Ideas about morphological complexity have been used to classify languages and to link complexity to language age and social structure. Creoles and sign languages are often framed as younger and structurally simpler than other languages. Concurrently, sign language morphology has been described as paradoxical, as both simple and complex. This paper is a critical examination of claims about morphological complexity and its relationship to language age and social structure. We show that the theoretical and empirical foundations of claims that sign language morphology is paradoxical are flawed. Specifically, argumentation and evidence supporting analogies between creole and sign language complexity adopt theoretically contested and ideologically problematic assumptions about creoles and uncritically apply them to sign languages. We identify four flaws in argumentation: (i) use of limited morphological data to generate claims about global complexity, (ii) association of binary language categories with categorical complexity differences, (iii) use of language age to motivate predictions about morphological complexity, and (iv) extrapolating from creole complexity to sign language complexity. Based on these flaws, we develop nine theoretical and practical recommendations for working with morphological complexity and discuss uncritical cross-disciplinary transfer of ideas.

Through compositional inclusion or exclusion, the photograph can assert and communicate what belongs in a picture, in a landscape, in an ecosystem. It can illuminate what we deem conservation-worthy, or, on a larger scale, which extinctions are attention-worthy. Photographic practice helps to illuminate the active nature of extinction, and our choices as actors and witnesses within that process. Here, researchers from the University of Leeds’ Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Programme present individual reflections on interdisciplinary practice-led research in the Scottish Small Isles. We consider how photography, as a form of praxis, can generate new forms of knowledge surrounding extinction: its meanings, representations, and legacies, particularly through visual representation. We offer seven perspectives on contemporary image-making, from disciplines including philosophy, conservation biology, literature, sociology, geology, cultural anthropology, and palaeontology. Researchers gathered experiential, ethical, even biological meanings from considering what to include or exclude in images: from the micro to the macro, the visible to the invisible, the aesthetic to the ecological. We draw conclusions around meaning-making through the process of photography itself, and the tensions encountered through framing and decision-making in a time of mass ecological decline.

The elusive southern river otter (Lontra provocax; huillín in Spanish) is critically endangered in the Argentine portion of Tierra del Fuego, and low social awareness may be one of the major threats to its conservation. Our survey of local residents’ knowledge and valuation of the huillín showed that only 14% recognized photographs of the species, almost half did not know that it is endangered and most erroneously thought it was an introduced species. Greater knowledge about the huillín was related to higher respondent education levels. Younger and more knowledgeable residents valued the species more for ecological and relational reasons; its instrumental value was considered least important. More communication should be targeted at older people and groups not directly interacting with nature via informal education methods, including combining positive messages about the huillín and other native species with ongoing outreach efforts warning about biological invasions. Understanding perceptions and valuations of biodiversity can make conservation efforts more effective and inclusive.

Objectives: Experience of people with dementia falls between attempts to maintain a sense of self and normality and struggle with acceptance in order to integrate the changes within the self (Clare). The need for interventions, including spiritual care, targeting fear and loss of self is reported (Palmer). In Japan, Buddhist temples which hold peer-support café for the caregivers of the people with dementia are emerging, as those needs are not fully covered by the health care system (Okamura). For the better future psychogeriatrics-Buddhist temple collaboration, this study explores the views of the Buddhist priests who work in the secular health care system.

Methods: Consecutive in-depth interviews were conducted with health care professionals such as medical doctors, psychologists, care workers, etc. who work in the secular health care system, and who are at the same time qualified as Buddhist priests. Verbatim transcripts were analyzed using a qualitative descriptive approach. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the Taisho University ethics committee.

Results: Twenty-four subjects were interviewed. Some medical doctors expressed struggles as Buddhist priests concerning not being able to provide person-centered care in the medical setting, especially in intensive care units in early career training, due to the busyness. However, now that they are specialists, they are able to provide person-centered care. According to care workers, the effects of Buddhist priests in the residential care were; protecting burnout of the care staff; decreasing anxiety of the residents; increasing trust from the family; and making the inclusive care environment. All of them talked that the lack of practical knowledge teaching on aging, dementia, and death in the monk training program is a problem, but that there may be considerable resistance to changing a curriculum with a long history.

Conclusions: Discourses of the professionals of both territories, i.e., scientific care and spiritual care, are worth investigating for the future reform of the education of both territories.

World-renowned New Theatre Quarterly celebrates its fifty years of publication and its 200th issue, this being the last under the editorship of Maria Shevtsova. Simon Trussler, founder of Theatre Quarterly in 1971 (which closed for lack of funding in 1981) always considered New Theatre Quarterly, established with Cambridge University Press in 1985 – and with Clive Barker as co-editor – to be simply a continuation of TQ. Maria Shevtsova fully agreed. Forty issues of TQ, combined with one hundred and sixty editions of NTQ, gives the magic figure 200. The logistics of things, however, means that the number 160 appears on the cover of the present issue (the ‘New’ in New Theatre Quarterly standing for the newly resurgent journal on the back of its predecessor). This present issue also celebrates Maria Shevtsova’s twenty years of co-editorship with Simon Trussler, together with five more years of sole editorship of the journal following his death in 2019 (commemorated in NTQ 142, May 2020; see also their respective editorials, ‘One Hundred Issues and After’, in NTQ 100, November 2009).

Twenty-five years of absolute commitment and tireless work call for recognition and thanks. Assistant editor Philippa Burt here discusses with Shevtsova her vision for the journal, and how her scholarship, research, teaching, as well as her numerous academic and outreach activities in multiple media, connected with her editorial commitment. This conversation took place on 19 June 2024.

Teachers are grappling with increased pressure and expectations to facilitate transformative education experiences, the kinds of experiences that cultivate dispositions and skillsets essential for young peoples’ preparedness to imagine and create sustainable futures. As expectations for teachers grow, so too do initiatives intended to assist their efforts, such as the advent of classroom-ready education resources. The rise of educational resources gives cause for closer examination of how they are developed, particularly with respect to the ways they situate content in the deployment of curricular, methodological and pedagogical concepts. This article presents a practice and process of education resource creation using multi-modal content that entangles global education and conservation agendas. Through the mediating lens of UNESCO’s pillars of education, a critical discussion of the utility of these for enabling and inhibiting the articulation of a professional practice for education resource creation is offered. With the imperative for sustainability-focused education and prevalence of education resources being produced to support this, we scrutinise the importance of demystifying the professional practice of education resource creation. In doing so, we point to insights that become available when the curricular, pedagogical and methodological concepts informing education resource creation are made transparent and accessible.

Building on studies of historical non-Westphalian world orders, this article challenges desires to identify a ‘first’ international. The question ‘when was the first international?’ is fundamental to defining disciplinary boundaries and the ontologies that shape them. Such quests are substantialist rather than relational, limiting our understanding of the relations and diversity of agents involved in world ordering. Existing approaches to the ‘first’ international are caught in a ‘Mesopotamian trap’: a combination of social evolution conceptual models grounded in colonial epistemologies, analytical presentism, and the surviving propaganda of ancient urban rulers. This article proposes ‘dynamic multiplicity’ as a new framework to account for the diversity, complexity, dynamism, and relationality of world orders in past and present. Dynamic multiplicity emphasizes: a quantitative and qualitative multiplicity of actors; never-ending and always unfolding relations; the instability and permeability of social actors; the diachronic nature of social action; hierarchical and heterarchical power relations; the multi-scalar spatiality of the social; and sustained and critical interdisciplinarity. It applies dynamic multiplicity to the case of Sumer and ancient West Asia, a so-called ‘first’ international, to reveal a diversity of durable relational actors and contradict assumptions that international relations necessarily lead to world orders of homogenous unit-types.