In the 20s and 30s of the XX century. anti-religious propaganda in Soviet Ukraine was gaining momentum. In the course of the anti-religious Soviet policy, the school occupied a rather important place. The goal of the declared anti-religious policy was to destroy Orthodox, Catholic (Greek Catholic, Muslim, Protestant, etc.) ideological social canons, to break age-old family foundations, to educate a person of a new «Soviet» model. In large settlements, nurseries, 24-hour kindergartens and boarding facilities of various profiles began to be opened in large numbers. Under such conditions, family education has dramatically lost its authority, especially in cities. A normal phenomenon was the universal rejection of parents, whom the Soviet authorities suspected of collaborating with the then class enemies. Even in kindergartens, children were taught by educators that priests in temples are bad people who distract gullible hardworking people from work and promote very dubious narratives. Atheism became the new dominant ideology of the Soviet government. That is, the younger generation witnessed unpunished crimes against humanity. Soviet atheist education as a flagrant phenomenon of violation of human rights is especially noticeable when analyzing the life of Muslim families in Ukraine (their children have always lived isolated from the Ukrainian population, and received education at temples and learned to live under classical Muslim education). Anti-church and state literature, which was published at that time, despite the significant level of ignorance of the majority of the population, did not withstand any criticism and did not fulfill high party tasks. One of the forms of fighting against the religiosity of the population was demonstrative psychological pressure on believers from the side of employees. Therefore, in their majority, people were forced to hide their religious views in order not to harm their families. Communist carnivals, held on the days of major religious holidays and aimed at destroying religiosity among the average population, were the most vivid manifestations of the Soviet anti-church state policy.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Frédéric Chopin are household names, but few will recognize Francesca Caccini, Elisabeth Lutyens or Amy M. Beach, who are among the top-10 female composers of all time. Why are female composers overshadowed by their male counterparts? Using novel data on over 17,000 composers who represent the entire history of western classical music, we conduct the first quantitative exploration of the gender gap among composers. We use the length of a composer’s biographical entry in Grove Music Online to measure composer prominence, and shed light on the determinants of the gender gap with a focus on the development of composers’ human capital through families, teachers, and institutionalized music education. The evidence suggests that parental musical background matters for composers’ prominence, that the effects of teachers vary by the gender of the composer but the effects of parents do not, and while musician mothers and female teachers are important, they do not narrow the gender gap in composer prominence. We also find that the institutionalization of music education in conservatories increases the relative prominence of female composers.

Street names are not neutral identifiers to navigate through cities but are charged with strong symbolic connotations and reflect power relations within society. A growing body of geographic scholarship documents a strong gender bias in the urban namespace, where women only represent a small fraction of streets named after people. This article investigates whether the lack of women in political decision-making roles contributes to explaining their marginalization in urban toponyms. More specifically, we study the impact of the gender and ideology of town mayors on their decisions to commemorate women in the street map. Focusing on the universe of Spanish towns during the period 2001–2023, we find through fixed effects panel data models and regression discontinuity design that the mayor's gender does not affect the percentage of female-named streets, while the ideology of the governing party does. Our findings thus indicate that it is ideology rather than gender what shapes politicians' preferences regarding the commemoration of women in the street map. We argue that this is because, on the one hand, strong political parties can impose their agenda on local leaders, making irrelevant differences in their gender and, on the other, the ideological cleavage is more relevant than the gender one to account for differences in attitudes towards symbolic gender policies. A natural implication of our results is that simply having more female politicians will hardly suffice to address the gender gap in street names and in other symbolically charged policies.

This article analyzes the key factors that contributed to the development of human rights education, focusing on the role of grassroots social organizations in Bogotá, Colombia, between 1977 and 2007. The study is grounded in documentary and historical research, employing a socio-critical approach. This research addresses the issue of how human rights education in Colombia emerged from the convergence of two social forces that influenced the process of citizenship formation on one hand, the country sought to align its policies with international demands amid the Cold War and the establishment of the international human rights system. On the other, grassroots organizations spearheaded social movements that, in response to the State’s fragility, advanced demands for rights, particularly those related to social participation and access to essential services. The analysis reveals that collective political action, driven by organizational processes, forged new forms of learning and mobilization around rights. These practices encompassed solidarity, urban protest, collective resource management, and the struggle for the right to the city. Popular education served as a platform for promoting and activating judicial mechanisms to demand rights, employing participatory and reflective methodologies that resonated throughout the teaching and learning processes about rights within the school system.

This study showed that using collaborative entertainment robots for human-robot interaction can be a promising way to help manage the health of ageing populations by automatically detecting and mitigating cognitive impairment. The system enhanced spoken interaction with users by using cutting-edge technologies such as state-of-the-art speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning. The system was tested on senior participants and gathered, analyzed, and displayed individual interaction models to provide automated user engagement, daily interaction monitoring, and automatic early detection of deteriorating mental health. The findings were presented using bar charts and confusion matrices, incorporating important metrics such as mental workload and speech/non-speech interaction graphic. These visualizations aided individuals in managing their behavior to achieve an optimal cognitive workload, a challenging measure to determine due to cognitive decline. In order to make significant progress in the subject, future advancements need to focus on addressing the unpredictability in human speech sequences, using non-speech modalities such as gestures or facial expressions as supplementary inputs to complement speech and behavior, and effectively managing concerns related to human rights and data protection. In addition to technological constraints, future research should prioritize the examination of the enduring impacts of cognitive therapies facilitated by entertainment robots

Evidence on the influence of outdoor artificial light at night (ALAN) on hypothyroidism in pregnant women is scarce. We aimed to investigate the association between outdoor ALAN exposure and hypothyroidism in pregnancy. 81,120 pregnant women from the China Birth Cohort Study (CBCS) were analyzed, which recruited from 18 provinces and autonomous regions in China between February 2018 and December 2020. Hypothyroidism was defined based on clinical diagnosis by physicians. Outdoor ALAN exposure (nW/cm2/sr) within 1500m was estimated using VIIRS/DNB satellite data based on the participants' residential address. The Outdoor ALAN was divided in quartiles, with the lowest quartile (Q1) serving as the reference group. Generalized linear mixed models were employed to estimate the association between ALAN exposure and hypothyroidism. Among the 81,120 pregnant women, 3902 (4.77%) were diagnosed hypothyroidism. Pregnant women with hypothyroidism had significantly higher median (IQR, interquartile range) outdoor ALAN levels during pregnancy compared to those without hypothyroidism (30.97 (18.15) vs. 29.14 (20.21) nW/cm2/sr, p<0.01). After adjusting for covariates, we found that each quartile increment of outdoor ALAN exposure was associated with an adjusted Odds Ratio (aOR of 1.15 (95% Confidence Interval [95% CI]: 1.03-1.27), 1.15 (1.05-1.28), and 1.12 (1.00-1.25) for hypothyroidism, respectively from Q2 to Q4. Additionally, stratified analyses revealed that pre-pregnancy BMI was a significant modifier in the association between outdoor ALAN and hypothyroidism in pregnancy, with stronger effects observed among those who were overweight before pregnancy (1.21 [95% CI, 1.05-1.39] vs. 1.03 [95% CI, 0.97-1.10], p for interaction=0.01). Outdoor ALAN exposure is positively associated with hypothyroidism in pregnancy. To benefit maternal and infant health and well-being, recommendations for mitigating ALAN pollution and effective measures to avoid excessive light exposure should be developed.

This paper, Body as a Territory of Peace: A Proposal for Human Rights Education in Informal Spaces and Youth Contexts, aims to describe a pedagogical proposal to connect with the possibilities offered by non-formal learning and leisure spaces. These possibilities, combined with the simplicity of neighborhood contexts, enable approaching the (re)conceptualization of the body as a territory of peace from education for human rights and the claim of education for peace. It is proposed to use the controversial pedagogy and the pedagogy of liberation to establish a dialogic process taking into account the contribution provided in volume V, “Enduring war and rebuilding life: Impacts, confrontations and resistances,” from the report of the Comisión de la Verdad de Colombia (2022) [Colombian Truth Commission], to ultimately narrate the experience through the diversity offered by art. This pedagogical proposal offers an opportunity to heal the wounds and tend to the scars left by the internal armed conflict in Colombia, even when they seem invisible, claiming spaces of memory that history has also imprinted on the skin during our country's ongoing transition to peace.

In the last decade, the Republic of Moldova has often been cited as a success story for democratization. However, the construction of a resilient and efficient civil society is still an ongoing process. At societal level, ethnic cleavages, polarized geopolitical preferences of the citizens, or antagonist value systems are hard to reconcile for solving fundamental challenges such as the representation of unprivileged groups, minorities, gender inequalities, etc. Women empowerment is seen as the process that alters social power dynamics by questioning ideologies that perpetuate inequalities, challenging the status quo for obtaining and controlling resources, and transforming institutional structures that uphold power imbalances, such as the family, state, and market. (Batliwala 2007) Our article explores the state of affairs of this issue in the Republic of Moldova, specifically, the perception of women’s civil society organizations in order to understand the dynamic of its winding, but steady, development. As such, we analyze the existing dissensus at societal level over core issues such as gender roles, financial rights of women, political representation, and domestic violence. In particular, we outline the current status of women’s organizations’ success throughout the Republic of Moldova, whilst focusing on discrepancies between formal and actual gender equality, the ubiquity of post-Soviet and conservative ideology, scarce financial resources, and the lack of mass support for women’s organizations. Despite these challenges, such groups have managed to carve out a space to advocate for issues on behalf of women – namely, political and financial empowerment, and actions against domestic violence – by using affirmative measures, informal support, media and educational campaigns. Our qualitative research is based on 15 viewpoint interviews conducted between January and February 2024 with Moldovan citizens in Chişinău, Bălți and Cahul, selected in a gender-balanced manner, aged between 18 and 55. The results of the research confirm the hypothesis related to the role played by post-Soviet ideology, the influence of the Orthodox Church, divergent economic interests of the population, as well as precarious economic thinking. The results show as well that thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, role models can offer guidance to build cohesion and trust in civil society.

This article was presented as part of Axis II: Memory, Truth, Justice, and Reparation during the 10th Latin American and Caribbean Colloquium of Latin American and Caribbean Network of Human Rights Education and the Colombian Network of Human Rights Education (REDLACEDH), which took place at the National Pedagogical University of Bogotá, Colombia, from October 11 to 13, 2023. The event was organized by the REDLACEDH. These are the findings of a study on the production of literature regarding memory, truth, and justice; this production was born from experiences of education for “Never Again” in Brazil. The bibliographical research on social production related to the period 1964-1985 in Brazil originated from social organizations such as Movimiento de Mujeres por la Amnistía (Women’s Movement for Amnesty), Comités Brasileños de Amnistía (Brazilian Amnesty Committees), Comisión de Justicia y Paz (Justice and Peace Commission), Grupos Tortura Nunca Más (Torture Never Again Groups), Movimiento de Familiares de Muertos y Desaparecidos (Movement of Relatives of the Dead and Disappeared). The review encompasses political issues such as dossiers and reports on serious violations of human rights, the memory of hunger strikes inside political prisons, the historiography of resistance movements against the dictatorship, biographies, audiovisual productions, and educational practices of knowledge and memory originated from actions of resistance and defense. In this process, the significant roles played by former political prisoners, family members, lawyers, religious leaders, and human rights defenders are particularly noteworthy. The establishment of the Comisión Nacional de la Verdad (National Truth Commission) led to the emergence of productions stemming from human rights policy, including Truth Commission reports, academic studies, and research on transitional justice. At this stage, the centrality of political persecution by the authoritarian state returns, allowing space for silenced discourse.

This paper is an international law research on (1) the challenges of customs offenses harmonization in the EU, (2) an approximation of Ukraine’s (or other candidate country’s) legislation with the EU customs acquis. The research aims to (a) clarify the situation in the field of customs offenses, (b) analyse previous harmonization efforts, (c) find common denominators, and (d) synthesize the recommendations on how Ukraine shall act to harmonize with the EU customs acquis in the relevant field. At least two successful cases of harmonization are analysed, and conclusions are highlighted. A particular analysis is provided on the impossibility of abrupt alignment or using any EU country as a role model. The article offers an alternative – a gradual approximation by exchanging best practices. The research also emphasizes the importance of the procedural factors in the harmonization process. The article also defines additional possible sources of best practices such as (1) effectiveness, proportionality, and dissuasiveness through the prism of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) interpretations and (2) European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case law.