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In scholarship on religion and religious art, the term aniconism describes the absence of a figural representation of a deity (whether anthropomorphic or theriomorphic), primarily in the context of ritual veneration of one deity or more, but also within a visual tradition more broadly. Aniconic worship may take on a variety of forms, including veneration centered around a standing stone, open fire, vacant space, or no independent physical focal point at all. In religious art and visual culture, aniconism may also be manifested in a range of ways, such as adherence to the usage of ornament, calligraphy, or geometric forms. Although it is often treated as synonymous with iconoclasm, the word aniconism does not refer to the destruction of religious images. It may be adopted without an articulated reason or coherent doctrine, or it may be connected with an explicit theology. Worship of deities without figural representations has been widely attested for millennia in both polytheistic traditions (Greco-Roman, Phoenician) and monotheistic ones (Jewish, Islamic). The concept of aniconism, however, is modern. It was introduced by Johannes Adolph Overbeck (1826–1895) for the particular purpose of describing the presumed earliest phases in the development of Greek religion, which were construed as imageless. In the 20th century, aniconism has come to describe the absence of the figural image of a deity in worship and has been applied more broadly to certain artistic traditions such as early Buddhist, Islamic, and Jewish art. Since the manifestations of aniconism differ widely, it is vitally important to apply the concept contextually, with clear criteria for what is considered aniconic within a particular framework. Among the religions in the West from the Renaissance to the present, aniconism is notable in its emergence in certain strands of Protestantism, particularly in Calvinist houses of worship. Worship with no figural image is also often linked with primeval religions and is seen either negatively, as the practice of a less advanced culture, or positively, as a marker of higher spirituality. Claims of a complete absence of imagery and figural art in various religious traditions (e.g., Jewish, Islamic) have often been disproven, as further examination of those traditions has revealed the occurrence of figuration alongside some form of aniconism. The wide range of forms of aniconism and its coexistence with semi-figural and fully figural forms in worship and within broader visual traditions suggest that the concept is best applied through a nuanced approach which considers the nature and frequency of its occurrence rather than seeing it as an absolute negation of the figural image.

It is broadly agreed that sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and universal health coverage (UHC) are intimately linked. UHC has been described as a pragmatic means for advancing SRHR, and SRHR is considered an essential component of UHC. SRHR is universally recognized as a fundamental dimension of health and well-being and a human right. Ensuring SRHR requires a comprehensive, intersectional, and life-course approach, recognizing the layers of privilege or vulnerability that may influence one’s sexual and reproductive health needs and opportunities to fulfill one’s sexual and reproductive rights, as well as the shifting needs of individuals across the life course. UHC, on the other hand, implies that all people have access, without discrimination, to nationally determined sets of the needed promotive, preventive, curative, rehabilitative, and palliative essential health services. UHC also entails access to quality medicines and vaccines while ensuring that the use of these services does not expose the users to financial hardship. In 2019, the Political Declaration on UHC stipulated that access to SRH services as a key aspect of UHC was to be achieved by 2030. The declaration also reaffirmed commitments to the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action and Beijing Platform for Action. While SRHR is integral to the UHC agenda, and the delivery of both SRH services and UHC relies on functioning and quality primary health care systems, there are limitations of the UHC agenda for advancing SRHR. The aspiration of UHC and to what extent it has integrated SRHR under its ambit and advanced it from a gender and rights perspective can be revealed by a set of cases reflecting the experiences of people in vulnerable situations, which illustrate different shortcomings in the current UHC framework and its translation on the ground. These shortcomings include systematic exclusions and discrimination of persons currently belonging to marginalized groups, inadequate investment in and respect for women health workers, violations of autonomy and dignity, lack of accountability, and power of politics. These shortcomings, which limit access to and experience of quality health services, cannot be removed by narrowly focusing on addressing the “ability to pay” or reducing the financial barriers alone. Therefore, the current framing of UHC is insufficient to progressively realize SRHR and thus demands a reconceptualization and/or extension of current framing and design. To address the shortcomings, an intersectional feminist approach to UHC is proposed. Shifting mindsets and including gender and power analysis in UHC design, operationalization, and measurement of UHC outcomes will allow for achieving the UHC objectives of financial protection, equity in access, and service quality. Taking an intersectional feminist approach to UHC would improve not only SRHR outcomes but also health outcomes at large. It will furthermore offer a pathway to truly deliver on the objectives of UHC—equitable health care for all.

In Myanmar, from the Paleolithic to the early historic periods location has been an essential part of site layout and artifacts within wider cultural production. For all periods, there are issues of the classification and identification of implements that are complicated by multiperiod habitation. The result is frequent stratigraphic and artifactual ambiguity. Archaeological studies on the period from the Late Paleolithic to Neolithic eras have largely relied on artifact classification and minimally on the relationship to the local ecosystem. In many cases, hunter-gatherer foragers may have lived side by side with more sedentary groups who stored goods and stimulated a more hierarchical society. Archaeological research on the stone-using cultures began during the 19th century in tandem with colonial oil exploration. A pivotal 1943 survey was conducted of the geological terraces of the Upper Ayeyarwady River between Magway and Nyaung-U. This identified a Paleolithic culture utilizing fossil wood and river pebbles for tools dating to c.750,000 BP. The close link between environment and habitation strategies was matched in numerous Neolithic cultures that exploited natural resources at lowland open-air and cave sites. Near the Lower Chindwin, Upper Myanmar, associations with local resources are seen at Nyaung’gan, a bronze inhumation cemetery site of c.1500 bce on the rim of a extinct volcano. In a different way, local resources such as copper and soils determined the location of a series of bronze-iron mortuary sites in the plains of the Salween River (c.600 bce–300 CE) that flanked the Shan Plateau. These local chiefdoms exhibited status in abundant pottery and metal goods of burials. Mother-goddess figures and kye doke (bronze packets) representing bundles of fodder indicate a matrilineal ancestral culture engaged in incipient wet-rice cultivation. The subsequent emergence from c.200 bce of early urbanized Buddhist kingships and monastic communities continued in this agriculturally favorable landscape. Thus, for the period from the early stone cultures to the beginnings of the Buddhist societies that were expanding rice cultivation and interregional trade, understanding the local ecosystems is essential in accurately assessing the material culture.

Bread plays a crucial role in Egypt, profoundly impacting identity, family, and public interactions. Made from wheat, bread is not only a vital component of the national diet but also a focal point of Egypt’s social policy. Ensuring its affordability remains a central aim of the government. Despite these efforts, the availability and affordability of bread have continued to be points of debate and tension within Egyptian society. More than just a material good, bread in Egypt functions as a significant social indicator that affects and establishes relationships between people. It signals various states such as prosperity, distress, anxiety, and social and political mobilization. Bread is a remarkable commodity that provides nourishment while also serving as a potent symbol, encompassing spiritual, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions. Throughout Egypt’s political history, bread has emerged as a potent symbol in political discourse. Bread-related protests and movements have often signaled dissatisfaction with food policies and government actions. Shortages or price fluctuations in bread have frequently triggered public outcry and served as catalysts for social and political change. The political history of bread in Egypt encapsulates themes of division and cruelty as much as generosity and fulfillment. This was starkly evident during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, when bread became a powerful symbol of protest. Women held up pieces of bread, and men made helmets from it, emphasizing the slogan, “Bread, Dignity, and Social Justice.” Though bread may appear mundane, it is far from trivial. It represents power structures, human agency, and patterns of social relations. Bread is a gift that satisfies hunger, provides pleasure, evokes memory, and creates attachments. It acts as a link between the powerful and the powerless and between abundance and scarcity on family dining tables across Egypt. Bread’s presence at the core of daily life, the desperate measures families take to secure it, and its role in moments of crisis all underscore its significance.

Nearly 3.4 million Africans departed Atlantic Africa on British slave ships destined for the Americas between the 16th century and the first decade of the 19th century, when the British abolished the trade. The vast majority of these enslaved Africans were taken as war captives in West (primarily the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra) and West Central Africa before being sold to European slave traders. Most of them struggled to survive treacherous journeys to the Americas between the 1670s and 1807. Much of this trade was driven by sugar production in the Caribbean, where the majority of enslaved Africans were sold. These Africans also endured secondary and tertiary voyages to North and South America, where they arrived in British and Spanish territories. The British slave trade reached its zenith in the second half of the 18th century, when the ports of Liverpool in England and Bonny in the Bight of Biafra rose to prominence as slave trading hubs. A discussion of the history of the British slave trade from its inception in the 16th century through the era of abolition in the early 19th century includes a description of the historiographical literature and online resources for teaching and learning.

Colorism is discrimination based on skin tone—the lightness or darkness of one’s skin. While there is evidence of colorism in the U.S. criminal legal process—from police stops and arrests, to perceptions of criminality and guilt, to conviction and sentencing—some studies have not found colorism or have found colorism only for specific groups. Theory and methodological and contextual differences help explain heterogeneity in the findings. Some theory suggests that stereotypes influence outcomes in the criminal legal system and may vary depending on the context in which decisions are made (e.g., jurisdiction, judge, police office, location of police stop, jury composition). There was diversity in contextual factors and methods used to assess colorism in the criminal legal process that helps explain conflicting findings across studies. There were differences in skin tone and criminal legal system outcome measurement, study design, sampling, use of self-reported data, age of the data used relative to study publication date, types of statistical analyses performed, inclusion of key control variables and colorism inherent in some of those variables, and geography. Future research could further address differences and limitations in prior studies. To redress colorism in the criminal legal system, some scholars have suggested mandating implicit bias training, requiring police to reside in the jurisdictions they police, challenging the legality of color-based decisions in the criminal process, and developing anti-profiling policies. State-level race-based police reforms may reduce skin color disparities in criminal legal system outcomes, in addition to reducing racial disparities.

The story of the Crack Group begins with the public reading of the “Crack Manifesto” in 1996. Mexican literature, in that final decade of the 20th century, was recognized in the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Octavio Paz in 1990. This gesture also implied consolidating the literary establishment while closing ranks with hegemonic figures. There were few spaces for new writers to publish, and literature was still regarded as a solitary act. Faced with this scenario, five writers under the slogan of “literary friendship” decided to change the rules of the game: They would read the “Manifesto” and would each complement it with their own novel. It could have been just another gesture, but those in control of literature saw it as an affront. It was not possible for them to go against the established aesthetics and themes that exalted a national literature. Their books expanded literary frontiers and dared to trace themes under the distinctive quality of a cosmopolitan literature. What started as a “serious joke” has become a milestone—and not only in Mexican literature. We cannot overlook the fact that, also in 1996, the McOndo anthology was released: two isolated incidents that would later converge to speak of a new period in the literature of the American continent. This assertion is supported by a trajectory of more than twenty years that was confirmed by the “Postmanifesto-Crack 1996–2016.” The Crack Group has built its trajectory that is supported by writings that detail the agonizing 20th century and the promising diverse 21st century.

Cultural entrepreneurship research investigates the many cultural means and processes by which innovative courses of action come to fruition. Although commercial and technological concerns clearly matter, this area of research draws much-needed attention to the meaning-making activities that underpin entrepreneurship, innovation, and change. For instance, entrepreneurs tell stories that convey how their endeavors came to be and what they could accomplish. Innovators challenge the boundaries of familiar market categories and bring forward products that customers may not yet be equipped to understand. Creators develop novel experiences that challenge established conventions in surprising ways. In all these situations, entrepreneurial actors must harness their cultural context to convey the value of their endeavors to targeted others, including both external audiences and other related actors. In turn, these targeted others also draw on their cultural context to ascribe value to endeavors and decide whether to confer their attention and support. Expanding beyond more traditional views of entrepreneurship, which focus on the creation or exploitation of profitable opportunities, cultural entrepreneurship scholars recognize that entrepreneurial action is always embedded in its cultural context. This context provides a rich pool of cultural resources—that is, values, beliefs, practices, vocabularies, identities, logics, symbols, and practices—that entrepreneurial actors assemble, combine, or develop to bring innovative courses of action to fruition. These innovative courses of action are not limited to economic or technological pursuits but encompass a wider range of entrepreneurial possibilities, including the creation of new products and services as well as efforts to foster strategic change, advance social innovations, or tackle grand challenges, for instance. Cultural entrepreneurship has developed into a vibrant area of research, examining a variety of outcomes at different levels of analysis. Four distinct domains of inquiry can be gleaned from this. Two of the domains speak to the interplay between entrepreneurial actors—be they individuals, organizations, or broader collectives—and their external audiences. The first domain, entrepreneurship and innovation, uncovers the cultural processes by which entrepreneurial actors win the backing of external audiences, such as potential investors, market analysts, or customers. The second domain, market mediation and activism, draws attention to the active influence that external audiences have on the innovative courses of action that actors pursue, and how they do so. The last two domains speak to the interplay between focal actors and other related actors. The third domain, market creation and strategy, focuses on how actors shape the collective boundaries of given market categories, and what other related actors do within these boundaries. Finally, the fourth domain, intrapreneurship and organizational change, examines how actors account for what other related actors do too, and how they develop their organizational capacity to innovate and create innovative courses of action. Despite their different emphases, these four domains are united by a common interest in understanding how entrepreneurial actors bring innovative courses of action to fruition and the broader meaning systems in which such efforts are embedded.

For religious institutions in Latin western Europe of the 16th century, Earth was the center of the universe, and the orderly and predictable motion of the heavenly planets about the Earth (which included the Sun) reflected divine will and an inducement to moral improvement. The discovery by Copernicus that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, but was itself a planet orbiting the Sun, was revolutionary. The invention of the telescope resulted in the discovery of more planets by Galileo and others, initially thought to be planets orbiting planets. All planets were expected to feature geological processes seen on Earth. It was even speculated that these other worlds also supported intelligent life. The search for and discovery of a predicted “missing planet” at the beginning of the 19th century opened the door to a rapidly growing number of new small planets, which appeared as points of light in the sky, and were also referred to as “asteroids,” meaning “star-like.” All planets at this time, which then included asteroids, were thought to have formed from a disk of nebular dust and gas surrounding the early Sun. While in the 19th century it was thought by some that asteroids may have arisen from the breakup of a larger planet, it was not until the 1950s when the smaller members of this population were shown to be collisional fragments that there was a paradigm shift in the scientific literature away from their being considered a type of planet. Near the end of the 20th century, planets around other stars were discovered. These planets now number in the many thousands, greatly expanding the diversity of planet characteristics and solar system architectures. Since then, a growing number of small planets have been discovered in the Solar System (often referred to as ice dwarfs), many of which are hypothesized to have or have had subsurface oceans. Dwarfs are also satellites of planets. Ice dwarfs are the most common type of planet in the Solar System and are hypothesized to be the most common type of planet around other stars. If life can arise in subsurface oceans of these worlds, it raises the question of whether life might be common in the universe. The use of the term “planet” today in the scientific literature continues to reflect its heritage from the time of Galileo, that is, planets are geophysical objects, regardless of their orbits. So, by definition, planets would be those objects large enough to be gravitationally round, in generally hydrostatic equilibrium, at which point differentiation commences and geophysical processes, similar to those observed on Earth, are observed to “turn on.”