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I examine the prevalent construction of the long-lost yet technologically more highly-advanced society in the Mass Effect trilogy and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. First, I situate this construction within its long history, which finds a common touchstone in the myth of Atlantis. Through the lens of Jacques Derrida's hauntology, I consider how this construction is used in these two popular and prevalent yet different examples to evoke nostalgia for their own fictional pasts. I analyse the ways in which the ghosts of these gameworlds haunt the player in the present, through modalities of threat, nostalgia, lost futures and destiny. These manifest on various levels of the game: the gameworlds' fictional pasts (often overlapping with what would popularly be called a game's "lore"); digital materiality; and the games' spatial environments and the traversal of them. The examples differ in how and why the player interfaces with the gameworlds' ghosts on each layer, opening up some of the potential strategies for this game-internal nostalgia and haunting, while not being exhaustive.

Digital surveillance technologies enable a range of publics to observe the private lives of wild animals. Publics can now encounter wildlife from their smartphones, home computers, and other digital devices. These technologies generate public-wildlife relations that produce digital intimacy, but also summon wildlife into relations of care, commodification, and control. Via three case studies, this paper examines the biopolitical implications of such technologically mediated human-animal relations, which are becoming increasingly common and complex in the Digital Anthropocene. Each of our case studies involves a different biopolitical rationale deployed by a scientific-managerial regime: (1) clampdown (wild boar); (2) care (golden eagle); and (3) control (moose). Each of these modalities of biopower, however, is entangled with the other, inaugurating complex relations between publics, scientists, and wildlife. We show how digital technologies can predetermine certain representations of wildlife by encouraging particular gazes, which can have negative repercussions for public-wildlife relations in both digital and offline spaces. However, there remains work to be done to understand the positive public-wildlife relations inaugurated by digital mediation. Here, departing from much extant literature on digital human-animal relations, we highlight some of these positive potentials, notably: voice, immediacy, and agency.

Highlighting the rural district of Nyanza in Rwanda, this article examines community relations to heritage resources. It investigates the possibilities for more ethical, engaged models of heritage management which can better deliver on agendas of decolonization and development. Our research finds that Nyanza’s heritage stakeholders highly value heritage’s social and economic roles, but communities are also significantly alienated from heritage resources. In seeking to bridge this gap, heritage professionals utilize a discourse of technocratic improvement, but community leaders emphasize ideas of ownership, drawing on higher state-level discourses of self-reliance and “homegrown solutions.” They mobilize the state’s own attempts to filter developing, decolonizing initiatives through Rwandan frameworks to advocate for communities’ right to participate in heritage. This local agency offers a roadmap for utilizing favorable aspects of existing governance to push heritage management toward community engagement and decolonization.

With the availability of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) courses, an increasing number of international students have been joining Swedish universities. However, the language use in Swedish EMI courses may display unique features; while many Swedish students have high English language proficiency, code-switching between Swedish and English is reported as a common practice by both lecturers and students, even when international students are present. Moreover, the term “international students” is often used to include students of various statuses and linguistic abilities, and the experiences and perspectives of short-term exchange students towards the language use in Swedish EMI courses are rarely documented. The current study investigates the perspectives of short-term exchange students from Japan enrolled in EMI courses at a university in Sweden. Questionnaire and focus group interview confirmed previous studies regarding the language-use practices in the classrooms. Moreover, the rate of speech, turn-taking, and background knowledge were found to hinder the learning and participation of the exchange students. The findings suggest the need to raise awareness of the language practices in Swedish EMI courses to students, lecturers, and other universities in order to support the learning experience of short-term exchange students.

Administrative burdens in citizen-state interactions are increasingly gaining attention in both research and practice. However, being a relatively young research field, there is still considerable disagreement about how to conceptualize and measure administrative burdens. In particular, burdens are sometimes equated with what the state does, and other times with what target group members experience. We argue that such disagreement is a barrier for further theoretical development and has removed focus from studying the process in which state actions are converted into individual outcomes. We provide advice on how to conceptually bridge the gap between different conceptualizations of administrative burden and lay out a research agenda covering the next important theoretical and empirical steps based on such a shared understanding. We propose that developing the conceptual and empirical foundation of administrative burden research will help asking new and important research questions and building cumulative knowledge. To illustrate these points, we present a series of new research questions for future research to engage with. Administrative burdens in citizen-state interactions are increasingly gaining attention in both research and practice. However, being a relatively young research field, there is still considerable disagreement about how to conceptualize and measure administrative burdens. In particular, burdens are sometimes equated with what the state does, and other times with what target group members experience. We argue that such disagreement is a barrier for further theoretical development and has removed focus from studying the process in which state actions are converted into individual outcomes. We provide advice on how to conceptually bridge the gap between different conceptualizations of administrative burden and lay out a research agenda covering the next important theoretical and empirical steps based on such a shared understanding. We propose that developing the conceptual and empirical foundation of administrative burden research will help asking new and important research questions and building cumulative knowledge. To illustrate these points, we present a series of new research questions for future research to engage with.

Abstract This essay charts the German eighteenth-century physician and writer Johann Georg Zimmermann’s monumental work on solitude. The essay draws on but also challenges recent historiography on two counts. First, it situates Zimmermann’s discourse on solitude in the context of the early modern cultura animi tradition, in which philosophy provided a cure for a soul perceived as diseased and perturbed by passion and desire. Placed in this context, solitude comes into view not primarily as a passive state of rest and tranquillity connected to the rural life, but as active, therapeutic and exercise-oriented work on the self. Second, it argues that Zimmermann also shaped his discourse in relation to the increasingly radical late eighteenth-century exploration of subjectivity and selfhood, an exploration that reflects the emergence of the modern conception of the unique individual and autonomous self.