Shakespeare’s impersonations: Ariosto and the game of 'sorti' in Much Ado About Nothing

'Much Ado About Nothing', first published in 1600, is a play of dissimulation. Complex disguises, literal and emotional, persuade individuals into both declarations and disavowals of feelings. Claudio, in particular, is duped into humiliating his betrothed Hero by an elaborate trick in which she is made to seem unfaithful through a proxy performance of erotic arousal. It has long been assumed that a direct or indirect source for this major element in Shakespeare’s plot derives from Canto V of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, in which the servant Dalinda impersonates Ginevra on the balcony, to the most painful chagrin of Ginevra’s lover Ariodante. However, Shakespeare’s interest in dissimulation goes much further than this. Dissimulatio is the Latin rhetorical term in which the whole point is that the distinction between real and simulated feeling is often impossible to decipher, as Cicero and Quintilian discussed on several occasions. Moreover, the idea of impersonation merges with the developing discourse of personation on the stage: the ability of an actor to simulate the feelings of a different person, even without disguise. By ‘traveling through a textual labyrinth’, as Umberto Eco puts it, this essay investigates the presence of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso among the complex sources of this Shakespearean play, whose comedic plot apropos of an unjustly accused character may reveal elements of tribute to Giordano Bruno’s ‘heroic’ pursuit of truth. In doing so, we aim to discern how Ariosto’s allegoric effects are diffused in Shakespeare’s play of betrayed emotions and epistemic quest.</p

Informal, individual and cumulative labour agency: reconceptualising capital's socio-spatial fix in the south Indian garment industry

This paper reconceptualises labour agency by examining the cumulative impact of informal and individual worker agency on capital’s search for a social-spatial fix in the Tiruppur garment industry in Tamil Nadu, India. The study foregrounds everyday micro-acts—such as choosing, refusing, and exiting work—as significant forms of agency, especially when viewed in aggregate. Based on ethnographic research, we explore how these acts influence the socio-spatial fix pursued by capital. Drawing on social reproduction theory to unpack the gendered dynamics of workers’ agency, the paper first highlights how workers’ decisions— constrained by domestic responsibilities, safety concerns, and aspirations for dignity and autonomy—create a volatile and elusive labour force. It then shows how capital responds to this agency by adapting its socio-spatial strategies, such as increasing its use of labour contractors, shifting to piece-rate payments, relocating production units, and fostering patronage-based labour ties. The study advances labour geography by expanding the conceptualisation of agency to include reproductive dynamics and by demonstrating how individual acts of agency, though not always intentional or collective, cumulatively reshape capitalist production geographies. Ultimately, the paper argues for a dialectical understanding of capital-labour relations, in which socio-spatial fixes are continuously restructured through the interplay of everyday worker agency and capital’s strategic responses.</p

When bits enter just transitions: data and energy justice in digitalised energy futures

Energy systems worldwide are undergoing a profound transformation. Transitions to low-carbon pathways rely on digital technologies to decarbonise and decentralise energy infrastructure. However, this digitalisation raises critical questions around data and its fair use—referred to as ‘data justice’— which remained unexplored in energy research. While justice considerations have become central to energy transitions, the specific justice challenges introduced by digitalisation demand careful attention to ensure it does not exacerbate existing injustices or create new forms of exclusion and inequality. To date, little emphasis has been placed on how digitalisation influences justice outcomes through the data generated and required by smart energy systems, and how these data-related issues might prompt a rethinking of social justice in energy contexts. This paper argues that integrating energy and data justice perspectives offers a critical starting point for addressing these emerging challenges. The study identifies justice challenges related to the production, ownership, use, and governance of data within digital energy systems. The findings demonstrate how data justice perspectives can enrich energy justice scholarship and help navigate the nuanced social and ethical complexities introduced by digitalisation. The study offers recommendations for policymakers and energy stakeholders to embed justice principles into the design and implementation of digitalised energy systems, ensuring that future energy transitions are both inclusive and equitable.</p

Artificial intelligence in humanitarian aid: a review and future research agenda

As crises, both natural and man-made, continue to escalate in frequency and complexity, the need for effective and timely humanitarian interventions has become increasingly critical. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative tool in enhancing humanitarian aid, addressing all stages of the crisis management cycle. Despite growing interest in AI's application within the humanitarian field, the existing literature remains fragmented, with limited synthesis of its overall impact. This study adopts a systematic literature review approach to provide a comprehensive analysis of AI's utilization in humanitarian aid across the crisis cycle, as well as its role in broader humanitarian settings outside of immediate crisis contexts. Based on 60 selected studies, the findings reveal that AI applications in both the pre- and post-crisis phases can be grouped into four specific categories, and that AI's role in broader humanitarian contexts can similarly be divided into four focus areas. Specifically, the categories in the pre-crisis phase include site selection, medical services enhancement, early warning, and information flow, and the categories in the post-crisis phase include distribution and delivery, damage assessment, online and textual insights, and routing optimization. The review highlights AI's significant potential to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian efforts, offering valuable insights for organizations seeking to harness AI's transformative power.</p

Global Cult Cinemas: Decolonising Cult Film Studies

To date, discourses of cult cinema have predominantly focused upon Anglo-American cinema and its reception in the West. Even when cult scholarship has expanded to include non-English language cinema from regions such as East and Southeast Asia, what nevertheless tends to define these cinemas as cult has been the subcultural fandom for those films in the West. Shifting the focus onto cult film traditions and fandoms beyond the Anglosphere, Global Cult Cinemas makes a decisive intervention in the field by calling for a decolonisation of cult film studies. This volume therefore interrogates both the coloniality and gendered nature of much cult scholarship and the extent to which an implicit white male perspective needs challenging in an age of decolonising the academy. Our contributors focus their research on circuits of cult film production and reception beyond the predominant Anglophone centres, with particular attention to cult practices across the Global South. Chapters include investigations of specific cult film traditions within countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan, alongside explorations of the politics of indigenous cult filmmaking, the global circulation of cult icons such as El Santo, and the status of auteurs such as Alejandro Jodorowsky in the era of #MeToo. In sum, this collection critiques the Eurocentric assumptions that lie at the heart of much existing cult film scholarship, and offers new ways of theorizing global cult cinemas to work towards the goal of decolonising cult film studies.</p

Going Analogue in a Post-Digital Society

In an age where digital technologies permeate nearly every aspect of daily life, a curious countertrend has emerged: a deliberate return to analogue practices and experiences. Whether it’s jotting thoughts in a leather-bound notebook, sending handwritten letters, or choosing a mechanical over a smart watch, many individuals are embracing the physical and the slow. This is the landscape of the post-digital society. As Nicholas Negroponte observed in 1998, “the digital revolution is over”—digital technologies are no longer novel but deeply embedded in the everyday.This chapter explores the motivations behind the analogue resurgence as a response to the overwhelming pace, abstraction, and ephemerality of digital life, revealing how materiality, slowness, and sensory engagement offer forms of resistance, meaning-making, and connection in a post-digital society. These shifts have significant implications for critical marketing, as they challenge dominant narratives of innovation, reconfigure consumer-brand relationships, and open up new avenues for research on value creation, authenticity, and consumer agency in a post-digital society. </p

Humanitarianism in the Home Hosting-At-Home and the Politics of Hospitality

Who is a humanitarian, and where does humanitarianism take place? Focusing on humanitarian responses within the Global South and North, Humanitarianism in the Home critically examines hosting-at-home – that is, people providing shelter in their own home to displaced people – as a widespread yet underexamined and underappreciated response to large-scale displacement.This book situates hosting-at-home practices and initiatives within a current expansion of private expressions of humanitarian actions across a range of global contexts. It situates the home as a key site of humanitarian hospitality and considers the implications of hosting-at-home for humanitarian politics writ large and its relationship to wider dynamics and structures of international relations and global politics. Drawing on feminist and decolonial literature, it grounds this analysis in a theorisation of the interconnections between humanitarianism, home, and hospitality, informing a critical understanding of hosting-at-home as a simultaneously every day and global practice, in its spatial, temporal, and relational dimensions. Overall, the book sees hosting-at-home as neither a straightforward alternative to the dominant international humanitarian system and attendant structures of power, nor a simple continuation of this. Instead, given the multiplicity of its various expressions, hosting-at-home occupies an ambivalent position within tensions between care and control, and complicity and solidarity.This book will be of interest to students and scholars of humanitarianism, international relations and politics, and refugee and migration studies. It will be of particular interest no doubt to those curious about how humanitarian responses have changed over time, how international organisations as well as ‘ordinary people’ have responded to humanitarian crises historically and in the present, and the politics of welcoming and caring for people displaced within and across borders.</p

Unraveling the complexity of radical service innovation: a systematic review, integrative framework, and research roadmap

Radical service innovation (RSI) is essential for firms seeking long-term competitive advantage. However, RSI’s conceptual ambiguity and the lack of a comprehensive framework detailing its antecedents and consequences have hindered progress in the field. This study conducts a systematic literature review on RSI to critically examine the extant literature. We propose the knowledge-based view of innovation as a theoretical foundation for RSI, and identify three core attributes of service innovation that enable differentiation between RSI and incremental service innovation (ISI). From our synthesis of the existing literature, we develop an integrative framework that outlines the antecedents, consequences, and moderators of RSI. Finally, we identify five central RSI themes and propose an agenda with exemplar research questions for future studies. This study enhances the theoretical clarity of RSI, offers actionable insights for managers implementing RSI, and provides a foundation for advancing research in the service innovation domain.</p

Decolonising innovation in sustainability transitions for pluriversal justice and wellbeing

Sustainability scholars address social-ecological injustices associated with innovation processes, through concepts such as ‘just transitions’ and ‘energy justice’. However, the making of today’s innovations by deep and pervasive formations of power and privilege – colonial modernities – is currently neglected in sustainability transition studies. We conceptualise nine epistemological and ontological foundations of distinctively colonial-modern innovation processes. These foundations include: fixing categorical divides on flowing relations; stratifying rigidly separated orders; promoting appropriation of privileges; objectifying and reifying realities; monopolising quantifications; standardising practices; singularising ontology, by approaching the pluriverse (of many different and connected ways of knowing, being and doing in disparate worlds) as just one world; and dominating other worlds by colonial-modern worldmaking.Taken together, these interwoven foundations point to the following actions to help decolonise modern innovation processes: recognising and challenging colonial formations of concentrated power and privilege as they are built into modern knowing; extending egalitarian relations towards intersectionally marginalised contributors in knowledge production; grasping multifarious encompassment by wider material and living ecologies of beings notionally separated as ‘human’ or ‘nonhuman’; embracing inherent uncertainties in all that can be known or made, to imbue knowing and making with humility and care; admitting open pluralities of qualities, which include approaching dimensions of categories as fluid; and supporting pluriversal reparations spanning many ways of knowing, in struggles to dismantle coloniality everywhere. Decolonising innovation processes in these ways, we propose, can contribute to deeper decolonial transformations of modernities in solidarity with colonially subordinated peoples’ struggles for pluriversal wellbeing and justice. Without realising such justice for the flourishing of many worlds, sustainability may remain little more than a modern illusion.</p

Effects of sensory and environmental labelling of plant-based products on consumer acceptance: Context, energy density and framing factors

There is growing pressure to replace animal-sourced proteins with plant-based proteins. Consumer studies suggest sensory properties and environment are the major factors impacting adoption of PBFs, but few studies have contrasted these factors. Knowing that health labels negatively impact sensory experience, we tested whether environmental labels had the same negative impact. Using an online survey, volunteers (N = 328) were randomly assigned to one of three label contexts: sensory (emphasizing taste and texture), environmental (highlighting sustainability and environmental impact), or control (no specific messaging), where they evaluated eight plant-based alternative foods. Each product was enhanced by either a positive or a negatively valanced framing statement, with half the foods higher, and half lower, in energy density (ED). Participants rated expected liking, wanting and likely recommendation, and estimated what they would pay for each food. For liking and recommending, there was no significant difference between environmental and sensory contexts (p = 0.94), but both were significantly higher than control (p = 0.0006), while for expected wanting only the sensory exceeded the control (p = 0.0014). The amount willing to pay was significantly higher in the environmental than sensory (p = 0.0005) or control (p </p