ABSTRACT Contested memory of the history of Japanese imperialism has frequently been identified as a crucial theme of East Asian international politics. National collective memories, and the identities they constitute, are posed as conflicting in their narratives of this history and its political implications, causing diplomatic clashes. In making these arguments, however, International Relations scholarship often assumes the existence of a singular collective memory within each state. While allowing for a causal explanation of the East Asian ‘history problem’ at the inter-state level, this tendency misses the more complex, contested terrain of memory politics within each state and implies a fixity to their strained relations. In contrast, this article considers counter-memories of colonial history that contest mainstream constructions within East Asian states and theorises their potential to transform the history problem. Focusing on Japan-South Korea relations, it draws on observational fieldwork and textual analysis of activist museums, political protests and popular literature in both countries to analyse alternative historical narratives concerning wartime forced labour and the ‘comfort women’, their contestation of the mainstream, and their potential to transform the status quo of bilateral relations. In doing so, the article opens avenues to theorising alternative future pathways for East Asian international politics.

ABSTRACT This article examines how subregional cooperation initiatives in Southeast Asia, celebrated for promoting ‘borderless’ economic integration, re‑scale and re‑narrate long‑standing projects of enclosure that deepen the marginalisation of maritime communities. Focusing on the Singapore–Johor–Riau (SIJORI) Growth Triangle and the Brunei–Indonesia–Malaysia–Philippines East ASEAN Growth Area (BIMP‑EAGA), it traces how regional growth zones build on colonial and national histories of surveillance, sedentarisation, and dispossession while reorganising them through cross‑border institutions and development rhetoric. Drawing on the concept of selective border permeability – where borders open to state elites and investors but tighten around communities such as the Orang Laut and Bajau Laut – the analysis shows how these initiatives extend uneven geographies of mobility into the sea. By bringing critical geopolitics into conversation with the original concept of blue agrarianisation, the article argues that subregional cooperation reimagines the sea as both a ‘borderless’ investment frontier and a landscape of intensified regulation. Juxtaposing SIJORI and BIMP‑EAGA, the study demonstrates how regional projects selectively open borders for capital while consolidating state authority, reproducing older forms of enclosure in new, regionally articulated ways.

ABSTRACT This article explores the contemporary visitor experience in museums at contrasting colonial geographies with a focus on exhibitions of colonial history, specifically comparing the ‘Slavery’ exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Kura Hulanda Museum in Curaçao. Through expert interviews, TripAdvisor reviews, and content analysis of media and museum publications in 2020 and 2021, the article identifies discrepancies and similarities in how visitors experience the representation of colonial history at both exhibitions. The article shows that the Kura Hulanda Museum maintains a traditional museum pedagogy and lacks a local perspective in the narratives and representation, which hampers the stimulation of an inclusive visitor experience. Contrastingly, the Rijksmuseum's ‘Slavery’ exhibition employs a contemporary, multivocal approach with personal narratives and multisensory methods, creating a more diverse and emotional visitor experience. The article suggests that museums in both colonial geographies should integrate oral history, personal and individual storytelling, and multiple interpretation methods to enhance visitor engagement and to focus on providing a holistic, inclusive and authentic experience. By addressing these aspects, museums can better connect with contemporary societies and ensure museums remain meaningful and resilient in the future, catering to the diverse needs and expectations of their visitors.

ABSTRACT This paper examines how Portuguese nationals perceive and negotiate their relations with the Chinese majority in postcolonial Macau. Employing a Critical Intercultural Communication (CIC) approach, this study explicitly foregrounds Portuguese residents’ accounts and interpretations of interaction and investigates how they navigate identity negotiation, cultural boundaries, and power structures within a predominantly Chinese society following the 1999 handover to Chinese governance. A meta-theoretical lens integrates CIC with Bourdieu’s linguistic capital and Foucauldian power/discourse to situate interactional narratives within Macau’s institutional fields (law, education, labor markets, media). Using a critical ethnographic methodology, the research captures the layered experiences of Portuguese nationals as they contend with linguistic barriers, cultural separations, and legacies of colonial hierarchy that continue to impact social relations. Key findings reveal that while Portuguese nationals strive to preserve cultural heritage, they encounter a “glass wall” of language and cultural distinctions that reinforce social divisions – a wall sustained not only by linguistic difference but also by historically produced institutional arrangements and privileged expectations about who should accommodate whom. This study contributes to intercultural communication scholarship by examining how colonial histories shape contemporary intercultural dynamics, shedding light on the nuanced process of identity negotiation and selective adaptation within Macau’s postcolonial landscape.

ABSTRACT Cultural ecology and decolonial ecology are current directions in environmental literary studies whose mutual relationship has not yet been adequately addressed. The article brings cultural ecology into critical conversation with a decolonial perspective that has been gaining increasing attention in the environmental humanities. It briefly outlines some of the basic premises of a cultural ecology of literature; then argues that in spite of differences in genealogy and emphasis, there are significant affinities between key assumptions of cultural ecology and decolonial ecology; finally, it discusses a literary example that illustrates the productive collusion between cultural and decolonial ecology in the creative imagination, Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island. The novel is a decolonial inversion of historical colonialism, which retraces, against the background of the planetary polycrisis, the trajectory of an indigenous epic poem from pre-colonial Bangladesh to early Enlightenment Venice for a pluriversal rewriting of prevailing narratives of the Anthropocene.

ABSTRACT Indigenous Futurisms is an interdisciplinary framework that reimagines the future through Indigenous epistemologies, temporalities, and creative practices across literature, film, and new media. Emerging as a response to ongoing settler colonialism and cultural erasure, it challenges linear, Western conceptions of time by foregrounding cyclical, relational, and non-linear understandings often articulated through the concept of transmotion. This study examines how Indigenous artists and writers employ speculative and science fiction modes to assert sovereignty, cultural continuity, and agency while engaging histories of colonization and envisioning decolonized futures. In literature, Indigenous Futurisms reclaims narrative authority through storytelling that intertwines past, present, and future, emphasizing resilience, memory, and world-building. In film, it utilizes visual and narrative strategies to represent layered temporalities and Indigenous cosmologies, while fostering community engagement and collaborative production. In new media, including digital art, interactive platforms, and virtual environments, Indigenous Futurisms expands participatory storytelling, enabling co-creation, knowledge sharing, and the preservation of cultural protocols. Across these media, the framework highlights the importance of ethics, representation, and community-centered methodologies. Ultimately, Indigenous Futurisms operates as both a critical lens and a creative practice that advances decolonial thought, reclaims Indigenous presence in futurity, and fosters global dialogues across the Global South and Global North. Keywords: Indigenous Futurisms, Transmotion, Decoloniality, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Speculative Media.

Over the last three decades (and maybe longer), studies have documented persistent race-based maternal mental health disparities, whereas Black mothers are more likely to experience mental health concerns, and least likely to access formal mental health services due to structural racism and other social determinants. Given the history of colonization and culturally grounded collective healing, it is essential that infant mental health practitioners support Black mothers and their intentional decision-making rather than problematizing or pathologizing healthy responses. This qualitative pilot study entailed analysis of in-depth interviews with 12 Black mothers between the ages of 20 and 39 in a US midwestern metropolitan context. Three interconnected themes emerged describing the decision-making process: changing contexts in maternal mental health and decision-making, assessing supports for mental health, and recommendations for supporting Black maternal mental health and decision-making in more helpful ways. Findings reveal that Black mothers engage in complex, culturally-grounded decision-making processes that extend beyond formal mental health services to include self-help, informal support, and community-based resources. The research contributes to a theoretical understanding of how intersecting identities and contextual factors influence mental health decision-making, offering practical recommendations for culturally responsive infant mental health practice and policy development that center on Black mothers' voices and experiences.

Cultural safety is a vital component of healthcare education, particularly in countries with colonial histories such as Australia. Ensuring that cultural safety is meaningfully embedded and assessed within health professional programs is essential for improving health outcomes for First Nation Australians. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate how cultural safety is represented in a Pharmacy education curriculum. A qualitative curriculum mapping approach was used to identify cultural safety elements in curriculum documents. First, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health curriculum framework was used to determine if unit-level learning outcomes referenced cultural safety. Second, the concept of constructive alignment was used to determine if cultural safety learning outcomes were constructively aligned with learning activities and assessments. Third, verbs similar to Bloom's taxonomy was used to identify the cognitive level of cultural safety elements RESULTS: Seven units of study were mapped. One unit demonstrated aligned cultural safety elements, however, six did not. Assessments of cultural safety learning outcomes were largely absent with learning activities typically confined to single events at novice level. When assessments did occur, they were predominantly of a lower cognitive order through multiple choice or short answer questions formats CONCLUSION: Despite national standards, cultural safety appears to be inconsistently embedded and poorly assessed. Further curriculum development is necessary to achieve constructive alignment and accountability.

Haunted houses: Using photovoice to understand emotional geographies in single room occupancy housing.

Abstract This article examines the introduction of Jamaica’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), Jamaica Digital Exchange (JAM-DEX), to show how monetary innovation is embedded in questions of sovereignty, class, race, and religion. Drawing on 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kingston (2022–2024), it adopts a pragmatist anthropology of money and mobilizes three cultural lenses – institutional, infrastructural, and affective – to analyze how CBDCs are lived, interpreted, and contested in everyday life. The institutional lens reveals a struggle over monetary sovereignty that is continually undermined by the CBDC’s dependence on private, largely foreign-owned financial intermediaries for its circulation. The infrastructural lens shows how financial innovation can reproduce the racialized and classed hierarchies rooted in Jamaica’s colonial banking history. The affective lens shows how moral imaginaries, ranging from eschatological fears of the ‘Mark of the Beast’ to crypto-libertarian critiques of surveillance, shape public engagement with the CBDC. The article employs the metaphor of haunting to show how unresolved histories of racial capitalism re-emerge through JAM-DEX, producing a disjointed temporality in which digital futures arrive prematurely. The persistence of these financial ghosts reinforces the claim that CBDCs should be studied within their social, historical, and affective contexts.

Intermedial adaptation of literary narratives into film represents a complex cultural and aesthetic process shaped by historical, linguistic, and ideological contexts. Broadly, adaptation studies have evolved from fidelity-based critiques toward more dynamic frameworks that emphasize transformation, reinterpretation, and cross-media dialogue. Within postcolonial contexts, these adaptations are particularly significant, as they mediate histories of colonialism, identity formation, and cultural resistance while negotiating power structures embedded in both literature and cinema. Transnational cinematic traditions further complicate this landscape by introducing hybrid storytelling techniques, diverse production networks, and global audience expectations. Narrowing the focus, intermedial adaptation in postcolonial and transnational settings involves the reconfiguration of narrative voice, temporality, and symbolism as texts move from page to screen. Filmmakers often employ visual, auditory, and performative elements to reinterpret literary themes such as displacement, memory, and hybridity, thereby creating new layers of meaning. These adaptations do not merely reproduce source texts but actively reconstruct them within new socio-political and cultural frameworks. This study highlights how intermediality functions as a critical lens for understanding the transformation of narratives across media, revealing the interplay between local cultural specificity and global cinematic influences in shaping contemporary storytelling practices.

Reconciliation and Indigenous self-determination have importance globally for the management of protected area systems, as these landscapes constitute key arenas where conservation, colonial history and contemporary struggles for Indigenous governance and authority interface. This case study examines the role of reconciliation and Indigenous self-determination in the Northwestern region of British Columbia’s (BC) provincial parks system in Canada. The objectives were to identify socio-political barriers to Indigenous inclusion in BC Parks’ planning and operations management and to develop practical recommendations for park planners and operations managers to support reconciliation and Indigenous self-determination in their work. Twenty-eight semi-structured interviews with Gitxsan First Nation Chiefs and Elders and BC Parks staff revealed that settler colonialism, residential schools and assimilation policies have created longstanding mistrust in the Province. Gitxsan participants emphasised that reconciliation is community-specific, and self-determination requires greater control, agency and governance over their territories. BC Parks participants called for regionally located Indigenous Relations specialists, co-management of parks and Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas to support engagement and relationship-building. The paper argues that meaningful inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in park planning and operations management is essential for advancing reconciliation, supporting self-determination, and addressing broader social and environmental issues.

ABSTRACT This article provides a philosophical response to the need for truth-telling about colonial history, focussing on the Australian context. The response consists in inviting philosophers and the public to engage in social-justice practices specified by a model called Distributed Truth-Telling (DTT), which integrates the historiography of injustices affecting Indigenous peoples with insights from social philosophy and cultural evolution theory. By contrast to official and large-scale truth commissions, distributed truth-telling is a set of non-elitist practices that weave three components: first, multisite, multiformat, and multiscale inquiries into injustices; second, remedial imaginings and reasoning about moral repair and reconciliated futures; and finally, emotions suitable for motivating agents to cooperatively plan and implement moral revolutions. Distributed truth-telling can entrench virtuous feedback loops that contribute to moral revolutions. However, vicious feedback loops associated with collective denial and biases can impair distributed truth-telling and thwart moral revolutions.

Since 1995, Māori tribes have received NZ$ 4.6 billion in compensation for grievances concerning their dispossession in the colonial history of New Zealand, but studies of the influence of settlements on the ‘well-being’ of Māori beneficiaries are scarce. This article reflects on the first major settlement, which was signed with the Waikato-Tainui tribe whose entire territory was confiscated in 1864. After 30 years, the settlement has increased in value to NZ$ 1.9 billion, but, for a variety of reasons, tribal members hardly benefit from the restitution of resources and the growth of the tribal estate. Resources of all tribal beneficiaries have been collectivized under the governance of a tribal corporation that aims at preventing fragmentation in order to enhance their capital value. As a consequence, however, the settlement is deepening the disenfranchisement of tribal members, who have no further avenues for seeking redress for their deprivation.

Environmental ethics has moved from a largely philosophical debate on the moral standing of nature toward a transdisciplinary field shaping conservation policy, environmental governance, sustainable production, consumer behavior, ecological restoration, and organizational transformation. Building on the attached literature base and integrating recent additions from the supplied extraction set, this review synthesizes contemporary scholarship on the normative architectures, empirical applications, and governance implications of environmental ethics. The review shows that recent literature has expanded the field in four major directions: first, by refining debates on anthropocentric, biocentric, ecocentric, virtue-based, relational, and rights-based frameworks; second, by translating ethical theory into practical domains such as biodiversity management, environmental impact assessment, green consumption, climate communication, mining and soil remediation, and marine and forest governance; third, by foregrounding pluralism, relationality, and stewardship as mediating concepts between intrinsic and instrumental valuation; and fourth, by embedding ethics in organizational innovation, stakeholder pressure, and sustainable performance. Across the literature, the strongest trend is a shift away from binary oppositions human versus nature, intrinsic versus instrumental value, science versus values toward integrative approaches that recognize normative plurality while preserving ethical accountability. At the same time, major tensions remain regarding rights of nature, moral standing of individuals versus collectives, colonial and postcolonial histories of conservation, and the political limits of sustainability governance under predominantly anthropocentric institutions. This review contributes a structured synthesis, four summary tables, and an updated analytical agenda for future scholarship. It argues that environmental ethics is most productive when treated not as an abstract supplement to environmental decision-making, but as the normative infrastructure through which environmental knowledge, institutions, and actions are interpreted, justified, contested, and transformed. Keywords: environmental ethics; Anthropocene; biodiversity conservation; relational values; rights of nature; green innovation; sustainability governance

There is a correlation between colonial histories and contemporary migration practices, and this paper examines these transnational enduring connections. Using a qualitative thematic synthesis of existing interdisciplinary sources, this paper argues that the politics of space, migration, and identity in the present cannot be fully comprehended without tracing their colonial genealogies. The findings demonstrate that colonial migrations in all forms (forced, enslaved, or settled) formed transnational genealogies that determine who moves, who is stopped, who belongs, and who is an outsider. The paper concludes that understanding current migration politics, spatial inequalities, and identities requires an appreciation of transnational genealogies that connect the past to the present. The paper suggests that colonial history is more than a background but a framework that sets the conditions within which migration occurs today. This paper contributes to showing that family functions as a neglected site where genealogies are transmitted and contested across generations.

This article argues that South Asian literature viewed through a postcolonial lens offers crucial alternatives to Western Ecocriticism by reinterpreting environmental degradation via culturally rooted stories that emphasize dispossession, spiritual ecology, and economic marginalization. It questions the Western separation between nature and culture, advocating for a more pluralistic and decentralized perspective informed by indigenous worldviews. Through a comparative examination of the writings of Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, Raja Rao, Kamala Markandaya, and Rohinton Mistry, the analysis illustrates how these authors reshape ecological awareness by depicting nature as a vibrant historical force rather than simply a backdrop. Drawing on third-wave Ecocriticism (Buell, 2005) and postcolonial critiques of the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty, 2009; Moore, 2016), this paper promotes a planetary and decolonial Ecocriticism—one that prioritizes subaltern knowledge systems and highlights the gradual violence (Nixon, 2011) that connects colonial histories with present-day climate injustices.

Abstract This essay explains how Junot Díaz’s stories show the lasting impact of colonialism and dictatorship on everyday life, especially for immigrants and their children living between cultures. I argue that struggles over belonging, love, and identity are shaped by history and power even when characters do not name those forces directly. I interpret Junot Díaz’s fiction as an account of “the other side”: a peripheral perspective produced by migration, racialization, and the enduring afterlife of colonial violence. Dominican and U.S. histories, especially dictatorship, imperial entanglements, and postindustrial economic restructuring, shape the motives, relationships, and moral horizons of Díaz’s characters. Methodologically, the essay combines close reading with interdisciplinary framing: using diaspora theory to parse displacement, decolonial theory (via the concept of coloniality) to track the persistence of power/knowledge hierarchies, and comparative literary analysis to set Díaz alongside Gloria Anzaldúa and Rudolfo Anaya. Díaz’s “third place,” language, and genre play (fabulism, fantasy/science fiction) render colonial history as lived structure. Díaz shows how coloniality distorts intimacy, masculinity, and community through both material constraint and epistemic domination, and that “decolonial love” names a fragile but real form of resistance and healing. I conclude that colonialism is first a material enterprise whose cultural residues persist, and that reading the “carnality of knowledge” in Díaz clarifies how agency can emerge, even in exile, as a world-making practice.

Sustainable development discourse has operated for over three decades under an unresolved foundational tension: the Brundtland Commission's canonical 1987 definition accommodated continued economic growth as a political condition of international consensus, while the ecological systems that definition was designed to protect have continued to deteriorate. By 2023, six of nine quantified planetary boundaries had been transgressed. This paper conducts a thematic review of seventeen papers spanning the bibliometric, normative-ecological, and political-economic traditions within sustainability research, identifying four structural problems that the field has not resolved: the causal gap between knowledge production and measurable outcomes; the paradigm-replacement problem concerning neoclassical economics; the foundational dependency of the entire literature on Planetary Boundaries evidence it does not independently validate; and the Global South absence problem. The review finds that alternative economic frameworks — Doughnut Economics, post-growth theory, ecological economics, and capabilities-based approaches — have reached theoretical maturity and demonstrated governance operationalizability, but have been developed exclusively in and for high-income, post-industrial economies. The paper argues that the Global South is not a representational gap to be corrected by inclusive citation practice, but the site where existing frameworks' deepest assumptions about the relationship between economic growth, human development, and ecological constraint are most consequentially tested. It proposes a theoretical reconstruction of post-growth and doughnut economics frameworks that engages the specific political economy of Southern developmental contexts — marked by unmet social foundations, constrained fiscal and institutional capacity, colonial resource extraction histories, and asymmetric international financial architecture — as the condition for producing a genuinely global alternative economics of sustainability.

The objective of this review is to map the depth and breadth of the literature on underrepresented groups in medical school admissions. Specifically, we aim to define URiM applicant groups and how they changed over time, summarize their admission experiences, and identify support strategies throughout their admissions process. The medical school admissions process plays a key role in shaping the physician workforce, which should reflect the populations it serves. Applicants from different gender, income, geographic, racial, and ability backgrounds have been underrepresented in medicine (URiM) for sociohistorical and geopolitical reasons. However, diversity in medicine is vital for enhanced medical education and health care experiences. The literature on underrepresentation in medical school admissions has not been comprehensively summarized. A scoping review will facilitate a better understanding of URiM groups and their admission experiences in Canada and other countries with similar British colonial histories. Articles will be eligible for inclusion if they are primary studies from Commonwealth countries about URiM groups applying to medical school. Articles will be excluded if they are not primary studies, not about URiM medical school applicants, not from the defined geographic regions, or if the full text could not be found. A scoping review will be conducted following JBI methodology and the population, concept and context (PCC) framework. MEDLINE, Embase, ERIC, and CABI Global Health databases will be searched, with no date or language restrictions. Data will be analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods. OSF osf.io/rgwdb.