Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached memory studies in earnest. This partly reflects the hype around recent developments in generative AI (genAI), machine learning, and large language models (LLMs). But how can memory studies scholars handle this hype? Focusing on genAI applications, in particular so-called ‘chatbots’ (transformer-based instruction-tuned text generators), this commentary highlights five areas of critique that can help memory scholars to critically interrogate AI’s implications for their field. These are: (1) historical critiques that complicate AI’s common historical narrative and historicize genAI; (2) technical critiques that highlight how genAI applications are designed and function; (3) praxis critiques that centre on how people use genAI; (4) geopolitical critiques that recognize how international power dynamics shape the uneven global distribution of genAI and its consequences; and (5) environmental critiques that foreground genAI’s ecological impact. For each area, we highlight debates and themes that we argue should be central to the ongoing study of genAI and memory. We do this from an interdisciplinary perspective that combines our knowledge of digital sociology, media studies, literary and cultural studies, cognitive psychology, and communication and computer science. We conclude with a methodological provocation and by reflecting on our own role in the hype we are seeking to dispel.

This Reflection draws from an ongoing collaboration among the three authors, investigating mutual enlistment between the United States Department of Defense and research communities devoted to the advancement of the AI project. We are interested in the intersecting concerns and resonant sensibilities that draw us together – what we argue is the necessary starting point for interdisciplinary thinking – and in the differences that are the collaboration’s generative possibilities. Among the threads that join us are intersecting pathways between academic and commercial positionings within and against the AI project. Each of us has moved between locations in industry and the university, as researchers, practitioners, and students/faculty. Drawing on these experiences, we explore the possibilities that different positionings afford and what they preclude, how we have attempted to navigate these institutions within their frames of reference, and what has drawn us into relations beyond their putative boundaries. Based on Philip Agre’s call for a “critical technical practice” as a path towards more radical shifts in knowledge practices, we consider how we might weave together our biographical trajectories, disciplinary affiliations, political commitments, subjectivities, and skills into what Andrew Barry and Georgina Born name a more “auspicious interdisciplinarity”.

Ideas about morphological complexity have been used to classify languages and to link complexity to language age and social structure. Creoles and sign languages are often framed as younger and structurally simpler than other languages. Concurrently, sign language morphology has been described as paradoxical, as both simple and complex. This paper is a critical examination of claims about morphological complexity and its relationship to language age and social structure. We show that the theoretical and empirical foundations of claims that sign language morphology is paradoxical are flawed. Specifically, argumentation and evidence supporting analogies between creole and sign language complexity adopt theoretically contested and ideologically problematic assumptions about creoles and uncritically apply them to sign languages. We identify four flaws in argumentation: (i) use of limited morphological data to generate claims about global complexity, (ii) association of binary language categories with categorical complexity differences, (iii) use of language age to motivate predictions about morphological complexity, and (iv) extrapolating from creole complexity to sign language complexity. Based on these flaws, we develop nine theoretical and practical recommendations for working with morphological complexity and discuss uncritical cross-disciplinary transfer of ideas.

Through compositional inclusion or exclusion, the photograph can assert and communicate what belongs in a picture, in a landscape, in an ecosystem. It can illuminate what we deem conservation-worthy, or, on a larger scale, which extinctions are attention-worthy. Photographic practice helps to illuminate the active nature of extinction, and our choices as actors and witnesses within that process. Here, researchers from the University of Leeds’ Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Programme present individual reflections on interdisciplinary practice-led research in the Scottish Small Isles. We consider how photography, as a form of praxis, can generate new forms of knowledge surrounding extinction: its meanings, representations, and legacies, particularly through visual representation. We offer seven perspectives on contemporary image-making, from disciplines including philosophy, conservation biology, literature, sociology, geology, cultural anthropology, and palaeontology. Researchers gathered experiential, ethical, even biological meanings from considering what to include or exclude in images: from the micro to the macro, the visible to the invisible, the aesthetic to the ecological. We draw conclusions around meaning-making through the process of photography itself, and the tensions encountered through framing and decision-making in a time of mass ecological decline.

The elusive southern river otter (Lontra provocax; huillín in Spanish) is critically endangered in the Argentine portion of Tierra del Fuego, and low social awareness may be one of the major threats to its conservation. Our survey of local residents’ knowledge and valuation of the huillín showed that only 14% recognized photographs of the species, almost half did not know that it is endangered and most erroneously thought it was an introduced species. Greater knowledge about the huillín was related to higher respondent education levels. Younger and more knowledgeable residents valued the species more for ecological and relational reasons; its instrumental value was considered least important. More communication should be targeted at older people and groups not directly interacting with nature via informal education methods, including combining positive messages about the huillín and other native species with ongoing outreach efforts warning about biological invasions. Understanding perceptions and valuations of biodiversity can make conservation efforts more effective and inclusive.

Objectives: Experience of people with dementia falls between attempts to maintain a sense of self and normality and struggle with acceptance in order to integrate the changes within the self (Clare). The need for interventions, including spiritual care, targeting fear and loss of self is reported (Palmer). In Japan, Buddhist temples which hold peer-support café for the caregivers of the people with dementia are emerging, as those needs are not fully covered by the health care system (Okamura). For the better future psychogeriatrics-Buddhist temple collaboration, this study explores the views of the Buddhist priests who work in the secular health care system.

Methods: Consecutive in-depth interviews were conducted with health care professionals such as medical doctors, psychologists, care workers, etc. who work in the secular health care system, and who are at the same time qualified as Buddhist priests. Verbatim transcripts were analyzed using a qualitative descriptive approach. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the Taisho University ethics committee.

Results: Twenty-four subjects were interviewed. Some medical doctors expressed struggles as Buddhist priests concerning not being able to provide person-centered care in the medical setting, especially in intensive care units in early career training, due to the busyness. However, now that they are specialists, they are able to provide person-centered care. According to care workers, the effects of Buddhist priests in the residential care were; protecting burnout of the care staff; decreasing anxiety of the residents; increasing trust from the family; and making the inclusive care environment. All of them talked that the lack of practical knowledge teaching on aging, dementia, and death in the monk training program is a problem, but that there may be considerable resistance to changing a curriculum with a long history.

Conclusions: Discourses of the professionals of both territories, i.e., scientific care and spiritual care, are worth investigating for the future reform of the education of both territories.

World-renowned New Theatre Quarterly celebrates its fifty years of publication and its 200th issue, this being the last under the editorship of Maria Shevtsova. Simon Trussler, founder of Theatre Quarterly in 1971 (which closed for lack of funding in 1981) always considered New Theatre Quarterly, established with Cambridge University Press in 1985 – and with Clive Barker as co-editor – to be simply a continuation of TQ. Maria Shevtsova fully agreed. Forty issues of TQ, combined with one hundred and sixty editions of NTQ, gives the magic figure 200. The logistics of things, however, means that the number 160 appears on the cover of the present issue (the ‘New’ in New Theatre Quarterly standing for the newly resurgent journal on the back of its predecessor). This present issue also celebrates Maria Shevtsova’s twenty years of co-editorship with Simon Trussler, together with five more years of sole editorship of the journal following his death in 2019 (commemorated in NTQ 142, May 2020; see also their respective editorials, ‘One Hundred Issues and After’, in NTQ 100, November 2009).

Twenty-five years of absolute commitment and tireless work call for recognition and thanks. Assistant editor Philippa Burt here discusses with Shevtsova her vision for the journal, and how her scholarship, research, teaching, as well as her numerous academic and outreach activities in multiple media, connected with her editorial commitment. This conversation took place on 19 June 2024.

Teachers are grappling with increased pressure and expectations to facilitate transformative education experiences, the kinds of experiences that cultivate dispositions and skillsets essential for young peoples’ preparedness to imagine and create sustainable futures. As expectations for teachers grow, so too do initiatives intended to assist their efforts, such as the advent of classroom-ready education resources. The rise of educational resources gives cause for closer examination of how they are developed, particularly with respect to the ways they situate content in the deployment of curricular, methodological and pedagogical concepts. This article presents a practice and process of education resource creation using multi-modal content that entangles global education and conservation agendas. Through the mediating lens of UNESCO’s pillars of education, a critical discussion of the utility of these for enabling and inhibiting the articulation of a professional practice for education resource creation is offered. With the imperative for sustainability-focused education and prevalence of education resources being produced to support this, we scrutinise the importance of demystifying the professional practice of education resource creation. In doing so, we point to insights that become available when the curricular, pedagogical and methodological concepts informing education resource creation are made transparent and accessible.