Journals
2026 EN
Tatiree Waiena · Douglas Bronwen
This article explores the significance and contributions of Protestant Islander missionaries in the early Christianization of the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati). Traditionally, mission histories of the Pacific Islands focused heavily on the work of white male missionaries, underrating or even ignoring that of Islander men and women who (like equally undervalued white women) were often critical to mission success or failure. The key contributions of Hawaiians, Samoans, and Gilbertese to the establishment of the Church, now known as the Kiribati Uniting Church (KUC), is evaluated. A particular concern is Islanders’ partnerships with white male and female missionaries and their lasting impact on ways in which Christianity is understood and practised in Kiribati. The names (where known in the case of wives) and work sites of nearly 100 Islander missionaries are listed in four tables.
Journals
2026 EN
Marie Gillian
Sarah Henry was born in 1797 at the London Missionary Society’s mission at Matavai Bay Tahiti. On several occasions Sarah rejected the path expected of a ‘respectable’ young woman and a missionary daughter. She was the subject of scandal. This article covers four incidents in Sarah Henry Bland’s life: sexual intimacy with a tāne at Mo‘orea at the age of 16 in 1814; exile to New South Wales (NSW), where she eloped, married, and was then estranged from William Bland in 1817 as the result of her adultery, the subsequent court case publicly shaming her; life with Commandant James Morisset at the secondary penal colony at Newcastle in 1820–2; and her return in 1822 to the Society Islands for a three-month period in which her behaviour again caused censure before she left for London. While most historians of this period have focused on the impact on Mā‘ohi of foreigners, this article turns this narrative on its head by exploring Sarah’s responses to different lifeways in the Society Islands. Telling Sarah’s extraordinary life underscores the significance of children and the mission domestic sphere. It sketches contemporary morality, both at the Society Islands and the penal colony of NSW, through the lenses of gender and race, sexuality, masculinity and femininity, and exposes the complexity and ‘entanglement’ of intercultural relationships.
Journals
2026 EN
Sun Chuanming · Chen Yutao · Zhang Hui
+1 more
Intangible cultural heritage has the potential to enhance women’s empowerment and gender equality. By focusing on the case of Jian’ou Tiaofan, as a form of Chinese intangible cultural heritage, this study investigates women’s empowerment through cultural labor in the context of intangible cultural heritage. Results show that women’s empowerment is essentially a process that begins with the redistribution of cultural power from male folk elites to women and realizes the reproduction of power through the transformation and accumulation of resources. As women engage in preserving and inheriting of intangible cultural heritage, their empowerment evolves dynamically across the three stages of ‘task-oriented empowerment,’ ‘career-oriented empowerment,’ and ‘mission-oriented empowerment’ driven by the internal mechanism of ‘functional premium – justice distance – empowerment autonomy.’ This study deepens the understanding of women’s participation and their empowerment. In order to combine women’s empowerment with the preservation of intangible cultural heritage, it is suggested that relevant entities encourage women to participate in cultural labor and address the issue of gender justice embedded in this process.
Journals
2026 EN
Rosenberg-Friedman Lilach
This article examines how birthrates shaped power dynamics relations and Orientalist discourse in Mandatory Palestine (1918–1948). While a Zionist leadership sought a Jewish demographic majority, it also aimed for a Western-oriented society. Mizrahi Jews, with higher fertility than Ashkenazim, were both a demographic asset and a cultural challenge, fueling anxieties of ‘Orientalization’. The Yishuv’s leadership promoted a unified fertility norm: boosting Ashkenazi birthrates while restricting Mizrahi reproduction. Though this ‘civilizing mission’ applied to all Jewish groups, its rhetoric reflected a distinct, revealed and marked fear of Mizrahi demographic dominance. Drawing on archives, reports and press sources, this article shows how fertility policies embodied tensions between a ‘national mission’ to expand Jewish numbers and a ‘civilizing mission’ to regulate reproduction. These policies reinforced ethnic hierarchies, shaping attitudes toward Mizrahi fertility and influencing later Israeli demographic and social policies. The findings also inform ongoing debates on reproduction and national identity in Israel.
Journals
2026 EN
Bektaş Ayda
This article aims to examine the financial entitlements of Ottoman diplomats – specifically their salaries, expense allowances, and contingency funds – using archival evidence from Ottoman records. It focuses on the late nineteenth-century reforms, particularly those related to the restructuring of the Ottoman diplomatic service, which sought to professionalize and secure the financial stability of diplomats. The study argues that these reforms ensured diplomats’ financial security and, at the same time, played a crucial role in strengthening the state’s administrative framework by promoting transparency and reducing corruption. By examining three key categories of income – regular salaries determined by hierarchical positions and regional strategic importance, supplementary payments for extra responsibilities, and mission-related allowances – the study provides a comprehensive analysis of how these financial reforms contributed to the modernization of the Ottoman bureaucracy. It highlights that the strategic management of diplomats’ financial entitlements was essential in improving the operational effectiveness of the diplomatic corps and in advancing broader institutional reforms within the state. Ultimately, the findings suggest that the state’s deliberate approach to managing diplomats’ finances enhanced both the functionality of its diplomatic missions and the overall development of Ottoman governance in the late nineteenth century.
Journals
2026 EN
Shasko Larissa
Is it possible to increase interest in learning more about nuclear science among young women through science fiction? How can the interactive elements of social media advance #STEMINISM? Inspiring greater interest in radiation as an educational topic is important to recruiting the future generation of scientists and is crucial to the ability of Canada and other countries to deploy new nuclear power as part of the low carbon energy mix. This article explores how science fiction and social media could help address gender divides in scientific understanding of radiation and encourage more women and young people to pursue nuclear energy careers. While nuclear power can provide stable and clean electricity to replace fossil fuels, learning about nuclear science may be dismissed by today’s youth as “too boring” to reliably grow the workforce to meet future demands. Gender divides in scientific understanding of radiation include the tendency for more males than females to be employed in the nuclear sector, which reaches back to a more general trend in which females are underrepresented among STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates. Even fictional depictions of radiation tend to be geared toward audiences or interests that are (at least historically) more identified as “for boys” than “for girls.” Science fiction storytelling provides a promising method of engagement to increase interest in nuclear science and possibly inspire more passion in STEM-oriented career paths among youth; however, strategies for overcoming the gender-biased limitations of the science fiction genre must be developed. This paper explores how science fiction and the social media platform Instagram can be combined to spark interest in nuclear energy as a climate change solution among women and young people. Atomic Eve is a science fiction Instagram superhero whose mission on Earth includes helping to solve the climate change crisis by increasing interest in learning more about nuclear energy. This article presents Atomic Eve as a creative experiment in how STEAM education (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) could help innovate thinking around the role of public engagement in inspiring more women and younger people to pursue careers in the nuclear energy sector.
Journals
2026 EN
Satvat Nader · Hernandez Richard · Vitullo Fanny
+4 more
Kairos Power LLC, committed to developing a safe and affordable technology in pursuit of its mission to enable the world’s transition to clean energy, is actively engaged in demonstrating a series of major hardware advancements. Notably, this includes the introduction of Hermes, a low-power test reactor, which represents a groundbreaking achievement as the first operational pebble bed fluoride-salt-cooled high-temperature reactor (FHR). At the time of this paper’s preparation, the construction of the Hermes reactor had begun in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The initial startup process of Hermes, encompassing prefuel loading, fuel loading, and the transition to a low-power core, signifies a historic milestone in the realm of advanced nuclear energy on a national scale. The procedures employed for initiating fuel loading and conducting low-power testing for the Hermes reactor, which were informed by the experience of historical reactors with a high degree of resemblance, are demonstrated in this paper. These procedures were methodically designed to validate the critical components for criticality prediction capabilities within Kairos Power’s nuclear design framework. By doing so, this process also ensures that the safety analysis of the Hermes reactor is conducted within the appropriate range of parameters derived from nuclear design analysis. The first key technical finding of this paper emphasizes the essential role of in-vessel detectors for monitoring fuel loading during Hermes startup. These detectors allow for conservative predictions as criticality is approached, leveraging their proximity to the active region of the core. Additionally, it was confirmed that the proven inverse subcritical multiplication factor (1/M) approach for reaching criticality is applicable to Hermes fuel loading. Finally, the work in this paper demonstrates the unique capability of a pebble bed FHR to safely achieve criticality through both pebble fuel loading and the withdrawal of reactivity control banks, while adjusting the fuel-to-moderator composition to reach a targeted critical fuel height.
Journals
2026 EN
Kidron Anat
This study examines the intersection of indigeneity, Zionism, and education in Palestine, focusing on the gap between “natural” and “national” indigeneity. It explores how the pre-state Hebrew education system sought to foster a sense of national indigeneity among native-born, Arabic-speaking Jewish populations, primarily of Sephardic and Middle Eastern descent, living in peripheral Arab cities. While these communities shared daily cultural and social practices with their Arab neighbours, efforts to create a new Jewish national identity sought to distance native Jews from the local Arab context. Using archival research and memoirs of teacher-emissaries, the study investigates tensions between Jewish immigrants, particularly Ashkenazi Europeans, and native Jews. Zionist ideals of indigeneity, rooted in ancestral ties to the land, and the European modernity embraced by many migrants meant that terms such as “sons of the land” were paradoxically applied both to Arabic-speaking Jews and to young European Jewish immigrants arriving in the late 1800s, reflecting broader identity struggles. The study analyses how the entangled histories of the land’s inhabitants shaped evolving notions of “nativeness” that transcended ethnic and linguistic boundaries. It highlights the complexities of Zionism and the cultural and political compromises required to unify a linguistically and socially diverse Jewish population.
Journals
2026 EN
Reisin Pamela
This article presents the author’s research into the meanings acquired by the term missions in the history of education in Ibero-America, its colonial origins and its appropriation and reconfiguration by different political officials, pedagogues and rural teachers. The word “missions” has been used to refer to various practices, both religious and secular. This work will focus on analysing the missions that had the purpose of intervening in non-urban, peripheral territories, far from the centres of political power. In the early 1920s in Mexico, Vasconcelos, then Secretary of Public Education, drew inspiration from the religious missions deployed during the colonial period in Indigenous territories to create Cultural Missions. Between 1930 and 1960, in Spain, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, missions were implemented, which shared features with the Mexican experience. What educational concepts and practices were associated with Cultural Missions? Which elements became transnational and why? What role did UNESCO and CREFAL play in this process? To answer these questions, contributions from the transnational history of education, intellectual history and post-colonial studies will be gathered, also relying on various sources, such as mission chronicles, official publications, writings by teachers and officials, and an interview with a missionary.
Journals
2026 EN
Heck Sarah · Gilbert Melissa · Pearsall Hamil
+1 more
Public schools are often overlooked in disaster resilience frameworks. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the crucial role of schools as critical social infrastructure (CSI), extending beyond their primary mission of education to address acute community needs during crises including providing essential services such as food distribution, childcare, and access to technology. This article advances a convergence research agenda to understand how schools act as place-based CSI, with a focus on school districts in North America. We emphasize the unique ability of schools to support vulnerable populations through deep community ties, localized knowledge, and institutional networks that are features with relevance across international contexts. This approach underscores the multiscalar role of schools in mitigating vulnerabilities and promoting equity during disruptions. We argue for policies that prioritize schools as critical hubs for disaster preparedness and long-term sustainability, emphasizing equitable resource allocation to enhance their capacity to serve as vital community infrastructure that has the potential to foster long-term community resilience.