Defying Kuwaiti Censorship and Addressing the Crisis of Intellectualism: Ḥāris saṭḥ al-ʿālam as a Subversive Feminine Dystopian Fairy Tale

The “Arab Spring” posed a significant challenge to entrenched authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), disrupting the pursuit of freedom and democracy while exacerbating existing social and political crises. In its aftermath, contemporary Arabic literature saw a marked rise in dystopian novels that reflect on past revolutions and project a bleak future. This widespread revolutionary spirit also inspired marginalised groups in Kuwait, including censored writers. Against this backdrop, Kuwaiti author Buthayna al-ʿĪsa, in her 2019 work Ḥāris saṭḥ al-ʿālam (Guardian of the World Surface), weaves well-known Western fairy tale figures into a dystopian narrative set in a Middle Eastern context. Her use of estrangement – now a survival strategy for activists and intellectuals in Kuwait and across the Arab world post-“Arab Spring” – enables her to critique book censorship and the growing totalitarianism in Kuwait while skilfully avoiding censorship herself. Framing the narrative through a bookstore proprietress who both writes and participates in the story, Ḥāris saṭḥ al-ʿālam offers a nuanced portrayal of female characters, both within the narrative and as the storyteller, emphasising the subversive potential of Arab women to confront the Symbolic order and the crisis of intellectualism in the post-revolutionary era

Visual Narratives and Lens of the Youth Collective: : Framing the Revolution and its Afterlives

This essay posits that the Lens of the Youth [collective] (‘adsat al-shābb, hereafter LYC) Facebook sites mark a turn in the visual language coming out of Syria in the aftermath of the uprisings there in 2011. Reacting to the urgency to create and disseminate, i.e. to produce culture from the frontlines, LYC’s visual language was not the language of war photography, but rather a vernacular expression of visual communication. As much as this essay is an attempt to read the images connectively, as chapters of a long narrative in a protracted war, it also argues that these images both contributed initially and continue to contribute to the active work of community-making that is one of the outcomes of the revolution

Trends in Syrian Studies in a time of internal war

This issue, Vol 16, No 1, of Syria Studies explores the impact of Syria’s internal war on research and analysis of Syria in the more the more than decade beginning soon after the outbreak of the Syrian uprising. Contributors write from the perspective of their own research and positionality as researchers from/of Syria. They explore such questions as: How do we conduct research amidst protracted war? What constitutes ‘the field’ when access to the country is virtually impossible for many of us? How are our research questions and methods shaped by the current state of protracted war? Abboud argues that the post-2011 period represents a new, fourth period that will shape Syrian state formation. Ghada Atrash’s essay forefronts how “epistemic activism” can disrupt knowledge production. Rula Jabbour examines the utility of  Strategic Studies for iunderstanding the Syrian conflict. Sumaya Malas considers how the “post-conflict” framework discourages researchers from pursuing projects until conflicts are perceived to be over. Rimun Murad assesses the emergence of the war novel as a consequence of the conflict. Christa Salamandra’s reflection on ethnography on understanding Damascene elites. Uğur Ümit Üngör asks how the Syrian conflict has affected the conduct of wider international politics. Fadi Skeiker personal testimony centres on theatre as a practice of citizenship and social justice. Alexa Firat examines visual narratives of the conflict

Book Review: Wilson, C & Wilson R. (2025). University and You: Strengthening Your Skills and Developing Your Potential

This review presents the book University and You: Strengthening Your Skills and Developing Your Potential, which is a recent publication offering advice to students who may be new to the context of UK-based university study. This review introduces the layout and main foci of this book and offers an evaluation of its utility as a practical guidebook for students taking their first steps into UK higher education

Editorial: Language and Faith

This issue of Theology in Scotland explores how language shapes, challenges, and sometimes constrains faith, especially within the historical and contemporary Scottish context.&nbsp

Anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism? The pitfalls of a \u27shallow\u27 approach to epistemological revision

This essay by guest author Ben Brent investigates the subtle ways in which Eurocentrism can be reproduced in what otherwise appear to be anti-Eurocentric, decolonial theory. Distinguishing between “shallow” and “foundational” anti-Eurocentrism, the decentering approach pursued by some anti-Eurocentric authors is analysed in juxtaposition with the stronger position which forms the kernel of much decolonial theorising. A more “foundational” anti-Eurocentrism does, however, entail its own problems for global thought: namely, the reproduction and circulation of knowledge in a more pluriversal geopolitical context. Decoloniality is the only paradigm that offers a foundational break from Eurocentrism, opposed to a revisionism which rearticulates some of Eurocentrism’s core historical and ideological premises

A Defence of the Interpretational Account of Validity

Both the interpretational account and the representational account provide contrasting accounts of validity for natural-language arguments. While the interpretational account captures formal validity, unlike the representational account, it does not capture materially valid arguments. Therefore, materially valid arguments are viewed as counterexamples to the interpretational account. I motivate why we may want to defend the interpretational account over the representational account and then proceed to defend the interpretational account using the suppressed premise strategy. The first objection to the suppressed premise strategy is by Stephen Read, who argues that the supressed premise is redundant. My contribution is to demonstrate how his objection fails. I also discuss and defend the suppressed premise strategy against other objections, which concern the nature of the supressed premise and the problem of modus ponens

Supervaluationism, Dynamic Supervaluationism, and Higher-Order Vagueness

The fact that the phenomenon of vagueness can itself be vague—and its vagueness be vague as well—seems impossible to make sense of without getting a headache. This so–called higher order vagueness makes theorising about vagueness a notoriously difficult task for philosophers of logic and language. This difficulty manifests itself in that, even if a theory can convincingly explain what vagueness is and how we can reason about it, when faced with the vagueness of the just–tamed vagueness, it gets flooded with paradoxes and makes the initial theory seem implausible. In this paper, I argue that Rosanna Keefe’s supervaluationism is one such theory. Even though it elegantly accounts for the first order of vagueness, it becomes less elegant when questioned about the higher orders. To demonstrate this, I show that Keefe’s system fails to resolve various paradoxes of higher-order vagueness such as the finite series paradox or the D* paradox. Furthermore, I argue that in her attempts to accommodate the paradoxes by adopting a rigid hierarchy of metalanguages, Keefe invites new worries. Given these criticisms, it is unlikely that Keefe’s theory can be ‘argued out’ of these paradoxes—‘finite series’ in particular. Instead, I argue that the theory must be substantially modified if it is to be salvaged, and one way to do so is by making the proposed structure more dynamic. I attempt to do so by sketching an outline of dynamic supervaluationism that can tackle the problems that Keefe’s supervaluationism cannot. I close my essay by teasing out some challenges that the proposed theory could face and offering possible solutions. I believe that supervaluationism is a very attractive approach to vagueness and therefore, it is worth developing further into a more robust theory that could tackle its higher orders