Humans possess the capacity to make sense of stories unfolding across different and difficult times with nuanced understanding and to unlearn and relearn what once seemed familiar. All human beings are storytellers, and the narratives of minorities deserve recognition and value within Westernised contexts. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives and employing a narrative inquiry approach, I share stories from my lived experiences as a former graduate student and current educator. These stories focus on pedagogical practices, dynamic identity formation and reflective engagements with place as valid and vital ways of knowing, doing, being and becoming. I highlight how choice often entails challenge, how agency and struggle can be intertwined with empowerment, and how marginalisation can coexist with celebration. This inquiry aims to reveal the layered complexity and sometimes paradoxical dimensions of learner and teacher identities within the assemblage of learning and teaching in higher education.

This paper explores the role of identity in constitutional law, moving beyond the dominant concept of constitutional identity. While many European constitutional texts reference various forms of identity – such as national, religious, or cultural – constitutional identity has been disproportionately emphasised in academic discourse. Through an empirical analysis of constitutional provisions and court rulings across 47 European states, this study demonstrates that identity plays a broader and more nuanced role in constitutional law than previously recognised. The paper categorises four types of relationships between identity and constitutional norms: identity as a right to protection, a basis for additional rights, a principle guiding constitutional interpretation, and an identity of the constitution itself. It highlights how constitutional courts interpret and balance competing identities, influencing the application of fundamental rights and constitutional principles. By highlighting examples that represent different models of identity systems, the paper reveals the necessity of giving scientific attention to the relationships between identities. Indeed, identities can undermine liberal constitutional values by privileging certain collective identities over individual identities and individual rights. Ultimately, the study argues that focusing solely on constitutional identity as an analytical concept to designate everything even remotely related to identity in constitutional law obscures the broader dynamics of identity within constitutional systems. It calls for a strict conceptual redefinition of constitutional identity in order to better understand how identity, in all its potential forms, continuously reshapes constitutional law and influences the evolution of democratic and human rights protections in European states.

We give a complete description of Rees quotients of free inverse semigroups given by positive relators that satisfy nontrivial identities, including identities in signature with involution. They are finitely presented in the class of all inverse semigroups. Those that satisfy a nontrivial semigroup identity have polynomial growth and can be given by an irredundant presentation with at most four relators. Those that satisfy a nontrivial identity in signature with involution, but which do not satisfy a nontrivial semigroup identity, have exponential growth and fall within two infinite families of finite presentations with two generators. The first family involves an unbounded number of relators and the other involves presentations with at most four relators of unbounded length. We give a new sufficient condition for which a finite set X of reduced words over an alphabet $A\cup A^{-1}$ freely generates a free inverse subsemigroup of $FI_A$ and use it in our proofs.

The ways in which minority street-level bureaucrats construe their identities as state representatives and as representatives of minority clients are known to inform their discretionary behavior toward clients, thereby shaping policy outcomes. While existing studies have examined race and ethnicity as shared identities between minority bureaucrats and clients, the role of “migrant” identity has been overlooked. Focusing on the so-called European migration crisis of 2015–2017, this study addresses this gap. Drawing on qualitative interviews with migrant bureaucrats, it examines how being simultaneously a migrant and a migration policy implementer shapes bureaucratic discretion. This article introduces the notion of “migrant representative” and identifies four profiles of migrant bureaucrats, each corresponding to different degrees of identification with the local migration management system and the migrant clients. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on representative bureaucracy and the debate on the linkage between passive and active representation.

Qin imperial unification in 221 bce is often conceived of as the ‘unification of China’. Although from the long-term perspective of Chinese history this view is surely valid, it obscures some of the major trends of the Warring States period (453–221 bce). Back then, the Zhou (‘Chinese’) world was moving in the direction of the internal consolidation of large territorial states amid increasing political and cultural separation from their neighbours. This process unmistakably recalls similar developments in early modern Europe, where, as is well known, these resulted in the formation of nation-states. In China, by contrast, the development trajectory was markedly different. The potential transformation of the competing Warring States into fully fledged separate entities never materialized. The unified empire was eventually accepted as the sole legitimate solution to political turmoil, whereas individual states were denied the right to exist. Why, despite strong parallels, did the Chinese development trajectory ultimately diverge so conspicuously from what happened in modern Europe?

In search of an answer, this article focuses on the extraordinary role played by politically active intellectuals of the Warring States period. By prioritizing the common good of ‘All-under-Heaven’ over that of an individual polity, by denigrating local identities, and by rejecting the legitimacy of regional states, these intellectuals paved the way for the political unification of the Zhou world long before it occurred. This article addresses the idealistic and egoistic reasons for this choice and explores the cosmopolitan undertones of the universalist outlook of the Warring States-period intellectuals.

We study the free metabelian group $M(2,n)$ of prime power exponent n on two generators by means of invariants $M(2,n)'\to \mathbb {Z}_n$ that we construct from colorings of the squares in the integer grid $\mathbb {R} \times \mathbb {Z} \cup \mathbb {Z} \times \mathbb {R}$. In particular, we improve bounds found by Newman for the order of $M(2,2^k)$. We study identities in $M(2,n)$, which give information about identities in the Burnside group $B(2,n)$ and the restricted Burnside group $R(2,n)$.

The aim of this article is to provoke discussion concerning arithmetic properties of the function $p_{d}(n)$ counting partitions of a positive integer n into dth powers, where $d\geq 2$. Apart from results concerning the asymptotic behaviour of $p_{d}(n)$, little is known. In the first part of the paper, we prove certain congruences involving functions counting various types of partitions into dth powers. The second part of the paper is experimental and contains questions and conjectures concerning the arithmetic behaviour of the sequence $(p_{d}(n))_{n\in \mathbb {N}}$, based on computations of $p_{d}(n)$ for $n\leq 10^5$ for $d=2$ and $n\leq 10^{6}$ for $d=3, 4, 5$.

An ethnographic analysis of two interconnected cities for the Somali diaspora—Nairobi and Johannesburg—helps to uncover alternative narratives about the lives of Somali women and the ways they renegotiate their cultural and religious identities in diasporic contexts, moving beyond the widespread representation of Somali women in the global imagination as helpless victims. Using the domains of marriage and female circumcision, Ripero-Muñiz analyzes how these women exercise their agency while at the same time negotiating the cultural and religious practices of their community. By focusing on the ways in which Somali women re-negotiate their identities, this article helps to locate the agency of women in refugee and migrant communities in sub-Saharan Africa.

Scholars from across the social sciences argue that identities – such as race, ethnicity, and gender – are highly influential over individuals’ attitudes, actions, and evaluations. Experiments are becoming particularly integral for allowing identity scholars to explain how these social attachments shape our political behavior. In this letter, we draw attention to how identity scholars should approach the common practice of assessing moderators, measuring control variables, and detecting effect heterogeneity using covariates. Special care must be taken when deciding where to place measures of demographic covariates in identity-related experiments, as these cases pose unique challenges from how scholars traditionally approach experimental design. We argue in this letter that identity scholars, particularly those whose subjects identify as women or minorities, are often right to measure covariates of interest posttreatment.