Who is deemed deathworthy, and how is this status produced? What discourses, affects, and histories enable the industrialization of premature Black death while rendering it largely invisible? Rooted in a decolonial queer feminist epistemological framework, this article examines how discursive and affective strategies in U.K. print media and immigration policies during the European “refugee crisis” (2013–2016) justified routine death-making at sea. Conceptualizing Blackness as a relational political and epistemological tool, the article reveals how media and state actors—drawing on racialized mythologies of young single Black men and appeals to imperial nostalgia—constructed these men as objects of panic, disgust, resentment, and fear. Applying collocation analysis and visualization techniques, the article theorizes “affective-racialized networks”—discursive formations that circulate and accumulate affective meanings across space and time, shaping public perception and legitimizing policies of deterrence, externalization, and active abandonment. These networks sustained the routinized deaths of Black migrant men at sea, reinforcing Europe’s imperial border regimes. By foregrounding the mutual constitution of race, affect, and temporality, this study expands migration scholarship’s engagement with race, demonstrating how racial logics operate beyond geopolitical and temporal boundaries through transnational circuits of meaning, power, and governance. The article argues that centering Blackness and affect is essential to understanding how racialization functions and how Black deaths are rendered normative within global bordering practices.

Affective ties encompass a broad family of emotional phenomena, including love, affection, attachment, and devotion. Affective ties may appear deeply personal, and they most certainly are. But they are also important resources for the exercise of political power in international politics – not only as vulnerabilities that can be exploited for coercion but also, and more significantly, as means to mobilise action and sacrifice. Viewed from the vantage point of political agents, affective ties are thus power resources whose distribution in the international system shapes their strategies and choices. Viewed from the perspective of the system, the international realm is not only characterised by struggles over material capabilities or ideas but also competition over affective ties. Correspondingly, nationalism is not simply an identity. It is a collection of techniques and practices for generating and capturing affective ties that has emerged as a highly effective contender in this contest, with crucial implications for how the international system is organised. That being said, other forms of eliciting affective ties also persist.

There is a longstanding belief amongst scholars of psychophysiology that activation is positively associated with attention. However, recent work on news avoidance suggests that activation from negative content is linked to decreased attention. The current study seeks to investigate these different expectations and suggests that both increased and decreased activation can be linked to both attention and avoidance. Using an experiment that employs skin conductance levels and heart rate to evaluate subjects’ media selection choices, the author finds that even as deactivation is most likely to precede the decision to turn away from content, roughly 30% of the time activation precedes turning away. These findings confirm prior conclusions from the psychophysiological communications literature, and in the news avoidance literature, but it also highlights the need for more nuanced expectations where activation and media selection are concerned.

This introduction to the special issue on food charity, religion, and care in Vietnam compares grassroots philanthropy in Vietnam with broader trends toward religious humanitarianism happening across Asia. The co-editors of the special issue examine why food charity has become popular in urban areas like Ho Chi Minh City by exploring how food holds spiritual, moral significance for both donors and recipients. This survey illuminates how grassroots philanthropy in Vietnam can offer a comparative study for spirituality, ethics, and food practices across Asia, as well as religious humanitarian- ism globally.

Although psychopathic personality traits are widely reported to be related to reduced reactivity to emotion-eliciting situations, findings are not consistent. It has been argued that these differences could be related to variations in the way psychopathy is measured. To examine whether measurement variance resulting from the use of clinical assessment versus self-report assessment could be driving such differences, this systematic review and meta-analysis investigated the comparability of relations between psychopathic traits and responsiveness to emotion-inducing tasks for clinical versus self-report measures. The systematic review resulted in eight studies and 131 effect sizes, which included studies of emotion categorization, emotion regulation, decision-making, and executive functioning tasks. Robust Variance Estimation correlated effects models revealed no significant differences between effect sizes for clinical (PCL-R) versus self-report (PPI, SRP, and LSRP) assessment-based psychopathic traits and emotion tasks. Despite the small number of studies that included both clinical and self-report assessments of psychopathy, these results do not provide any evidence for an assessment-based difference in correlations with emotional responsiveness across tasks. The findings also show no associations between scores on emotional responsiveness and indices of psychopathy. Future research on emotional responsiveness in psychopathy should include both assessment types to be able to increase the research basis for the comparison.

Este artículo cuestiona la suposición común de que las organizaciones negras son inherentemente antirracistas, enfatizando la necesidad de explorar cómo esas organizaciones desarrollan perspectivas antirracistas que se integra en su trabajo y prácticas. A partir de una experiencia de trabajo con Sankofa Danzafro, este estudio analiza los resultados de seis laboratorios de danza realizados con niños, adolescentes y jóvenes afrocolombianos. Estos laboratorios culminaron en la creación de “Ancestros del Futuro”, una obra de danza inspirada en el afro-futurismo y el Black joy, interpretada por la compañía de danza afro contemporánea en Colombia. Esta investigación resalta cómo la perspectiva antirracista en la danza afro contemporánea se forma a través de una combinación única de estéticas que emergen de prácticas de danza rutinarias y una dimensión afectiva que evoluciona en momentos clave en las trayectorias de vida de los bailarines. Esta fusión desafía los discursos antirracistas dominantes que generalmente enmarcan el antirracismo como una agenda programática estática, presentándolo en cambio como una conciencia política-afectiva dinámica desarrollada mediante un compromiso reflexivo con el cuerpo a través de la danza.

Growing evidence suggests that ratings of second language (L2) speech may be influenced by perceptions of speakers’ affective states, yet the size and direction of these effects remain underexplored. To investigate these effects, 83 raters evaluated 30 speech samples using 7-point scales of four language features and ten affective states. The speech samples were 2-min videorecordings from a high-stakes speaking test. An exploratory factor analysis reduced the affect scores to three factors: assuredness, involvement, and positivity. Regression models indicated that affect variables predicted spoken language feature ratings, explaining 18–27% of the variance in scores. Assuredness and involvement corresponded with all language features, while positivity only predicted comprehensibility scores. These findings suggest that listeners’ perceptions of speakers’ affective states intertwine with their spoken language ratings to form a visual component of second-language communication. The study has implications for models of L2 speech, language pedagogy, and assessment practice.

Braidotti describes the world as gasping for air as collectively we face a range of socioecological challenges. Young people are important actors in these challenges, making schools a critical space for this work. Physical education (PE) can contribute through promoting relevant embodied encounters that develop students’ physical literacies (PL). Noting the recent moves to extend the notion of a physically literate individual to include the ecological, alongside the Australian Curriculum that requires teachers to attend to their learning area, cross-curriculum priorities and general capabilities including sustainability and ethical capabilities, there are exciting possibilities for developing students’ PL to confront these challenges. Despite these opportunities, for PE to contribute meaningfully, teachers must progress from PE represented by sport techniques, linear pedagogies and driven by competition to PE that engages students to think and act differently in the world, ethically, ontologically and epistemologically. Using autoethnography, this paper presents vignettes to outline current issues and possibilities for PE. Through a posthuman lens, positioning teachers and students as learners who are always becoming, with the capacity to affect and be affected, it is possible to achieve the intended curriculum and develop young people’s capacities to make a meaningful contribution to the socioecological challenges we face.

Enamoured by gamified FinTech platforms and the rise of investment cultures on social media, young people are turning to financial markets to take control over their future in a present shaped by instability and crisis. Recently, the story of young investors has been dominated by sensationalist accounts of speculative investing (i.e., GameStop). But alongside these speculative traders exists the young passive investor, who steadily invests in safe, diverse assets to grow their wealth over their lifetime. The figure of the passive young investor points to a larger social phenomenon of a maturing asset economy where major assets such as property are out of reach, but financial assets have emerged to allow young people to live an assetised life. To understand why young investors are turning to financial markets as an instrument of wealth accumulation, I argue that these practices emerge as a response to young people’s affective state of precariousness. This precariousness emerges from their material and discursive context that includes a retreating welfare state, wage stagnation, limited employment pathways, and individualised risk management. This affective atmosphere of precariousness pushes young people to seek stability and security wherever they can, and for young investors, this is found in financial assets.

This article revisits Rayford Logan’s thesis in The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877‒1901 to chart how African Americans experienced joy during a racial low point—“the Nadir” of race relations. Using Logan’s claims as a conceptual framework, the article examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s position on amusement and everyday Black people’s joyful acts during the post-Reconstruction period to understand “a paradox of pleasure”—feeling jovial during dark times. With the Nadir as a case study, this essay argues that historians may develop Black joy as a historical analytic by asking research questions about Black affect, employing the tools of historical imagination, and concentrating on the small delights of daily life. This essay seeks to inspire curiosity about how exploring Black life from the angle of elation, not sorrow, can produce complex histories of Black subjectivity and feeling. It proposes Black joy as an inchoate analytic in hopes of it becoming a formal mode of historical inquiry.