To explore how nurse practitioners and physicians providing primary care for LGBTQ+ people experience and make sense of their practice. Qualitative study using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 clinicians (four nurse practitioners, eight physicians) working in LGBTQ+-focused primary care across diverse U.S. regions. Interviews were online, audio-recorded via Zoom, and lasted 50-90 min. Reflexive notes were maintained. Analysis followed Smith and Nizza's six-stage Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) process from close reading to experiential statements, clustering to personal experiential themes, development of group experiential themes, and synthesis, supported by memoing and peer debriefing. Four Group Experiential Themes: (1) Belonging, Affirmation, and the Power of LGBTQ+-Centred Spaces: clinicians practised as their full selves and modelled culturally safe care; (2) Personal Pain as Professional Purpose: personal histories of marginalisation informed a reparative ethic that fostered empathy, trust, and safety; (3) Expanding the Boundaries of Health Work: care routinely extended beyond clinic walls to advocacy, harm reduction, administrative support, and navigation of social determinants amid political precarity; (4) Resistance Within Broken Systems: persistent, invisible labour was required to navigate heteronormative and cisnormative infrastructures. LGBTQ+-focused primary care operates as clinical practice and social justice work. Clinicians translate lived experience into reparative, relational care while constantly negotiating systemic constraints and policy volatility. Embed LGBTQ+-affirming competencies and reflexivity in education; redesign digital/administrative systems for affirmed names/pronouns and streamlined access; resource and protect services and staff wellbeing in hostile policy climates. Problem: Persistent inequities and under-recognised experiential labour in LGBTQ+ primary care. Belonging and affirmation; reparative ethic; expanded health work; daily systemic workarounds. Impact Audience: Nurses, physicians, educators, leaders, and policymakers. Reporting Method: COREQ. No Patient or Public Contribution.

This article examines Anne Lister's diaries as a space for a queer reconfiguration of the Don Juan myth in early nineteenth-century English context. Rather than identifying Lister with the libertine hero, it treats Don Juan archetype as a critical lens through which to reconsider seduction and desire once it is no longer supported by masculine privilege. Through close readings of selected diary entries, the discussion traces how Lister's persistent courtships do not follow a pattern of conquest but emerge from vulnerability and in the hope of domestic stability. Instead of ending in moral punishment, her story is determined by exclusion and by the difficulty of finding recognition in the social sphere. The diary, especially in its coded passages, become a space to register her desire under conditions of risk and surveillance, allowing for a rethinking of Don Juanism as a historically situated negotiation of desire and survival.

A tension between free will and determinism shapes narratives of type 2 diabetes and obesity, contributing to stigma and defining how these conditions are culturally understood. This research involved an interdisciplinary analysis drawing on philosophy, narrative theory and illness narrative scholarship. It undertakes close readings of two remission memoirs-William Banting's Letter on Corpulence (1863) and Tom Watson's Downsizing (2020)-in dialogue with Augustine's redemptive and conversion narrative, Confessions. Discourses of metabolic illness oscillate between models of personal responsibility and biological determinism. Subjects are both blamed and rendered passive. In contrast, Banting's and Watson's remission memoirs mobilise a redemptive narrative form structured by deficiency, transformation and renewal. The two texts, written a century and a half apart, assert the authors' agency while positioning them as generative people who seek to transform others. They contest dominant biomedical and institutional narratives that marginalise patient voice and prioritise clinical authority. This article links two memoirs of metabolic illness to a tradition of redemptive story-telling, asking for a rethinking of agency, responsibility and transformation regarding type 2 diabetes. There are implications for both clinical practice and cultural understanding.

ABSTRACT This article explores the Adriatic Sea as a historically specific sound world in the late medieval and early modern periods. Focusing on the eastern Adriatic littoral and archipelago, it asks how travelers and local observers described the sounds of the sea and what cultural meanings they attached to its many states. Drawing on pilgrimage and related travel narratives, complemented by local narrative sources, the article treats these texts as both records of experience and theologically mediated reconstructions of past journeys. Situated at the intersection of sensory history and auditory history, the study combines close reading of sensory language with attention to distal touch. It argues that the Adriatic functioned as an acoustic threshold into pilgrimage, a moral and theological environment in which travelers learned to hear danger, community, and environmental change. Storms turned ships into resonant chambers of fear, while dead calm produced a paradoxical state of audible stillness and immobilized travel. Over time, the sea’s murmur became a sound that faded into the background yet could be reactivated in moments of nocturnal vigilance and monastic contemplation. The article thus adds a maritime dimension to recent work in sensory and auditory history.

Latife Tekin’s Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills marks a pioneering intervention by bringing the peripheral slum settlements to the forefront of urban discourse. Establishing a distinctive subgenre of “shantytown fiction” situated in a milieu of garbage, the text reorients representations towards literary urban studies. This article examines Berji Kristin through the framework of Mike Davis’s “slum ecology” to uncover the mechanisms of “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe) as the underpinning necropower structure. Engaging with waste critique to explore the symbolic ramifications of waste in perpetuating urban exclusion of informal settlers, and by employing Timothy Morton’s notion of “hyperobjects,” the study investigates the agential materiality of waste and its lethal entanglement with the precarious lives of the squatters in the novel. Through close reading, the article shows how waste operates as an amorphous entity of the social “Othering” by examining the intersection of occupation, location, and the socio-political accumulation of “waste.”

This article explores Karen McCarthy Woolf’s An Aviary of Small Birds as a sequence of maternal elegies of loss that mourn the stillbirth of her son, Otto. Through a close reading and a formal analysis of the collection, I examine how the poems articulate the often-silenced experience of motherhood without child, portraying grief as an enduring presence rather than a process with closure. The collection resists conventional narratives of healing, instead embodying the complexities of maternal bereavement. By engaging with poetic form, imagery and language, McCarthy Woolf’s work redefines elegy, bearing witness to the persistence of loss and the impossibility of resolution.

ABSTRACT This article examines Tim Winton’s Shallows as a novel of unsettled dwelling, arguing that its representations of domestic, coastal and shell-like spaces articulate a specifically settler-colonial form of existential angst. While Shallows has often been read through ecocritical frameworks that emphasise environmental activism, whaling and ecological ethics, this article shifts attention to the spatial and affective dimensions of home, intimacy and belonging. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of the house and the shell, and reworking it through feminist spatial theory (Elizabeth Grosz) and settler-colonial scholarship (Lisa Slater, Simone Bignall, Lorenzo Veracini), the article reads Winton’s dwellings as anxious enclosures that promise refuge and expose the instability of settler emplacement. Through a close reading of the book’s central characters, Daniel, Queenie and Cleve, it shows how feelings of emptiness, loneliness and anxious proximity emerge not simply as psychological states but as spatialised affects produced by the unresolved conditions of colonial occupation. The article concludes by reading Queenie’s reimagined relation to place as a tentative movement beyond the contracted shell of settler domesticity towards a more open, non-possessive mode of inhabitation.

ABSTRACT This article examines how the work of contemporary American poet Dana Ward generates ecological thinking through ‘infinity lyric’: a mode shaped by psychedelic aesthetics, drifting attention and shifting scales of perception. By close reading Ward’s two collections, This Can’t Be Life (2012) and The Crisis of Infinite Worlds (2013), in conversation with poststructuralist, new materialist and contemporary poetic theory, the article explores how Ward performs an active reorganisation of everyday experience, forging a psychedelic ecosophy in which mind, society and environment connect through lyrical voice and movement. Situating Ward’s work within the cultural ecologies of Web 2.0 and anti-capitalist critique, the article argues that Ward’s aesthetic of lysergic excess offers an ethical practice grounded not in transcendence but in immanent, relational forms of being. It concludes that infinity lyric provides a distinctive contribution to ecological thought by modelling participatory, heterogeneous and open-ended ways of attending to the world’s material agencies.

ABSTRACT Through close readings of two contemporary novels, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, this article explores the existential value of retreat as a response to the ecological crisis. In these ‘fictions of retreat’ – as I call this strand of climate fiction – retreat is understood as a strategic gesture of stepping back from ordinary life in order to gain new perspectives on human – nonhuman relations. A key component of retreat is a reframing of resilience from an individual psychological attribute to a collective experience. Retreat takes profoundly different forms in Wood’s novel – whose protagonist, an atheist woman, retires to a convent – and in Harvey’s work, which is set aboard the International Space Station. In both narratives, though, retreat fosters experiences of community and shared rhythms that offer a distanced and affectively nuanced stance on our environmental predicament.

Through the divergent paths of two female characters Ashima Bhaduri Ganguli and Moushumi Mazoomdar, this article contends that Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) stages a dialectic between inherited Bengali tradition and self-fashioned modernity. The essay places the novel in the context of research on South Asian American writing feminist diaspora theory and transnational food studies. This article argues that Ashima and Moushumi, on the other hand, occupy different kinds of “third space,” (Bhabha 1994) in which their existence as diasporic subjects is defined by their daily negotiations of food, fashion, movement, and memory. We do not consider food practices and sartorial practices as two independent systems of symbolism. Expanding upon Hall’s notion of “new ethnicities,” Butler’s “theory of performativity,” and Brah’s concept of “diasporic positionality,” we demonstrate how Ashima’s hybridized domestic practices and Moushumi’s cosmopolitan selfhood challenge the teleological models of assimilation. In-depth close readings of several pivotal scenes such as Moushumi’s Parisian dinner party, Ashima’s spontaneous jhāl mūrī in a Cambridge kitchen and the final breakdown of Moushumi and Gogol’s marriage illustrate how Lahiri encapsulates desire resistance and nostalgia in commonplace material culture.

ABSTRACT This article examines the interpretation of the Pauline Epistles within the intellectual milieu of sixteenth-century Salamanca, understood as a continuation and transformation of medieval exegetical culture. Focusing on figures commonly associated with the School of Salamanca—Francisco de Vitoria, Melchor Cano, Domingo de Soto, Domingo Báñez, and Fray Luis de León—the study analyses how Pauline exegesis functioned at the intersection of scholastic theology, humanist philology, and ecclesiastical authority. Through close readings of commentaries, theological treatises, and methodological reflections, the article shows that Salamanca theologians developed a distinctive approach to Scripture that combined the primacy of the literal sense with a controlled use of philological tools, all within an explicitly ecclesial hermeneutical framework. Particular attention is given to Domingo de Soto's commentary on Romans, exemplifying how Pauline texts shaped Iberian debates on justification, grace, and authority during the Protestant Reformation. By situating Pauline exegesis within the cultural and institutional setting of Salamanca, marked by controversies over the Vulgate, the authority of original languages, and the legacy of medieval scholasticism, the article contributes to a broader understanding of how Scripture was read, taught, and contested in the Iberian world at the threshold between the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

ABSTRACT This article offers a postphenomenological reading of South Asian labour migration to the Gulf through Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People. I argue that the novel theorises what I call visa flesh: a condition in which the migrant body is made legible, governable, and exploitable through the infrastructures of kafala – ID systems, camp routines, worksite technologies, transport, and digital communication. Bringing postphenomenology into dialogue with Judith Butler’s account of politically distributed precarity and Brian Larkin’s account of infrastructure as material and sensory form, the article shows that Gulf precarity cannot be reduced to wages, contracts, or legal status alone. It is also produced through everyday mediations that reorganise perception, movement, recognition, and exposure. Rather than using migration scholarship to validate fiction, the essay uses empirical work to frame the institutional conditions that Unnikrishnan’s formal experimentation renders newly perceptible. Close reading of embodied, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations demonstrates how the novel makes infrastructural violence sensible at the level of rhythm, atmosphere, and bodily fragmentation.

ABSTRACT This article maps how neoliberal reforms in higher education incubate organizational violence during periods of change. The analysis draws on unstructured interviews from a Romanian public university and close reading of policy and managerial discourse. Conceptually, we theorize liminal governance as a rule-suspending condition produced during reform periods, where ambiguity, procedural flux, and managerial discretion converge to enable both symbolic and insensitive forms of violence in order to manage resistance to change. These reforms thus offer a critical vantage point from which to observe how violence is embedded in managerial language, governance techniques, and everyday interactions. Stylistically, we employ thick description: informants, public figures and, at times, even cited authors appear as characters in a narrative that builds a horizon of meaning, linking macro-level shifts to their local articulation.

ABSTRACT This article proposes a pluralist empirical-critical framework for analysing interpretive communities in literary studies. I argue that literary scholarship has tended to privilege a small set of academically sanctioned interpretations, while overlooking the interpretative codes that emerge across broader reading publics. Drawing on interviews with humanities scholars and referencing empirical work with digital social reading data, I show how emotional analysis, computational modelling, and close reading can be brought into productive dialogue. I situate this methodological proposal within longstanding disciplinary tensions around representation, canon formation, and the knower-knowledge structure of the humanities. By integrating digital social reading practices with literary-critical interpretation, the article outlines how a pluralist approach can expand the field of literary interpretation, clarify its epistemic foundations, and address structural conflicts within contemporary literary studies.

ABSTRACT Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) is frequently interpreted as a dystopian critique of biotechnology and corporate capitalism, yet its most politically significant figure — Oryx, a woman whose childhood begins with her sale into sexual exploitation — has received limited critical attention. This article argues that Oryx’s narrative trajectory, from her commodification as a child to her death within the novel’s dystopian power structures, constitutes an anatomy of conditions that render child trafficking systemic. Drawing on feminist literary criticism, postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and Marxist theories of commodification, the study offers a close reading of Oryx’s exploitation within global economic hierarchies. The analysis places this narrative in dialogue with evidence from the Jeffrey Epstein network, revealing mechanisms: targeting vulnerable children, commodifying the human body, conditioning victims into silence, and protecting perpetrators. The article argues that Atwood’s dystopian fiction illuminates patterns of exploitation that legal and political systems have failed to confront.

ABSTRACT This article examines Kamala Harris’ 2020–2024 presidential trajectory as a site where multiracial, diasporic identity confronts white supremacist nostalgia in contemporary US politics. Its central thesis argues that Harris’ transoceanic hybridity, rooted in Black Atlantic and South Asian Indian Ocean histories, both destabilizes hegemonic narratives of national belonging and reveals the structural limits placed on hybrid, gendered bodies within presidential politics. Drawing on Critical Mixed Race Studies and Diaspora Theory, the article investigates how Harris’ multi-ethnoracial identity was mobilized, scrutinized, and contested in media, campaign discourse, and political attacks, particularly in contrast to Donald Trump’s masculinist, frontier-based imaginaries of power. Methodologically, the study employs qualitative critical discourse analysis of key campaign texts, including the September 2024 presidential debate, Trump’s victory speech, and Harris’ concession speech, alongside close readings of Harris’ memoir. The analysis demonstrates how hybridity operates as a politically ambivalent force that can challenge exclusionary racial logics while remaining vulnerable to containment within dominant structures of power.

Since the early development of critical gerontology, scholars have recognized the importance of the concept of emancipatory gerontology. In recent years, references to emancipation within gerontological discourse have increased substantially. This growing attention is partly attributable to the rising prominence of emancipatory and participatory research paradigms across the social sciences more broadly. However, a close reading of much of the academic literature in this field suggests that an important element is missing. As this commentary argues, many scholars invoke the concept of "emancipation" in gerontological research as though its meaning were self-evident, without offering a clear definition or explicitly situating their usage within an established theoretical framework. In light of this conceptual ambiguity, this viewpoint seeks to address this gap through a three-stage process. First, it outlines the general meaning of the term "emancipation" and proposes a preliminary working definition of "emancipation in old age." Second, it examines the key elements of this working definition as they are reflected in selected examples of existing gerontological research. Finally, it outlines potential next steps for advancing the conceptual development of "emancipation in old age" as a coherent, comprehensible, and potentially open to future operationalization.

ABSTRACT Documentary cinema serves as a medium through which Indigenous cultural practices and knowledge systems are recorded and interpreted. Many representations of African ritual traditions, however, remain detached from the philosophical foundations that sustain those practices. This study examines the documentary film Evé Kornu (Inseparable Spirits), set among the Anlo community in the Volta Region, in which a ritual is performed upon the death of one twin to separate the surviving twin from the deceased and restore spiritual balance. The study asks how Evé Kornu functions as a site of ritual pedagogy and decolonial knowledge production in the representation of Indigenous Ghanaian cultural practices. The study employs qualitative film analysis and treats the documentary as a cultural text. Selected scenes are examined through a close reading of the film’s formal elements. Ritual pedagogy provides the central analytical frame, while Indigenous knowledge systems and decolonial aesthetics guide the interpretation. The analysis shows that the film constructs ritual pedagogy through apparition and spiritual disturbance, moral conflict between Christianity and ritual obligation, and ritual enactment as ancestral repair. The study contributes to African documentary film scholarship by showing how cinema can transmit ritual knowledge, preserve Indigenous epistemology, and represent twinship as a cosmological condition.

This article interrogates the long-standing tension between aesthetics and politics in the South African literary landscape. Dominant institutional frameworks have historically privileged an apolitical conception of the aesthetic – art for art’s sake – while dismissing politically inflected cultural expression as mere ‘craft’. Against this backdrop, I argue that Black poetic production in South Africa, particularly in the work of Mzwakhe Mbuli (The Beat) and Modise Sekgothe (Zulu Helios), resists this bifurcation. Drawing on the conceptual and methodological intervention of the Black Archive, I show how their poetry stages an ontological protest – where art is not merely expressive, but functional, insurgent, and epistemically generative. Through close readings of both texts, I examine how poetic form operates as a vehicle of political critique and historical memory. Mbuli’s performative cadence and thematic invocation of dispossession, alongside Sekgothe’s cosmological lyricism and embodied poetics, demonstrate how Black artistic expression refuses the colonial separation of aesthetic form and political function. Rather than occupying the margins of literary value, these works call for a reconstitution of the literary canon – one that recognises the epistemic validity of performance, orality, and vernacular modes of knowing. The article thus contributes to ongoing debates in African and decolonial literary studies by offering a theoretical model for reading poetry as archival praxis.

ABSTRACT Bodies of water are not merely rhetorical devices in Jeanette Winterson's novels; they are new posthuman subject images that carry profound political and ethical connotations, directly responding to the urgent water crisis of the Anthropocene. Grounded in close reading of Sexing the Cherry, The Stone Gods, Written on the Body and other key texts, this study integrates Astrida Neimanis's theory of ‘bodies of water’ to challenge two interrelated yet distinct predicaments: modern water discourse reduces water to a universal and isolated abstract resource (H2O), engendering hydroschizophrenia – a cognitive fragmentation that severs water from its ecological and cultural specificity, leading to severe water resource destruction. Paralleling this, Nietzsche's ‘eternal recurrence’ embodies a philosophical rupture: it frames repetition as a sterile, non-generative cycle by severing life from its aqueous origins. Winterson subverts both paradigms by reimagining bodies of water as posthuman embodied images. Through connecting amniotic fluid with primordial evolutionary soup and revealing the abyssal qualities of the human body as a watery cyborg, Winterson endows water with gestationality, transcorporeality, and unknowability, impeling us to recognise material water as an integral part of the planetary hydrocommons we co-create. Ultimately, these figurations dismantle humanist myths of self-sufficiency and isolation, disintegrate its illusory unitary subject, and forge a relational ethic. They embody a hydrocommons ‘we’ – a porous, aqueous subjectivity that dissolves human/non-human binaries and extends responsibility across time and space, offering a textually grounded framework for posthuman ecocriticism and blue humanities.