies in attending to ethical issues in mental health and substance use health (MHSUH) in healthcare ethics consultation (HCEC). Given the prevalence and stigma associated with MHSUH, it is crucial for healthcare ethicists to approach such matters skillfully. A literature review was conducted in the areas of bioethics, health professions education, and stigma studies, followed by quality improvement interviews with content experts to gather feedback on the framework’s strengths, limitations, and anticipated utility. The proposed framework describes three key concepts: first, integrating self-reflexive practices into formal, informal, and hidden curricula; second, embedding structural humility into teaching methods and contexts of learning; and third, striking a balance between critical consciousness and compassion in dialogue. The proposed educational framework has the potential to help HCEC learners enhance their understanding and awareness of ethical issues related to structural stigma and MHSUH. Moreover, context-specific learning, particularly in MHSUH, can play a significant role in promoting competency-building among healthcare ethicists, allowing them to address issues of social justice effectively in their practice. Further dialogue is encouraged within the healthcare ethics community to further develop the concepts described in this framework.

This article scrutinizes the role of transparency in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Specifically, it examines a widely heard claim that ‘transparency is the backbone of the Paris Agreement’, and the assumption that mandatory transparency (reporting and review) is essential to fill potential gaps in climate action left by voluntary, nationally determined climate targets. We subject this claim to critical scrutiny by tracing the political contestations around the desired role of transparency in the UNFCCC, with a focus on mitigation-related transparency. Our analysis shows that, despite developing countries expressing concerns during the pre-Paris negotiations, the Paris Agreement's enhanced transparency framework (ETF) is almost exclusively ‘enhanced’ (compared with earlier provisions) for developing countries, with some instances of regression for developed countries. Furthermore, the effects of such enhanced reporting are not straightforward and might de facto have an impact on countries’ autonomy to nationally determine their mitigation targets in diverse ways, even as all the detailed reporting does not facilitate comparability of effort. With implementation of the ETF due to start in 2024, our analysis provides a timely exploration of the extent to which transparency is really a backbone of the Paris Agreement, and for whom and with what implications for ambitious action from all under the international climate regime. It calls into question whether the transformative potential of transparency, much extolled within the UNFCCC process, will materialize for all countries in a similar manner or rather will have an impact on countries differentially.

This study explores the diachronic variation of mid-vowel aperture (/e, ɛ, o, ɔ/) in word-final and penultimate-syllable positions in vowel harmony (VH) contexts in declamatory/journalistic French from 1925 to 2023.

Our corpora include two pre-existing corpora – the INA broadcast archives corpus (1940–1999) and the ESTER corpus (2000–2004) – as well as two novel corpora, which include recordings from the Archives de la Parole by Hubert Pernot (1925–1929) and a selection from Radio France and YouTube spanning 2020 to 2023.

Our results suggest a general tendency of VH weakening over the last century. Additionally, we found a significant acoustic convergence in terms of aperture between vowels /o/ and /ɔ/, but no convergence between /e/ and /ɛ/ in word-final position, contrary to prior research.

An auxiliary imitation experiment was designed to investigate the correlation between the loud/projected voice in older recordings and the F1 of mid-vowels in VH contexts. The imitation experiment reveals a significant increase in F1 in loud declamatory speech. However, no effect of speech style on VH was observed, supporting the diachronic process of VH reduction.

This article examines the role of travel in the practice of Cold War politics, focusing particularly on the experiences of Indonesian trade unionists who travelled between Indonesia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. During the Sukarno era (1949–1966), Indonesians from the country's largest trade union federation SOBSI held leading positions in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). In 1965–1966, the army-directed purges against the Indonesian Left destroyed independent trade unionism as the country transitioned to the Suharto New Order regime. As leftist trade unionists were killed, imprisoned, or detained without trial, memories of travelling to the Communist bloc became denied, repressed, and submerged from history. The prison notebooks of Indonesian trade unionist Adam Soepardjan represent a unique set of underground writings produced after the army coup. An analysis of these notebooks reveals the ambivalences of Cold War political travel and the complex subjectivities of the traveller who appraises and reappraises the experiences of travel in a radically changed set of circumstances.

Although the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, also known as Taiwan) and their ruling parties have altered over time, there are quite a few similarities between their models of nation-building, more than is commonly acknowledged. The guofu (father) of the modern Chinese state, Sun Yat-sen, one of the few political leaders who is still honored on both sides of the Taiwan Straits, claimed all the peoples and territories of the former Qing empire comprised a single national community, the so-called Zhonghua minzu. Yet a Han super-majority has long sat at the center of this national imaginary. In this article, we ask what has happened to Sun’s imagined community across the last century, and how it has evolved in the two competing Chinese states the PRC and the ROC. We seek to demonstrate the enduring challenge of Han-centrism for multiethnic nation-building in both countries, while illustrating how shifts in domestic and international politics are altering this national imaginary and the place of ethnocultural diversity within it.

In the 1970s, the Major Urban Fringe Experiment, later known as Operation Groundwork, emerged in response to industrial decline, growing awareness of industry’s environmental impact and grass-roots environmentalism and regeneration activism. Contrary to ideas of concomitant industrial and community decline, Groundwork demonstrates post-industrial regeneration’s community-building potential. Groundwork created bespoke volunteer groups, helped set up others and worked with already existing organizations. Unlike contemporary regeneration initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s, these community links were retained even as Groundwork expanded. This article traces Groundwork’s origins and its launch under Labour in the 1970s, its championing by Conservative Minister Michael Heseltine and its successful expansion from its initial test site in St Helens (Merseyside), to the North-West and then nationwide.

Putting a specific value on human life is important in many contexts and forms part of the basis for many political, administrative, commercial, and personal decisions. Sometimes, the value is set explicitly, sometimes even in monetary terms, but much more often, it is set implicitly through a decision that allows us to calculate the valuation of a life implicit in a certain rule or a certain resource allocation. We also value lives in what looks like a completely different way when we evaluate whether a particular life is being or has been lived well. Both of these ways of valuing are done from an outside or third-person perspective, but there is also a third way of valuing a life which is from the first-person perspective, and which essentially asks how much my life is worth to me. Is there any connection between these different ways of valuing life, and if so what is the connection between them? This paper provides an account of John Harris’ analysis of the value of life and discusses whether it can bridge the gap between first-person and third-person evaluations of the value of life, and whether it can do so in a way that still allows for resource allocation decisions to be made in health care and other sectors.

It has been thirty years since the end of political apartheid in South Africa in 1994. Those decades have been marked by single-party dominance under the African National Congress (ANC), and the expansion of democratic rights and public goods like education, as well as neoliberal economic policies, growing inequality and, in recent years, corruption and maladministration scandals. On the heels of a historic election in May 2024, one which marked the end of the ANC's electoral dominance and was shaped, in part, by government mismanagement of the energy sector and extensive infrastructural decline, it is a timely moment to consider the history of South Africa's state and its relation to industries of extraction and energy production. Two new books do just that. Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures, by Gabrielle Hecht, takes a long view of the impact of extractive industries, arguing that contemporary South Africa may offer a cautionary tale of the devastating impacts of the Anthropocene, one that ‘foretells planetary futures’ in the way that the state has failed to reckon with the enduring communal and environmental impacts of the mining industry. Apartheid's Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence, by Faeeza Ballim, historicizes the development of South Africa's electricity sector under the apartheid state and traces the roots of the current energy crisis back to the pursuit of authoritarian high modernism in the mid-twentieth century.