Current Articles

This essay explores the role of the idea of an imaginary in understanding the diversity of the constitutional systems of the world. It adapts to constitutional purposes Charles Taylor’s explanation of an imaginary as ‘that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’. It extrapolates general characteristics of imaginaries from Taylor’s account of the Western imaginary to assist understanding of the imaginaries of communities elsewhere and to explain how and why they may differ from each other. The essay argues that the idea of an imaginary may have explanatory power in a range of significant constitutional contexts in the current age of globalisation. It illustrates the point by examining the potential relevance of imaginaries in constitution-making and implementation; activities that have been widespread across the world since the end of the cold war, with mixed results. It concludes by speculating about the implications for imaginaries of the current world disorder and suggesting that imaginaries might have new applications in these unpromising conditions.

Many of the UK’s current economic and social problems, including its housing affordability crisis, can be traced to decades of land and housing policy failures. The role of land markets is strongly dependent on institutions, including land use regulation, financial regulation and property taxation. Transformative but deleterious changes to the institutional framework in the 1980s, that have persisted until recently, have resulted in high and volatile land prices (with several booms and busts in credit and house prices). The associated speculation diverted financial flows from more productive investment, damaging growth and competitiveness, and increasing financial instability risks. Policy remedies require a holistic package. This includes planning reform, land-value capture, expanding the social housing stock and reforming a dysfunctional property tax system.

English higher education (HE) is experiencing acute financial instability, driven by rising staff and compliance costs, a cap on tuition fees, and declining international student income. This article offers the first synthesis of recent fragmented scholarship on how English universities are responding to these pressures, using Resource Dependence Theory (RDT). A scoping literature review of peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2025 was conducted using Scopus with predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Records were screened for relevance and eligibility, and findings were analysed through thematic analysis; the review was complemented by case studies of three English universities to contextualise sector-wide patterns. Seventeen records were identified and sixteen studies met the inclusion criteria. Four strategic response patterns were identified: buffering (for example, voluntary redundancy schemes, course closures and operational streamlining), bridging (for example, internationalisation, industry partnerships and digital provision), restructuring (for example, intensified managerial control and consultancy logics) and sustainability, which emerged as a cross-cutting but fragile concern shaped by stakeholder power and financial slack. The findings suggest that, while universities display adaptive capacity, many responses generate new or intensified resource dependencies. More holistic approaches are therefore needed that balance financial efficiency with academic integrity, public purpose, stakeholder legitimacy, environmental sustainability and the governance implications of artificial intelligence.

Can the memoir ask political questions that the academic monograph cannot? Can one research in archives and be mindful of the dignity of the lives being researched? Why do philosophers often turn to literature for answers? Lea Ypi looks back at her experience of writing two memoirs about her childhood and her family in Albania to offer her thoughts on these issues. Writing about her beloved grandmother, Ypi realises, allowed her to measure the tectonic movements of history that dramatically changed the shape of modern Albania. At the same time these memoirs are also a reckoning with herself—a diasporic academic weighing up the privileges and problems of being at home in the world. This article arises from a Lecture delivered on 17 September 2025.

What the atlas calls Greenland is a country known to its Indigenous people as Kalaallit Nunaat, ‘lands of the Kalaallit’. But these names carry very different meanings: the first embedded in a history of colonisation; the second in practices of habitation. The incommensurability between these meanings poses a dilemma for today’s Kalaallit, faced with both the toxic legacy of Danish colonisation and the desire for their country to make its way in the family of nations. The professed desire of US President Trump to annex Greenland has brought this dilemma to a head. Where much of Europe has leapt to Denmark’s defence, in Kalaallit Nunaat the response has been more nuanced. Introducing the thematic collection, ‘On Greenland’, this article asks: can Kalaallit regain sovereignty over their lands and stories on their own terms? 

This article traces the recent development of security and defence policy in Greenland. Although constitutionally, questions of security and defence have been for Denmark to decide, Greenland has recently begun to formulate its own security and defence policies, as part of its quest to secure international recognition as an actor in its own right, and to play a part in shaping, and benefitting from, vast increases in defence investments. Traditionally, Greenland has cleaved to a pacifist position, and has sought to keep the military presence in the Arctic to a minimum. However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the threat of annexation following President Trump’s return to the White House, have raised the stakes over matters of Arctic security. As Greenland has demanded a greater say in negotiations with the Danish government over investments in security, defence policy has come to the fore in the domestic politics of Greenland itself. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.

Greenland is increasingly described through geopolitical, extractive, and climate science framings: as ice sheet, strategic space, mineral frontier, and planetary climate barometer. This article argues that such external narratives obscure Kalaallit Nunaat as an Indigenous homeland and self-governing political community. Drawing on the case of Pikialasorsuaq, the North Water polynya between northwest Greenland and Nunavut, the article points to the importance of reframing Greenlandic sovereignty, environmental protection, and geopolitics through land–sea–ice relations. Climate-driven changes in sea ice reshape mobility, risk, and anticipatory knowledge, while also opening the region to increased shipping, resource exploration, tourism, and strategic attention. Inuit-led initiatives for ecosystem management around Pikialasorsuaq demonstrate that conservation and environmental protection are not matters of bounded territory or external expertise, but practices of stewardship, mobility, and food security. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.

The geopolitical premises underlying recent arguments about the role of Greenland in world affairs do not align well with Arctic realities; some of the specific assertions appearing frequently in popular accounts are simply at odds with the facts. This does not mean that the place of the Arctic in international society is not changing or that Greenland is unimportant in the overall Arctic picture. But it does suggest that popular accounts of the role of Greenland are not helpful to those seeking to understand current developments in the Arctic and to address specific issues pertaining to Greenland. What is needed going forward is an effort to collaborate with Greenlandic leaders seeking to promote liberal values, rather than the promotion of outdated imperialistic practices bent upon the annexation of lands and peoples regardless of their desires. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.

For more than a millennium, white men have been telling stories about taking Greenland. In the stories told by Norwegians, Greenland was typically regarded as an extension of Norway, even if, in the end, it was never so. Danish stories, by contrast were always about taking care of Greenlanders, by placing them under the Kingdom’s benevolent protection. But the stories told by Americans would see in Greenland only a stepping stone to the realisation of greater ambitions: initially of polar exploration and subsequently geopolitical dominance. In the stories told by Greenlanders themselves, however, the leading characters are not European or American but Inuit. Contemporary Greenlandic counter-narratives, focusing on the modernisation period, point to Denmark’s role, as a colonial power, in extracting the resources of the country. While Europe is outraged by US President Trump’s boasts about taking Greenland, to Greenlanders themselves they echo to a familiar theme. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.

Beginning during the Second World War, the United States concluded a series of agreements with the Kingdom of Denmark that allowed the US considerable latitude to access Greenlandic territory for its own security. The claim of the current US Administration, that it requires control over Greenland for security reasons, is therefore specious. The US interest in annexing the country is more likely motivated by its substantial mineral reserves, especially of rare earth elements, in the face of competition not from China, as alleged, but from the European Union. Under the pretext that rare earths are needed for technologies to tackle the climate crisis, the drive for their extraction is part of a process of militarisation and digitisation set to concentrate shareholder value in unprecedented private fortunes. The annexation of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) would amount to policide, reducing an Indigenous nation to an ethnic minority within the American melting pot. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.

In these grim times, the potential for societies to advance social justice, address unequal access to rights, undo harms, and responsibly grow more sustainable ecologies, seems both challenging to find and ever more necessary. With dystopic developments coming increasingly to the fore, this collection of papers explores the concept of society’s potential to be otherwise and the methodological and evidentiary questions this raises. Such questions include: what is this otherwise and where is it found? How can we know? Is there evidence for any of these possibilities and what kind of evidence do we want or need? How are time and temporality addressed in thinking about futures? Is society’s potential part of its deep ontology, is it made, collectively and with effort, is it something imagined—that we can or should treat as if it existed—and what can we learn from dystopias both on the horizon and those present? These contributions address these themes through reflecting on the role of rights and civic stratification; utopias and the prefigurative; and through concepts of the moral economy.

The Editors introduce the third issue of Volume 14 of the Journal of the British Academy. This Introduction includes an overview of the content of the issue.

In this interview, Josh Milburn speaks to Marcy Norton about her 2024 Harvard University Press book The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492. The book explores the contrasting human–animal ‘modes of interaction’ developed in Europe and Native America, and how these modes of interaction impacted, and were impacted by, the 1492 arrival of Europeans in America. The conversation starts with the differences between European hunting and Native American predation, before turning—via a discussion of witchcraft and demonology—to European livestock farming and Native American familiarisation, the latter of which is an important, overlooked part of the origins of contemporary practices of ‘pet-keeping’. The conversation closes with reflections on the methods of animal history, the relationship of animal history to the broader animal studies world, and our own relationships with animals.

Public discourse in Denmark remains committed to the narrative of colonial benevolence, in which Danish presence in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) is remembered primarily through care, development, and economic generosity. The story of orsugiak – renamed ‘cryolite’ by Danish geologists – unsettles this narrative. Regarded as Greenland’s ‘white gold’, cryolite became essential to global aluminium production and was mined intensively by Danish companies between 1854 and 1990. While this extraction generated substantial colonial wealth that funded infrastructural and institutional developments in Denmark, the local Inuit community in Kalaallit Nunaat bore the social and environmental costs. In 2025, the documentary film Orsugiak – The White Gold of Greenland brought this history into public view, challenging established accounts of Danish colonialism. The backlash and subsequent deplatforming of the film reveal how colonial hierarchies continue to shape whose knowledge and narratives are granted legitimacy. As a Danish-Kalaaleq researcher and the main narrator of the film, I conceptualise this as `epistemic dispossession’ and argue for Inuit narrative sovereignty as a way of knowing and storying on Indigenous terms. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.

This article introduces the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing For Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’. This collection of articles showcases an international body of research and participatory approaches supporting diverse communities through digital and board games, role play, and co-production. It interrogates techno-centric net-zero strategies that risk widening equity gaps and explores inclusive ways to empower communities in climate action. The purpose of the collection is to advance understanding of how net zero can be achieved alongside sustainable development, recognising that climate action must be embedded within broader goals of equity, well-being, and ecological integrity. While there is no inherent contradiction between net zero and sustainability, this collection acknowledges that significant trade-offs and challenges remain. Poorly coordinated or inadequately designed net-zero policies risk deepening social inequalities; by contrast, integrated and fair approaches can transform net zero into a catalyst for broader sustainability gains. The articles demonstrate how locally rooted, creative engagement fosters trust, builds ownership, and produces contextually relevant, enduring solutions informed by communities of users who need to sustain changes in use of energy and natural resources across time. They show that initiatives developed by non-experts—or those that actively engage non-experts—can play a vital role in achieving net zero in an inclusive, equitable, and sustainable way forward that considers social and environmental aspects hand in hand. Originating from the 2nd Sustainability Multidisciplinary Meetup, supported by the British Academy Early Career Researcher Network, this collection of Early Career Researcher (ECR) essays offers practical pathways for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners committed to addressing climate change through collaboration, creativity, and climate justice.

Environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level (Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration of 1992). Public participation is essential to sustainable development and good governance. Access to environmental information, empowered by legislation, involves citizens in decision-making. Legislation on public participation for the protection of the environment plays a crucial role in ensuring that communities, stakeholders, and individuals have a say in environmental decision-making processes to achieve net-zero goals. Translating legal frameworks into community engagement remains challenging. Using The Green Planet AR Experience as a case study, this research applies a community engagement model to assess the role of augmented reality in encouraging participation. The findings suggest that embodied multisensory engagement enables participants to become co-creators of environmental experiences, potentially deepening their brand connections. This research demonstrates how immersive technologies can inform environmental governance through community co-creation. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

Climate justice recognises climate change as a global chain of cause and effect in which those most affected are often not those responsible for, or benefiting from, its drivers. Meaningful involvement of citizens and diverse stakeholders is therefore critical for assessing the socio-environmental impacts of development interventions that may impede justice, as well as identifying vulnerabilities. This article presents the development of a multi-stakeholder climate justice game based on dilemma-focused case studies, designed to build sustainability impact assessment skills within community settings. While emphasising the educational value of the game and its pilot application in postgraduate education, the paper also highlights persistent gaps in translating learning into policymaking and decision-making. It outlines key elements of game design, interdisciplinary collaboration, and approaches to assessing socio-ecological risks. By integrating the Sustainable Development Goals and adopting a value-pluralistic lens, the game broadens participation and evidence use, demonstrating its potential for democratic deliberation and advancing just transition debates. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

The ‘just transition’ to net zero emphasises that climate action benefits are shared widely, including amongst those potentially disadvantaged. Sustainable home retrofit requires a collaborative approach that integrates community expertise, prioritises passive design complemented by appropriate technologies, and balances building, energy, and residents’ needs. This requires engaging communities and forming partnerships between professionals and communities. We report findings from a co-designed creative community engagement workshop by the London Research and Policy Partnership (LRaPP) and Retrofit Action for Tomorrow (RAFT) in 2023. LRaPP and RAFT members co-designed and facilitated inclusive creative participatory methods, to engage diverse communities to attend. Forty participants discussed the use of home retrofit to navigate the ‘just transition’ to net zero, addressing ‘real-world’ complexities. This workshop brought together different individuals to cross research–policy–practice boundaries and collectively generate co-produced priorities and solutions to tackle how retrofit could be used to navigate the ‘just transition’ to net zero. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

Project CHANGE (Curating a Human-centred Approach for net zero: Gamifying Energy-behaviour) investigates how gamification can support public engagement in domestic energy retrofit and encourage sustainable behaviours. It introduces a prototype strategy-based simulation game that enables players to explore retrofit options, behavioural choices, and co-benefits within a risk-free, interactive environment. The paper outlines the development of the game, including its theoretical foundations, systems-based design, and user-centred methodology. The architecture integrates dynamic simulations [such as weather, NPC (non-player character) behaviour, and financial modelling] to illustrate how everyday decisions influence energy use and well-being. Initial findings from internal testing and a small-scale public trial indicate that gamified experiences can improve understanding of retrofit processes and increase perceived agency over household energy use. The paper also reflects on usability challenges, accessibility considerations, and constraints arising from limited resources and sample size. Overall, Project CHANGE demonstrates the potential of serious games as part of a broader toolkit for supporting systemic sustainability education and behaviour change. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

Delivering sustainable and affordable housing for low-income communities remains a major challenge amid housing shortages, energy insecurity, and net-zero transition pressures. In South Africa, adoption of net-zero housing is limited by regulatory, financial, and social barriers, highlighting the need for stronger policy integration and technological innovation. This study develops a community-driven, scalable net-zero housing model integrating Community-Based Participatory Research with innovative construction techniques. Africa’s first net-zero affordable housing prototype, the Sustainable Innovative Affordable House (SIAH-NZ), was implemented to demonstrate real-world feasibility. Performance assessments show a 97 per cent reduction in operational carbon emissions, an 82 per cent reduction in life-cycle costs, and a three-day construction period using prefabricated monolithic panels. Post-occupancy surveys indicate strong community acceptance, with 90 per cent of participants willing to adopt net-zero housing if financial support is available. The study highlights policy pathways for scaling net-zero housing through regulatory reform, financial incentives, decentralised renewables, and localised decision-making, offering a replicable blueprint for equitable, climate-resilient housing. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

This work presents the development of an educational ecology-focused card game created in collaboration with a grass-roots community group. Employing a participatory action research (PAR) methodology, the group gathered and analysed data on public attitudes towards climate change and card games to inform the design of the game. Key findings revealed a general awareness of environmental change but a limited understanding of its causes. Additionally, the public expressed a positive attitude towards both card games and education through this medium. Building upon these insights, the group designed a card game that explores climate change and pollution threats to a marine ecosystem. The PAR approach was found to be effective in designing a card game through community-led dissemination of results and decision-making. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving Sustainable Net-Zero Transition’, edited by Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou, and Ievgeniia Kopytsia.

From the British Academy’s 2026 event series The Age of Self?, former Archbishop of Canterbury and theologian Lord Rowan Williams FBA discusses the books, writers and ideas that have shaped his intellectual and spiritual life, in conversation with journalist and broadcaster Ritula Shah. Their discussion ranges across childhood reading, theology, poetry, translation, spirituality, social justice and solidarity, reflecting on the relationship between literature, religion and contemporary society.

What kind of ‘higher education’ is suitable for our age of polycrisis—accelerating climate change, economic turbulence, and global authoritarianism? Can universities unshackle themselves from the chains of financialisation, managerialism, and technocracy? Can care, imagination, collectivity, and autonomy be taught and learnt? In this conversation, Dr Michael Hrebeniak—founder of the New School of the Anthropocene—talks about his experiment in ‘counter-nihilism’. NSotA was founded as a ‘micro-university’ with a curriculum dedicated to addressing biopolitical emergency, climate justice, and the entanglements of a more-than-human assembly through the Arts and Humanities. Here, students and teachers collaborate and self-organise to acquire the skills necessary to be citizen-custodians of our planet.

This article reports key findings from a pilot project to design, develop, and test an intervention aimed at increasing perceived organisational support among television freelancers. The initiative is a response to a problem rooted in this sector’s model of employment: the television industry has become dependent upon a skilled but contingent workforce who report feeling unsupported and isolated in a work environment characterised by instability and insecurity. The article draws from organisational support theory and explores the utility of the concept of perceived organisational support in its application to contingent workers. The intervention (Supportive Offboarding) was designed to signal support by the inclusion of four key components: the offer of feedback from the company; the request for feedback to the company; a career-related conversation; and the expression of gratitude. Each of these aspects of the intervention is tested, its outcomes analysed, and its implications assessed.

While the transnational and translational ramifications of art song have started to attract attention in recent years, there is little critical understanding of the unique modalities in which multilingualism expresses itself in the genre. In this context, this article has a two-fold aim. Firstly, drawing upon scholarship both on art song and Multilingualism Studies, I map out what I call the linguistic regime of art song, defined by the multilingual competences expected of individuals active in the art song ecosystem (singers, composers, translators, coaches, audiences) and the hegemony of certain languages over others. Secondly, on the basis of an empirical experiment involving practice-led research in singing, I consider how engagement with songs in lesser represented languages might be encouraged, and how such engagement might help expand and/or challenge some aspects of the linguistic regime of art song.

The Editors introduce the second issue of Volume 14 of the Journal of the British Academy. This Introduction includes an overview of the content of the issue.