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A correction is presented to the article "Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision by Brian Morris" which appeared in the 1 August 2021 issue.

This introduction brings together a group of papers focusing on conservation theory and practice, and argues strongly for a new place-based conservation through a multispecies lens. Honouring the work of Brian Morris, a scholar who has consistently forged a persuasive set of conceptual connections between science and society, and building on his insights into environmental history and human-nature interactions, we outline a vision of conservation that incorporates new narratives - at the intersection between the ecological and the social - to reimagine the world in the Anthropocene. This includes challenging the persistence of fortress, neoprotectionist and other top-down forms of conservation, through a recognition that conservation is deeply rooted in (human, nonhuman and more-thanhuman) senses of place. The introduction urges scholars to focus on landscapes as units of analysis: 'multispecies assemblages' that are easily overlooked at other spatial and historical scales. It calls for increased attention to the contact zones where the lives of humans and other species biologically, culturally and politically intersect, as a counterpoint to the dominant planetary perspective of earth systems and conservation science. It underlines the importance of deep relational analyses of human interactions with other life forms, through renewed attention to multispecies histories, locality, and forms of knowledge rooted in place. It is at this level, through historically nuanced accounts founded on a more place-based conception of ourselves as a species, that new narratives and answers to our current predicament will emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jake Buehler For a firmer grip on unforgiving rock faces, rock climbers often dust their hands with climbing chalk. While several regions and countries such as the EU and India already include positive biodiversity stimulus measures, other countries, including the US and China, have implemented negative ones. BLM's Pendley ruled unlawful, management plans overturned Tom Oates US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Resource Management Plans (RMPs) were shelved following a ruling by US District Court of Montana Chief Judge Brian Morris declaring that the acting BLM director, William Perry Pendley, was serving unlawfully, under delegated authority. BLM manages approximately 12% of US lands, primarily in western states. [Extracted from the article]

Abstract  A major water quality issue in urban areas underlain by a productive aquifer is the impact of modern recharge. Using a variety of sample sources including multi-level boreholes, detectable concentrations of CFCs and SF6 have been found throughout the upper 50 m of the saturated aquifer beneath a suburb of Doncaster, UK, indicating that modern (<50-year old) recharge has penetrated to at least this depth. Additional support for this deep penetration is provided by the detection of sulphite-reducing clostridia and faecal streptococci. Despite the upper aquifer being a poorly cemented sandstone, the residence time indicators suggest that some modern recharge is travelling via fracture systems in addition to that moving down by simple piston flow. However, the overall impact of 80 years of steady urbanisation on water quality in the aquifer beneath this suburb has in general been limited. This is attributed to a combination of factors including previous land use, dilution by direct recharge of rainfall through green-space areas including gardens, and locally high storage in the friable upper aquifer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Richard Jefferies' contribution to the study of nature mysticism. I argue that the study of nature mysticism can be utilized as a valuable source of insight to cultivate a more ecocentric response to the ecological crisis. Historically, the study of mysticism in the West has been shaped by a monotheistic bias that tends to marginalize the teachings of nature mystics. I seek to redress this lacuna in the field by calling attention to the understudied teachings of the English mystic and author, Richard Jefferies. I claim that Jefferies' spiritual autobiography, The Story of My Heart ([1883] 2014) presents a compelling vision of nature mysticism that challenges the reader to reflect critically on conventional understandings of God, body, and time/being. Most significantly, I argue that Jefferies' concept of "soul-life" can be interpreted as an ontological category characterized by an intellectual and moral sensitivity towards the wonders of nature. Jefferies believed that the cultivation of soul-life is transformative and key to unlocking the full potential of our relationship to the earth and each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Murray Bookchin's dialectical or evolutionary naturalism, the metaphysic that underpins his social ecology, his libertarian socialism, and his ethical naturalism. Using Joel Kovel's suggestion that there were two Bookchins - a dialectical naturalist and promoter of Enlightenment humanism and a polemicist consumed with venom and rage - I outline Bookchin's metaphysics of nature and then turn, in the second part, to Bookchin's critique of several ontologies advocated by deep ecologists, in the closing decades of the twentieth century. The essay explains why Bookchin felt that these were either shallow or inadequate as metaphysics and led to reformist, or even reactionary, forms of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the reconfigurations of British anarchist politics and culture, focusing on the reception of William Godwin by three influential anarchist writers and activists: George Woodcock, Colin Ward, and Albert Meltzer. It argues that mobilizing Godwin was an important part of their efforts to define, and then defend, a particular version of anarchist intellectual culture in Britain, each with its own unique history and strategic perspectives regarding social and political change. These competing conceptualizations of Godwin's legacy and significance therefore reflected both their independent political and intellectual concerns and developing rifts in the broader anarchist movement, especially between proponents of gradualism and those of more militant forms of anarchism. Ultimately, for all three, Godwin became a cipher for internal ideological struggles in anarchist politics, as his pliable ideas were mobilized in the battle for the meaning of British anarchism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how enslaved individuals used linguistic comparisons and equivalencies to understand and navigate their marginalized social positions. The analysis focuses on a Nyanja/Chewa dictionary assembled in Mombasa in the 1850s by a German missionary and an enslaved man named Salimini. In contributing to the dictionary, Salimini translated between two worlds, comparing words and concepts from his original home to the west of Lake Malawi to those in Swahili spoken around the port city of Mombasa. By studying the derivation of entries related to slavery and comparing them to their Swahili equivalencies, and the lexicon of slavery in other nineteenth-century Nyanja/Chewa sources, we obtain a window into the creative ways that Salimini used concepts from his own language to navigate coastal East Africa’s complex hierarchies and social codes. Scholars have carefully demonstrated how people enslaved in coastal East Africa appropriated and manipulated Swahili idioms, rituals, and dress to challenge social hierarchies and claim their place in coastal society. Yet, the resonance of concepts from East and East Central Africa’s interior within these processes remains unexplored. Salimini’s translation work shows the creative ways enslaved individuals could employ words and ideas from their home languages, even as they adopted the language of their enslavers. The comparisons and equivalencies Salimini made between Mombasa and Lake Malawi underscore the importance of such translation acts to experiences of slavery and dependency. By contrasting and compounding concepts, the enslaved could both comprehend and shape their world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I seek to bring together a number of environmental histories to think about the place of forest in our lives. It is partly autobiographical in the sense that it concerns forest issues that I, for various reasons, have been entangled with recently. These are the making of carbon (REDD+) forests in Northeast India, preservation of the urban forests and planting of indigenous trees in Karura forests in Nairobi, Kenya, and the transformation of Swedish forests into vast industrial plantations. I come to these issues with little knowledge about the forest ecology or the flora and fauna, as such, but rather as a scholar with earlier experience of analysis of the social and political dynamics involved in conflicts over forests, that is, how differently powered actors seek to appropriate, stake claims to or control the forest. Hence, my point of departure and analytical framework is largely that of political ecology. In a conversation about the work of the anthropologist Brian Morris, I will point to the thinness of such an approach and open up aspects that are critical to Morris' way of engaging with the interactions of people, plants, insects, and animals. This, I will argue, is a truly grounded environmental anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educators are concerned that children make progress in their learning. While there are both policy and professional debates about how progress should be monitored and assessed, the views of children are rarely considered. Grounded in the 'voiced' research tradition, this paper reports on 158 focus group interviews with upper primary school students in purposefully selected arts rich schools in England. Children were asked about what they thought progress in arts subjects was, and how it was achieved. No children talked about grades or marks and only a handful mentioned rewards schemes. Their own evaluations and those of significant others, teachers, friends and family were very important. Children saw progress as supported and shaped by teacher pacing, scaffolding and feedback. Their own commitment to practice, use of feedback, persistence and self-belief were also highly significant. We suggest that these children's understandings have implications for the work that arts teachers do, and in particular for the ways in which children use feedback and develop their own criteria for self-evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around 1970, the City of Berkeley briefly became an epicenter of radical experimentation in urban planning and design, directly stemming from the counterculture of the late 1960s. This essay examines the ideological and political emergence of Berkeley's counterculture urbanism, arguing that its experiments left two important legacies in the history of planning. On the level of utopian thought, it articulated a clear alternative to mainstream capitalist urban development, or what Henri Lefebvre called "abstract space." On the level of contemporary planning practices, it opened up still-unresolved conflicts, especially between localized environmental preservation and the abstract, economic demands for affordable housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the mechanisms for reparation for injuries suffered by Ukraine due to Russia's aggression. It examines developments since the adoption of the Draft Conclusions regarding Russian assets abroad, exploring multilateral efforts involving the United Nations, the European Union, and national legislation from countries like the U.S. and Canada.

In the past two decades, most research on anomaly detection has focused on improving the accuracy of the detection, while largely ignoring the explainability of the corresponding methods and thus leaving the explanation of outcomes to practitioners. As anomaly detection algorithms are increasingly used in safetycritical domains, providing explanations for the high-stakes decisions made in those domains has become an ethical and regulatory requirement. Therefore, this work provides a comprehensive and structured survey on state-of-the-art explainable anomaly detection techniques. We propose a taxonomy based on the main aspects that characterise each explainable anomaly detection technique, aiming to help practitioners and researchers find the explainable anomaly detection method that best suits their needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insects are the most abundant terrestrial life-form, yet anthropologists on the whole have been little interested in insect life, although in recent decades with the emergence of ethnobiology and cultural entomology as sub-disciplines, a growing interest has developed in insect-human interactions. Thus scholars have been studying not only the practical uses of insects as food or medicine, but the role that insects have played in the cultural life of human societies - with regard to literature, mythology, music, art, religion, folklore and recreation (Bodenheimer 1951, Clausen 1954, Hogue 1987, Van Huis 1996). Here I shall focus on the role of insects as food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses issues like circumcision, nudism and anti-circumcision activism, particularly in the U.S., by analyzing an article published in the nudist magazine "Clothed in the Sun." Also cited are neonatal circumcision as a key component of American culture, the relationship between nudism and naturism, and Nacktkultur as a German concept of nudism.

In a poem to his friend Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley offered a critique of hope in ostentatiously metaphysical terms. He thus initiated an exchange, "On Hope," whose philosophical tenor offers new insights on the dialectic between poetry and metaphysics in seventeenth-century England. Following Cowley's lead, this essay explores the principle of hope in metaphysical poetry. It reads his poem against the metaphysical tradition, from Aristotle to Theodor Adorno, to clarify its engagement with the Aristotelian notion of potentiality. And it shows how, even in writing against hope, Cowley's poetry can think, and hope, in ways that metaphysics cannot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since around 2010, a workers' history of science has emerged as a distinct set of research questions and professional practices. More than a consolidation of prior concepts, the workers' history of science attends to resource distribution both in sites of science in the past and in present-day historians' sites of training and labor—the university, the library, the research organization, the professional meeting, and more. To understand the timing and trajectory of the workers' history of science, it is helpful to look at the history of "mutual aid." This example clarifies, first, how the workers' history of science is enlivening the historiography of science: by bringing to the past a form of analysis that was actively politically suppressed in the workplaces of history in the United States after World War II. It also shows how the workers' history of science can, in alliance with other movements, gradually transform the political economy of the profession—through small but consequential decisions about how to organize our shared professional worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the thesis that social comparison is, for Kierkegaard, a vice. The first part of this article reconstructs Kierkegaard's understanding of the nature of social comparison. Here, I bring attention to his anthropological but also political and sociological observations that pertain to social comparison and its links to modernity. The second part reconstructs the moral psychological account of social comparison in Kierkegaard, drawing on some of the available secondary literature. I complement Kierkegaard's consideration of social comparison in relation to worry and humility with his account of the non-cognitive aspects of its operationality. The third part demonstrates that social comparison is a vice. Therein, drawing on the previous sections of this article, I identify Kierkegaard's naturalistic argument engaged to present social comparison as a non-moral and non-religious vice (functionalism), pointing toward its intermeshing with the moral religious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship, if any, COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders had on mental health outcomes for undergraduate students. Participants: This study was comprised of 138 students, all of which were recruited from a single four-year college in the Midwest. Methods: A pre-/post-test comparative design was adopted and was leveraged to capture data regarding students' experiences before and after the shelter-in-place orders were enacted to determine if there was a marked effect between the pre-virus condition and the situation after stay at home orders went into effect. Results: Paired sample t-test were conducted to determine whether the mental health outcomes of depression, anxiety and stress were significantly changed from before to after COVID-19 shelter in place disorders. While anxiety and stress scores were revealed no significant difference, significantly greater depression was revealed after COVID-19. Conclusion: Overall, the results of this study highlight the need for colleges to be aware of the mental health toll that the pandemic and shelter-in-place orders may take on their students. Though this toll registered only directly in depression, there remains significant reasons to believe the situation may also affect stress and anxiety regardless of the absence of evidence for these factors in this study. There remains much to be done in assessing the ultimate impact of the pandemic on students' mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Fiji was a British colony, in the early twentieth century, education to Indigenous Fijians was delivered by missions including the Methodist Overseas Mission of Australasia. As argued here, education delivery was influenced by policies for African Americans. Policies from Tuskegee Institute in the American South were transposed to Nausori, where i taukei (people of the land) and Indo-Fijians were encouraged into industrial mission schemes, away from traditional communal lifestyles. This article illustrates how contemporary educational philosophies for and by Black men and women were part of a broader education network that acted as a locus of colonial reform. While some in the colonial hierarchy considered his emphasis on agricultural training appropriate to their vision of Native Fijian advancement, concurrently, Fijians themselves – passing through the mission system promoted competing forms of modernisation. They used missionary education, including influences of Washington's approach, to speak back to British power and authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article not only mentions spiritual anarchism nominally, as do so many previous articles, but tries to define it as precisely as possible. The definition assumes that the self itself can be a source of unjustifiable authority and a limitation to freedom, and that spiritual anarchism is nothing more than being open to that which transegoically transcends our narrow perspective. The article critically revisits previous overviews of spiritual anarchism, and itself proposes to take into account traditions that have been neglected. Finally, the article reverses the approach; that is, it considers how some of our spiritual practices can be made more anarchistic, including meditation, the psychedelic experience and the mystical experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use insights from post-structuralist anarchism to consider the relationship between a sense of the future, or "futurity", and the notion of utopia for anarchist movements. At issue is whether anarchism requires a vision or sense of the future at all and, if so, whether that futurity should be utopian. Drawing from the post-structuralist anarchism of Todd May, Saul Newman, and Lewis Call, I consider the problems with utopia, as well as the potential irrelevance or impossibility of even thinking the future. I then argue for the necessity of both and contend that post-structuralist anarchism does not preclude either futurity or provisional forms of utopia. I conclude by sketching the outlines of a utopia that would be acceptably post-structuralist and acceptably anarchist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the revitalization of the ancient Greek religion in modern Greece and the way some of its adherents approach mythology. This religious movement challenges the dominant religious discourse in modern Greece by claiming legitimacy through indigeneity, while making important arguments regarding the perceived spiritual and value crisis in their culture. At a time that right-wing extremisms and fundamentalisms are rising globally, this religious movement places emphasis on worldview and imagines a kind of citizen who engages with universal ideals while maintaining a strong connection to a unique ethnic identity. At the same time, Ethnikoi Hellenes challenge prevailing understandings of religion by making 'logos' or reason central to their theology. Thus, they challenge the association of Indigenous religions with "irrationality", while pointing out the inconsistencies and irrationalities of monotheistic religions, which they consider responsible for the widespread "cultural" crisis facing humanity. The example of one group's engagement with geomythology has been used to demonstrate that they do not conceive religion and science as contradictory but complementary, thus exhibiting transreligiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I read Portuguese writer Ferreira de Castro's Amazonian "novel of the jungle" A selva (1930) through the lens of the author's lifelong commitment to anarchist ideals and, in particular, to the thinking of Pëtr Kropotkin. I argue that Kropotkin's reflections on collaboration in more-than-human forms of existence and on the role mutual aid will play in an anarchist world to come are key to understanding the political evolution of the novel's protagonist from an elitist believer in monarchy to a proto-anarchist. Working in a rubber collection facility in the final years of the Amazonian rubber boom, A selva's main character observes the centrality of cooperation and symbiosis both within and across plant and animal species. Mutual aid, in turn, proves decisive for the survival of the destitute migrant rubber tappers that flocked to the Amazon in search of a better life. I contend that, in the novel, the cooperation between more-than-human rainforest beings serves as a blueprint for a more equitable human polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hedonic contrast effect occurs when comparing a stimulus to its alternatives makes it better or worse. We find that counterfactual comparisons induce larger hedonic contrast effects when they are also social comparisons. Hedonic contrast effects influence happiness with a food or wage more when another person receives its counterfactual alternative than when no person receives its counterfactual alternative. Social attention, the propensity to attend to the experiences of other people, underlies the larger hedonic contrast effects induced by social comparisons. People pay more attention to counterfactual alternatives when they are also social comparison standards, and this difference in the allocation of attention mediates the larger hedonic contrast effects that social counterfactual comparisons induce. Reducing attentional resources with cognitive load or time pressure reduces the impact of social counterfactual comparisons, and drawing attention to nonsocial counterfactual comparisons increases their impact. Social attention makes comparisons stronger when they are social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays consumers can easily connect with others who are pursuing similar goals via smart devices and mobile apps. This technology also enables them to compare how well they are doing relative to others in a variety of contexts, ranging from online gaming to losing weight to loyalty programs. This research investigates consumers' motivation to achieve a goal when they compare themselves with a superior other who has already attained the goal. Building on the literature on social comparison, and on competition in particular, we find that consumers are less motivated when the superior other has attained the goal compared to when the superior other is just ahead, keeping the relative distance equal. This negative effect on motivation is evident even in situations in which consumers can still attain the same goal as the superior other. We argue and demonstrate that this effect occurs because the other's goal attainment limits consumers' prospect to compete and overtake the superior other. Six experimental studies show evidence for this effect in hypothetical loyalty programs and behavioral task completion. These findings provide a deeper understanding of the motivational effect of social comparison, which have implications for marketing managers and public policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although one writer has suggested that the role theory consists of pompous, nebulous and incredibly lengthy re-statements of what has been common knowledge for a very long time, no one can deny that it has provided a viable conceptual framework for the investigation of individual behaviour within an organizational setting. Such a framework has been profitably utilized in recent decades in a number of important studies; those pertaining to educational institutions being of particular interest. However, as the concept of role has become increasingly employed as a tool of empirical analysis, so there has been a tendency on the part of many social scientists to formulate a plethora of related concepts. In defining these further concepts terminology has been somewhat inconsistent, and this has led to a good deal of unnecessary confusion. This article attempts a further summary and clarification of this literature, to clarify as it were, the reigning confusion and it also attempts to discuss theoretically the changes in role-conceptions noted in empirical studies of individuals in, or entering, an organizational setting. The concept of role has diverse origins. Stemming from several disciplines it has come to the forefront of sociological theory as a concept linking social structure with individual personality. And significantly, the earliest formulations of the concept came from directions exemplifying two dissimilar areas of study, social anthropology and social psychology.