Investigation into the articulations between formations of caste and cities in India has only recently gained momentum in research on urban India. Seeking to contribute to this research, this paper close reads Puneri, an anthology authored by noted Marathi litterateur S.J. Joshi, published in 1978. Written as reminiscences about the public culture of the city of Pune in the early to mid twentieth century, Puneri, I argue, represents a discursive attempt at caste-based appropriation of the city’s identity, whereby the remembered city is produced as a Brahman city, erasing the presence and contribution of marginalised caste groups to the city’s public life. I illustrate how this caste-marked city emerges via the distinct temporal and spatial boundaries that Joshi narrates in his essays, attempting to mask the deep contestations of the city spaces along caste lines in early twentieth century Pune.

Purpose This article examines Caroline Hood's work at the Rockefeller Center (1934–1973) and her contributions to US public relations, while considering how social and cultural capital influenced her ability to build a career in public relations during the mid-twentieth century. Design/methodology/approach Based on traditional archival research using Hood's collection at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the article consults coverage in the mainstream media and the public relations trade press for triangulation. Secondary sources on the Rockefeller Center and on women in public relations history are also included. Findings Intelligence, creativity and hard work are the primary reasons for Hood's success in public relations, but she had to overcome obstacles caused by widely accepted gender norms and prejudices of the mid-twentieth century. She leveraged social and especially cultural capital to create support as she constructed her own career ladder at the Rockefeller Center. Research limitations/implications One individual's experience cannot be generalized to the larger population, so scholars should continue to examine the role of social and cultural capital in public relations careers. Originality/value As the first public relations woman to achieve a vice presidency of a major US corporation, Hood deserves to be included in PR historiography, yet she has been largely overlooked. Additionally, although global research has indicated the importance of social and cultural capital in careers in public relations, especially for women, this is the first article to analyze their role in depth.

This paper examines the evolution of academic citation practices from print into digital contexts. While standardised citation styles only became widespread in the mid-twentieth century, the digital era has raised new questions about credibility, authority, and the recognition of diverse sources. Contemporary shifts—including the rise of alternative scholarly outputs, decolonisation movements, and artificial intelligence—have highlighted various forms of citational injustice and misbehaviours, prompting corrective interventions. While these approaches represent progress, they often remain narrowly focused and lack a broader theoretical orientation capable of driving multi-level systemic change in the context of developing technologies such as artificial intelligence, which are being used by some scholars as research tools. This paper serves as a foundation for developing a new citational justice framework in future research. Working towards improved citational justice is not only about recognising, acknowledging, and combating citational and epistemic injustice but also about rethinking the academic culture of research communications in digital citation contexts. Collective action and sustained structural transformation are needed to reshape digital citation practices towards more equitable and transparent paradigms of knowledge production in the rapidly changing digital publishing landscape.

Problem statement. A widespread thesis holds that heterogeneity is a defining aspect of modern discourse, reflecting the multiplicity of forms, genres, styles, and contexts in which communication takes place. This phenomenon is determined by socio-cultural, political, and historical factors, and in the digital era – by technological factors that radically transform the nature of discursive practices. Recognizing discourse heterogeneity is essential for improving analytical methodology, as it makes it possible to account for new forms of communication emerging in the digital age. Purpose of the article. The article aims to highlight the phenomenon of discourse heterogeneity, reveal its multidimensionality, and demonstrate how the digital era transforms discursive practices, posing new challenges and methodological perspectives for modern linguistics. Research methodology and methods. The study employs the descriptive method to synthesize and generalize theoretical approaches, the comparative-historical method to analyze the evolution of discursive practices, and discourse analysis to identify the specific features of different regimes and genres. Digital forms are examined through multimodal analysis, which highlights the interaction of textual, visual, and audiovisual elements; corpus methods, which enable the processing of large datasets; and a socio-semiotic approach aimed at uncovering the social meanings embedded in linguistic and visual codes. Results and discussion. Scholarly approaches to discourse study in the twenty-first century differ significantly: some researchers focus on specific aspects, such as spoken discourse, while others view discourse as a more homogeneous category, where the key analytical unit is the “text/genre” pair. Each of these approaches reflects certain traditions. The problem of heterogeneity is evident in differences between spoken and written discourse, institutional and non-institutional genres, and formal and informal registers. Discourse regimes are divided into spoken, written, digital, and multimodal, each with its own stylistic norms and organizational features. While spoken and written forms have a long history, digital and multimodal regimes have only in recent decades become an active subject of scholarly analysis. The development of the Internet and digital technologies has challenged traditional approaches formed in the mid-twentieth century and based mainly on printed texts. In today’s discursive space, genre is no longer a stable category but a dynamic system marked by constant variability and innovation. Comments on social media combine elements of public and private communication, memes integrate verbal and visual resources to convey evaluative or ironic meanings, threads create new forms of coherence reminiscent of journalistic or academic texts while remaining spontaneous, and Instagram/Facebook stories demonstrate multimodal integration of image, text, and sound. All this suggests that the digital era shapes a new dimension of heterogeneity that extends far beyond classical models. Conclusions and prospects. The study has demonstrated that discourse heterogeneity in the twenty-first century manifests itself at interrelated levels. At the level of regimes, it is evident in the coexistence of oral, written, digital, and multimodal forms; at the genre level, in the transformation of traditional genres and the emergence of hybrid formats such as memes, threads, and Instagram/Facebook stories, which combine features of different communicative practices; and at the methodological level, in the need to adopt an integrated approach that combines multimodal analysis, corpus methods, socio-semiotics, and digital ethnography. The digital environment therefore not only expands the spectrum of discursive practices but also underscores the necessity of treating heterogeneity as a key analytical principle of contemporary discourse studies.

Traditional management practices are essential for maintaining the biodiversity of many semi-natural grassland habitats. Abandonment of these practices is leading to shrub encroachment and a decline in biodiversity in many European regions. For this reason, understanding the social processes behind transforming traditional management practices and the subsequent habitat changes is currently a major focus of ecological research. We aimed to identify ecologically relevant indirect drivers (economic, demographic, institutional, cultural, and technological) impacting Natura 2000 grassland habitats since the mid-twentieth century in two neighbouring Central European post-communist countries, Hungary and Romania. Ecological memory on 21 semi-natural grassland localities was collected through 60 oral history interviews from knowledgeable locals. The studied localities were covered by semi-natural grasslands listed in the Habitats Directive, Annex I: 1.) Semi-natural dry grasslands (6210); 2.) Alluvial meadows of river valleys (6440); and 3.) Pannonic salt steppes and salt marshes (1530*). We asked about three time periods (before: 1950-1961, during: 1962-1989, and after socialist collective farming: 1990-2007). We identified 211 mentions of indirect drivers and categorised them into five main indirect driver categories. Economic drivers were the most often mentioned indirect driver categories for alluvial and saline habitats. Demographic drivers, such as ageing, labour shortage, and rural-urban migration, were highly intertwined and most pronounced for dry semi-natural grasslands. We found that the impacts of ecologically relevant social processes beginning in the 1960s-1970s became visible only decades later, reflected by delayed changes in grassland management and vegetation (e.g. shrub encroachment, spread of weeds and invasive species). Migration to cities was amplified by changing lifestyles and values, leading to a decrease in the village labour force and a consequent ageing of inhabitants, ultimately resulting in a major decline in livestock numbers and in traditional management practices. We argue that the decline of grassland management in the 1990s and 2000s was driven by long-term social processes that began in the 1960s. We argue, that appropriate subsidy schemes and governance models are essential to support surviving traditional farming practices, integrate biodiversity conservation with cultural heritage, and sustain innovative rural communities transitioning within Europe's marginalised agricultural landscapes.

ABSTRACT While marine resources have received substantial treatment by historians of the mid-twentieth century ocean, marine engineering has been largely left unexamined. One consequence has been the scant treatment of marine engineers and applied scientists. Another has been a tendency for ocean resource histories in this period to treat marine resource abundance as placeless, without attachment to local sites, histories, and challenges. I address these lacunae in three ways. First, it articulates an intellectual history of marine material abundance by treating marine engineering as an important disciplinary site, and deep seawater as a key object, through which ideas about oceanic abundance were articulated in technologies of ocean energy, marine and terrestrial food, and artificial cold. Second, the article localises one emergence of the oceanic frontier in post-statehood Hawai’i. Third, I situate these efforts in scientists’ ideas about Pacific marine commons. Altogether this paper asks, how has the idea of abundance, when grafted onto the promises made of deep seawater, shaped ideas about archipelagic futures, first from Hawai’i, and then in the wider Pacific? I conclude with a view from contemporary mariculture in Hawai’i where, in conversation with Hawaiian scholars, I suggest how efforts might embody alternative scales and metrics of abundance.

Abstract In this interview, noted photographer Harry Gamboa Jr. discusses his work with Jeremiah Axelrod. Topics include the influence of avant garde cinema, advertising, and mass media on Gamboa’s aesthetic, brutal institutional and cultural prejudice in mid-twentieth century Los Angeles, and his many efforts over the years to counteract those ubiquitous propagandistic negative media images to make visible a much fuller spectrum of Chicano cultural creation and authorship.

From the United States’ independence until the mid-twentieth century, American exceptionalism – a deep belief in the country’s status as a uniquely virtuous nation – impelled it to resist engaging in the cynical balance-of-power politics characteristic of great powers. It became permanently engaged only during the bipolar Cold War and the ensuing unipolar moment. In that era, the US presented itself first as the moral leader of the ‘free world’, then as the chief advocate of a rules-based world order. With the end of US primacy and the return of multipolarity and great-power competition, these options are gone. In China and Russia, the United States faces rivals espousing different sets of values that it cannot hope to vanquish. The concept of competitive coexistence offers a way forward. It reconciles permanent engagement with moral purpose by acknowledging the persistence of rivalry and the diversity of values, while charting a course that diminishes the risks of war and leaves space for cooperation on global challenges. Still the pre-eminent power, the United States can take the lead in forging coalitions to meet those challenges, leading through persuasion rather than domination.

This article examines the multifaceted dimensions of the scholarly legacy and socio-political engagement of the prominent Kazakh historian Y. Bekmakhanov, who lived during the mid-twentieth century, with the aim of constructing his political portrait. Based on archival analysis and source-critical methods, the study explores his scholarly courage, psychological resilience, and the consequences of opposing Soviet ideological constraints. A historical-psychological assessment addresses his repression, imprisonment in the GULAG, subsequent rehabilitation, and restoration of his academic titles. The article also highlights Bekmakhanov’s pedagogical work, his contribution to developing textbooks for schools and higher education institutions, and his scientific-pedagogical mission in shaping national historical consciousness. As a scholar, educator, and socially responsible public figure, Bekmakhanov made a substantial contribution to the development of Kazakh historical studies and the renewal of historical education content. His works constitute a comprehensive scholarly-pedagogical legacy that significantly influenced national consciousness, evidentiary rigor, and methodological innovation. Finally, the article identifies the importance of his legacy for contemporary independent Kazakh historiography, its role in restoring national historical memory, and its continuity with modern scholarly perspectives.

Starting from his conception of an original “extra-methodical” truth, of which one can gain experience through art, history, and philosophy, Gadamer enhances the fore-predicative dimension of knowledge. In his opinion, the awareness of our “pre-judices” – the voice of tradition –, reached through interpretation, opens up to the otherness of the other and increases friendship as well as solidarity. By defining hermeneutics as practical philosophy thanks to a re-working of Aristotle’s concept of phrónesis, Gadamer starts up a “rehabilitation of practical philosophy”. This “recovery” contributed to overcoming the world crisis in the mid-twentieth century and could still orient a “life together” within today’s ethical and political frameworks.

From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Slovenian Catholic intellectuals attributed significant merit to Cyril and Methodius in spreading education and strengthening national consciousness during the struggle against Germanization and other nationalist pressures. The importance of Cyril and Methodius in the Slovenian environment was substantiated by intellectuals, such as the pedagogue and bishop of Maribor Anton Martin Slomšek (1800–1862), the Franciscan friar and linguist Stanislav Škrabec (1844–1918), and the diocesan priest and historian Ivan Vrhovnik (1854–1935). The highest expression of these efforts was the establishment of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius in 1885, whose purpose was to build schools with the Slovenian language of instruction in ethnically mixed areas. The establishment of Cyril and Methodius as bearers of religious and national ideals was crucially influenced by a series of anniversaries associated with the millennium of their work in Moravia and Pannonia (1863, 1869, 1885). The publication of the encyclical Grande munus (1880) by Pope Leo XIII also significantly contributed to the spread of their veneration. However, the role of Cyril and Methodius was comprehensively portrayed among Slovenian intellectuals not until Franc Grivec (1878–1963) in the first half and in the mid-twentieth century. Grivec was a priest and professor of ecclesiology and Eastern theology at the Faculty of Theology in Ljubljana, who also arranged for the first critical editions of sources about the holy brothers in the Slovene language.

Abstract This article examines the national and international context within which Colombian immigration policy developed in the mid-twentieth century. Focussing on Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War, it traces how and why policymakers and public opinion began to see these groups as potentially harmful to society. It argues that Colombian immigration policy emerged at the intersection of multiple, evolving discourses of race which both helped frame and were shaped by anxieties over a mass influx from Spain. By exploring the stories of several Republicans who tried to come to Colombia, the article also reveals how they helped shape immigration policy.

Population was of primary concern in the mid-twentieth century, and Australia’s declining birth rate in the 1930s and 1940s brought forth concerns about the reproductive nation. One of the key professions that engaged with ideas of a reproductive Australia was medicine, particularly gynaecologists, obstetricians, and surgeons. Their medical discourse in the mid-twentieth century when exploring infertility exhibited a tension between the burgeoning medical understanding of infertility within marriages—shared between the husband and wife—and the social understanding of reproductive responsibility resting on the woman. Through new approaches to diagnosis and therapeutic technologies, such as artificial insemination, this tension around responsibility was elucidated in the medical discourse. Even when incorporating or exclusively assessing the man’s fertility status there was an underlying presumption of, if not female fault, female responsibility. As the majority of practitioners were gynaecologists, obstetricians, and surgeons, the continued focus on women could be justified through their particular medical specialisation which exclusively examined women. Despite the increased knowledge of male fault, often incurable male fault, in infertile marriages the very nature of examination, diagnosis and treatment was grounded in ideas of female reproductive responsibility.

While post-industrial landscapes are often characterised as products of their histories, in this article, our goal is to understand and depict them as unfolding processes as much as formed places. The article focuses on an area of the South Wales coalfield, Onllwyn in the Dulais Valley, once transformed by extensive mining activities from the early nineteenth century. Employing a relational and processual approach, we explore the gradual making of a post-industrial landscape from the mid-twentieth century. We identify three key processes - fragmenting, filling, and forgetting - that have characterised this emergence from the industrial past, each of which has been shaped by intertwined socio-cultural, economic, environmental, and material factors. While these processes take distinct and localised forms, we argue that they are relevant for post-industrial landscape studies more broadly, shedding light on how such landscapes form, as on the wider dynamics of decline, renewal and change.

This paper investigates the theoretical foundations, historical development, and modern implementation of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) methodology in higher education, with a particular focus on the Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University. The study provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of ESP from the mid-twentieth century to the present, tracing its origins to the works of key scholars such as John Swales, Tom Hutchinson, Alan Waters, and Michael McCarthy. Their contributions laid the groundwork for understanding ESP as a distinct discipline that emphasizes learner needs, communicative competence, and the relevance of language use in specific professional and academic contexts. The research highlights that ESP instruction differs fundamentally from general English courses in its reliance on needs analysis, discourse and genre analysis, and the development of profession-oriented materials. The practical component of the study involves the design and implementation of an ESP training program for second-year students at the Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University, using Technical English 3 as the core textbook. The program aims to develop students’ communicative competence across all four language skills, reading, writing, listening, and speaking, within a professional framework. The study underscores the importance of integrating specialized terminology, authentic materials, and task-based learning to enhance students’ ability to function effectively in their future professions. Findings reveal that well-structured ESP instruction not only improves language proficiency but also increases motivation, fosters autonomous learning, and prepares students for international collaboration in their technical fields. Keywords: ESP, needs analysis, language teaching, professional communication, ESP methodology

This article explores the evolution of Romani Studies from a frequently stereotyped field that reified Romani people and fostered several grave misconceptions and biases, such as “Gypsies” are thieves, criminals, or beggars, to a more compounded and interdisciplinary academic field. Initial studies conducted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often romanticised and differentiated Romani people. However, from the mid-twentieth century, studies have encompassed a wider range of perspectives and a more critical examination of the experiences of Roma. Today, studies on Roma aim to dispel prejudice while critically analysing their social realities, histories, and cultural heritages. Through activism, policy involvement, and interdisciplinary research, it seeks to advance Romani agency, inclusion, and rights.

In the late 1940s, when faced with a declining box office and seemingly relentless negative publicity and legal challenges, Hollywood embarked on perhaps the largest publicity campaign in its history. The series of shorts, ‘The Movies and You’, which was produced between 1949 and 1951, represents an extremely rare attempt by all factions of the film industry to work together during a time of great industrial stress and disruption to rebrand itself as an industry. An analysis of these shorts and their production and distribution provides valuable insight into the anxieties, objectives, and behaviours of the film industry during a time of incredible change, as well as presenting an early case study of industry branding.

The essay argues that the study of scholarly communication would benefit from attending to a “modal” sensibility—that is, a self-conscious sensitivity to the differences that different mediums make in understanding published works of scholarship. The essay critiques the unreflective textualism that dominates the conversation on publishing. The claim is that the primacy of text, as the sovereign medium of academic communication, is a largely invisible parochialism. The essay points to examples and traditions of multi-modal publishing as an entry point to taking the medium-specificity of publishing formats as an object of analysis. Such experimentation has followed, sometimes closely, the emergence of new mediums of storage and transmission within the societies that scholars work. The mid-twentieth century birth of the modern medium concept made multi-modality a conceivable, self-conscious project. Even so, the discourse on academic publishing has rarely registered the implications, including for inherited text-based formats. The essay concludes with a call for media scholars, curiously underrepresented in the discourse, to take up this task, with reference to pioneering works in the field.

This research paper delves into the profound, yet often obscured, impacts of the 1947 Partition on the subaltern class within Western Punjab, focusing on their experiences amid the cataclysmic events of the mid-twentieth century. Employing a case study approach rooted in the theoretical framework of Subaltern Studies, this analysis investigates the socio-economic upheavals, cultural dislocations, and systemic political marginalization faced by these marginalized populations—including landless labourers, small farmers, and minority women—as they navigated the turbulent birth of two nations. The study posits that the Partition fundamentally reshaped the social structure and identities of the subaltern, instigating long-term disruptions far beyond the immediate violence and displacement. Drawing on primary oral histories, governmental reports, and scholarly secondary literature, this research foregrounds the systemic vulnerability of marginalized groups to violence, resource deprivation, and the fracturing of cultural ties. Furthermore, it highlights the remarkable agency and resilience demonstrated by the subaltern communities in developing survival tactics and actively reconstructing their shattered lives. The paper ultimately argues for the centrality of subaltern perspectives in the broader historical discourse of Partition, thereby offering a more inclusive, thorough, and human-centred understanding of this transformative period.

Tumors likely develop over years/decades, implying that assessing long-term exposure to risk factors is crucial in cancer epidemiology. An increasing trend of long-term risk factor exposures starting from early life since the mid-twentieth century appears to have contributed to the epidemics of early-onset cancer (EOC) worldwide. A rising incidence of EOC has been reported in various body sites such as the bone marrow, bile duct, breast, colorectum, esophagus, gallbladder, head and neck, kidney, liver, pancreas, stomach, and uterine corpus. To address an intractable gap between long-term exposure assessments and tumoral molecular/microenvironmental profiling in EOC research, here we describe a framework using the prospective cohort incident-tumor biobank method (PCIBM), which was recently conceptualized. The PCIBM enables prospective molecular pathological epidemiology research that can link long-term exposures with tumor pathogenic signatures. We illustrate this framework using the study of early-onset colorectal cancer (EOCRC). First, one recognizes overlaps of the characteristics of EOCRC and later-onset counterparts. Second, EOCRC tumoral, multi-omic, or microenvironmental features are discovered and replicated. Third, using the PCIBM, long-term exposure variables are examined in relation to the incidence of all-age colorectal cancer subtypes possessing EOCRC tumoral features. Fourth, identified putative risk factors are tested for EOCRC incidence. This framework, which has provided etiological insights and advanced our understanding of EOCRC pathogenesis, is widely applicable to EOC in various organs. In addition, this research modality with artificial intelligence-driven computational tools should be used in lifecourse and other prospective cohort studies to improve our knowledge of EOC pathogenesis.