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Building on my ongoing ethnographic research with people living with HIV in different European countries, the paper focuses on RD, a Catalan man I have interviewed three times since 2014. In RD's life narrative, 'crisis' is a recurring theme including both the most blatant forms, like the severe housing crisis in Spain that followed the global financial crisis, and the most ordinary ones like domestic violence. Analysing the impact of crises in RD's perception and experience of the present, interwoven with the past(s) and the future(s), the paper discusses two main benefits of longitudinal ethnographic research. First, it allows to capture how crisis is not just a moment or a phase in RD's life, but acts as context generating a recurring experience of an 'uncanny present' shaped by logics of return and repetition of the past, and anticipation of the future. Second, it supports RD's self‐awareness around his ability to navigate the unknown when experiencing the 'uncanny present'; this highlights the ethical care dimension entailed by such methodology. The paper presents two main benefits of longitudinal ethnographic research. First, it allows to capture how crisis, for some people, is not just a moment or phase but acts as context generating a recurring experience of an 'uncanny present'. Second, it supports participants' self‐awareness around their ability to navigate the unknown, this demonstrating the ethical care dimension of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spanish far-right Vox party ran for the first time as a candidate for the Catalan parliamentary elections in February 2021. This paper analyses the party's political discourse on Twitter during the Catalan parliamentary election campaign in order to assess whether the degree of dialectical confrontation of their messages can exceed the limits of democratic debate. The results reveal how this far-right party's inflammatory messages, which seek to insult its political opponents, ultimately foster an undemocratic environment that turns Vox's political rivals into its enemy, driving social polarisation and a discourse of hatred towards individuals defending other ideologies or parties. Ultimately, it is intended to add that political-ideological nuance for future research that surpasses traditional hate speech —such as those based on criteria such as race or sex— and the suitability of Twitter for the proliferation of the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are secessionisms from and within the EU comparable? What motivates them and to what extent do they pose similar challenges to EU territorial governance? This article addresses these questions by comparing the framing of the British Leave campaign and the Catalan independence movement. Drawing on the FraTerr database and method, the analysis suggests that secessionism from the EU and secessionism within the EU are different political phenomena despite sharing an emphasis on sovereignty and the common goal of breaking-up from an existing polity. Secessionism from the EU is primarily a call for the recovery of lost sovereignty and of classical functions of the state such as border control. Secessionism within the EU invokes sovereignty as the right to external self-determination and adds narratives around a better future and greater democratic quality and social justice. These two types of secessionism pose different challenges to EU territorial governance because the first entails a full rejection of the European project while the latter calls for a review of European multi-level governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When men died in medieval Catalonia, their widows went to the notaries. This article traces the ways in which Jewish and Christian women negotiated legal culture in response to their husbands' deaths in Catalan cities between 1250 and 1350. Death required deeply practical responses as well as emotional ones: the administration of the estate of the deceased was often a pressing concern. Both Jewish and Christian women relied on a variety of legal institutions to safeguard their own and (in some cases) their children's financial futures as they entered widowhood. Through a combination of Latin notarial documentation and Hebrew responsa literature, this article compares Jewish and Christian women's legal responses to the deaths of their husbands. Jews navigated Christian legal institutions and sometimes adapted Christian customs. Yet they also maintained distinct practices, and Jewish widows and their families maneuvered between Christian notaries and Jewish rabbinic authorities as they shaped their individual legal responses to the life-changing deaths of their husbands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]