Geopolitics

The notion of vulnerability is gaining traction in EU border protection. On the one hand, the concept refers to vulnerable migrants and their affectedness by insecurity and violence. On the other, it indicates the susceptibility of borders to irregular crossings and cross-border crime. Both forms of vulnerability are assessed through dedicated procedures under the umbrella of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex. To make sense of these seemingly contradictory conceptual and practical uses of vulnerability, we draw on feminist postcolonial scholarship in security studies and political geography. We argue that a shared colonial matrix of gendered and racialised meanings and problematisations enables analogies between borders and bodies as (un-)deserving of protection. In a discourse-theoretical analysis of Frontex documents, we show how the ambiguous use of vulnerability legitimises the EU border regime and its security practices by constructing EU bordering as neutral and objective and EU borders as objects of care. We conclude that vulnerability becomes increasingly important for normalising the EU’s violent borders in the context of the EU’s broader claims to liberal values of freedom, protection, and human rights

European journal of analytic philosophy

I show that intuitive and logical considerations do not justifyintroducing Leibniz’s Law of the Indiscernibility of Identicals inmore than a limited form, as applying to atomic formulas. Once thisis accepted, it follows that Leibniz’s Law generalises to all formulasof the first-order Predicate Calculus but not to modal formulas.Among other things, identity turns out to be logically contingent

Adults Represent Others' Logical Inferences Even When It Is Unnecessary

Successful social interactions require representing not only what others know, but also what they may deductively infer from evidence. For instance, to help deciding between two alternatives, we may just reveal the incorrect option, expecting others to draw the correct conclusion. Seemingly, we readily track others’ logical inferences if it is necessary for our goals. However, it is currently unknown whether we also track them when we do not have to, and whether these inferences affect our own conclusions. To address this, in four online experiments, we presented adults with scenarios where an agent could arrive at the same or different conclusions as the participant, based on what she witnessed (via excluding one or two out of three target locations). Participants rated the likelihood of an outcome from self or from the agent's perspective. We hypothesized that if participants track others’ inferences also when making self-perspective judgments, that is, when they could respond without even paying attention to the other, the spontaneous representation of the other's different conclusion may result in higher ratings for the outcome the agent (but not the participant) considers possible, compared to the one both consider impossible. In three experiments, we found such an altercentric bias in self-perspective judgments, suggesting that participants spontaneously encoded the conclusions the agent could draw (Experiments 1 and 2), even when this required multistep inferences (Experiment 4), although there were considerable individual differences and the bias was absent when task-demands were high (Experiment 3), implying a potentially resource-dependent use of the capacity

Hukou Stratification and Job Precariousness between the State and Market Sectors in Contemporary China, 2010–2021

Echoing the global expansion of precarious employment, China has experienced a surge in labor flexibility and job deterioration since its integration into global capitalism. Existing research also highlighted the distinct features of the Chinese labor market related to its post-socialist nature. The Chinese household registration system, known as hukou, has been critical in explaining stratification and shaping labor market outcomes in China. However, hukou reforms in the recent decade have further relaxed restrictions on labor mobility and hukou conversion, suggesting that hukou may gradually lose its importance in transitional China. Building upon the global research on precarious work and dynamics of precariousness in employment in the Chinese context, I conceptualize job precariousness in the contemporary Chinese labor market in three dimensions. Using pooled data from the 2010 to 2021 Chinese General Social Survey, I examine how hukou stratification is associated with the three aspects of job precariousness, compare the relative importance of hukou with other market-related factors, and identify the disparities of the state and market sectors. The findings help contextualize global trends of precariousness by broadening the evidence base through a case in China

Asking for help:An empirical exploration into social grammar

This paper explores the interface between linguistic form and social meaning by focusing on correlations between sentence type and the social distance between interlocutors—a central aspect of the social meaning component of politeness. We present a forced-choice experiment with four different groups of speakers (L1 British English speakers, L1 American English speakers, L2 English/German speakers, and L1 German speakers). In this experiment, we manipulated the linguistic form of asking for help along the syntactic dimension of sentence type (declaratives, interrogatives, or imperatives) and recorded the addressee our participants picked for each form (brother, coworker, or stranger). We broaden the empirical picture by going beyond highly conventionalized forms (e.g., Can you VP?) and therefore also varying the modal auxiliary verbs (e.g., Will you VP?). Based on this comprehensive picture of ways of asking for help, we identify clusters of linguistic forms depending on their felicity in different social scenarios. Our descriptive cluster analysis as well as the statistical comparisons between sentence types indicate that there are systematic correspondences between linguistic form and social meaning across different groups of speakers and languages, and we propose that our empirical data provide a potential starting point for rethinking speech act grammar in terms of ‘social grammar’

Human-AI coevolution

Human-AI coevolution, defined as a process in which humans and AI algorithms continuously influence each other, increasingly characterises our society, but is understudied in artificial intelligence and complexity science literature. Recommender systems and assistants play a prominent role in human-AI coevolution, as they permeate many facets of daily life and influence human choices through online platforms. The interaction between users and AI results in a potentially endless feedback loop, wherein users' choices generate data to train AI models, which, in turn, shape subsequent user preferences. This human-AI feedback loop has peculiar characteristics compared to traditional human-machine interaction and gives rise to complex and often “unintended” systemic outcomes. This paper introduces human-AI coevolution as the cornerstone for a new field of study at the intersection between AI and complexity science focused on the theoretical, empirical, and mathematical investigation of the human-AI feedback loop. In doing so, we: (i) outline the pros and cons of existing methodologies and highlight shortcomings and potential ways for capturing feedback loop mechanisms; (ii) propose a reflection at the intersection between complexity science, AI and society; (iii) provide real-world examples for different human-AI ecosystems; and (iv) illustrate challenges to the creation of such a field of study, conceptualising them at increasing levels of abstraction, i.e., scientific, legal and socio-political

Current Issues

Over the past decades a growing number of countries have offered citizenship or residence in return for a donation or investment. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of this phenomenon, this open access collection examines its legal, political, and conceptual implications. The volume consists of four parts. The first part documents recent trends in investment migration and seeks to understand its implications for our understanding of the concept of citizenship. The second part provides a legal and normative assessment of investment migration, from the perspective of both EU and international law. The third part presents case studies of investment migration practices in countries from around the world, including from jurisdictions that have so far remained under-researched. The fourth part deals with the specific EU legal-political context and also engages with the case launched by the European Commission against Malta. The book assembles the leading experts in the field and offers a rigorous and balanced analysis of this sometimes controversial field