This week in interdisciplinary scholarship, we highlight ten new open-access studies spanning forensic anthropology, political geography, heritage studies, philosophy, religious studies, linguistics, literary analysis, education, and management.
📊 This week at a glance
🌍 African-led research
Machine learning estimates sex from 3D CT scans of skulls and pelvises with high accuracy, potentially improving forensic identification in South Africa.
Traditional methods like discriminant function analysis already work well, but this study shows machine learning can match or exceed them using 3D CT-generated measurements. For African forensic anthropology, this means more reliable sex estimation from skeletal remains, which is crucial for identifying victims in mass disasters or criminal cases. The approach could be adapted to diverse populations, addressing a key challenge in the field.
Apartheid South Africa and Israel functioned as interconnected outposts of US empire during the Cold War, with their liberation struggles shaping the Oslo Accords and South Africa’s transition.
This essay argues that the two regimes were not isolated but linked through US imperial strategy, and that conflicts with liberation movements in the 1980s directly influenced negotiations in both contexts. It changes how we understand the end of apartheid, showing it was entangled with global power dynamics and the Palestinian question. For African scholars, this highlights the need to analyze liberation histories through a transnational lens.
Repatriation of Nigerian cultural objects often neglects post-return conservation, risking the sustainability of returned heritage.
The study calls for hybrid museology—combining local and global conservation practices—to ensure repatriated objects are cared for and interpreted meaningfully. This shifts the focus from just returning items to taking responsibility for their long-term preservation. For African museums and policymakers, it underscores that restitution plans must include conservation strategies from the start.
The concept of hermeneutical reparations is proposed to address epistemic injustices, though the abstract is not available.
Based on the title, this philosophical work likely argues for reparations that go beyond material restitution to include correcting interpretive and epistemic wrongs. It may offer a framework for addressing colonial legacies in knowledge production. Detail is limited without the abstract, but the topic is highly relevant to African scholarship on decolonization.
The five-sacrifice formula in early Buddhist texts serves a rhetorical function, with variations across Pāli and Chinese versions revealing different emphases.
By comparing the Ujjaya-sutta and other Pāli texts with Chinese Āgama parallels, the study shows how the list of sacrifices was used to critique Brahmanical rituals. This changes our understanding of early Buddhist rhetoric as not fixed but adapted to different audiences. For scholars of religion, it highlights the importance of cross-cultural textual analysis in tracing doctrinal development.
The permissibility of presuppositions in conversation depends on conversational norms, not on whether the speaker’s assumption is reasonable.
This philosophical paper argues that what matters is whether the presupposition is allowed in the context of the conversation, not its rationality. It refines Stalnaker’s common ground model by separating permissibility from reasonableness. For linguists and philosophers, this offers a clearer way to analyze how speakers introduce unstated assumptions in dialogue.
Poetry by Mahmoud Darwish and Louise Glück generates affective and ethical relations among humans, land, and the nonhuman before conscious interpretation.
Using affect theory and new materialism, the study shows how poetic language creates sensations and relational experiences that challenge human-centered views of nature. This changes how we read these poets, emphasizing the pre-cognitive power of poetry to reshape political and ethical ties. For African literary studies, it offers a framework to analyze land and belonging beyond symbolic readings.
🔬 Global breakthroughs
Pride and shame mediate the link between classroom environment and English learning engagement among Chinese adolescents.
The study finds that achievement emotions like pride and shame play a key role in how the classroom environment affects students’ engagement in learning English. This shifts focus from purely cognitive factors to emotional dynamics in language education. For educators in Africa and beyond, it suggests that fostering positive emotions could enhance engagement, especially in EFL contexts.
Interactional histories—patterns of communication that develop across multiple events over time—are introduced as a new framework in conversation analysis.
This special issue introduction proposes studying how interactions build on each other over minutes, years, or decades, expanding traditional sequence-based analysis. It changes how researchers understand the temporal dimension of social interaction. For African scholars in linguistics and sociology, this offers a tool to analyze long-term communicative practices in communities.
Strategy as Practice research has evolved along a continuum from humanist to post-humanist approaches, with post-humanism gaining relevance due to AI and climate change.
Thirty years after the field’s first article, this perspective shows how SAP has renewed itself by incorporating non-human actors like algorithms and ecosystems. It changes the focus from solely human strategists to broader material and technological influences. For African management scholars, this opens avenues to study strategy in contexts shaped by digital and environmental shifts.
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