This study scrutinizes the history curriculum's pedagogical approaches and civic engagement in Lakes State, South Sudan. History curriculum in South Sudan is evolving from a colonial-influenced system towards a national framework emphasizing peacebuilding, critical thinking, and civic engagement, though it faces severe challenges, including a lack of qualified teachers, limited resources, and contested historical narratives. The curriculum prioritizes “unity in resistance" to foster national identity while struggling with the challenges of teaching sensitive, recent conflict history. History curriculum’s pedagogical approaches have shifted from a 19th century focus on nationalistic, elite-driven narratives to a 21st century emphasis on critical thinking, inquiry, and civic engagement. This evolution aims to use the study of the past to prepare students for active participation in democratic societies through pedagogical strategies like historical thinking, empathy, and evidence analysis. The study was analyzed under historical thinking / disciplinary theory, critical constructivism theory and narrative/chronological theory. A case study design was used, with a sample of 429 history teachers and head teachers from public secondary schools in Lakes’ state, South Sudan. The study's results are reliable with existing research on civic education and civic engagement, which suggests that the development of the understanding of historical and chronological time, independent of cognitive development of the person, must be understood above all as an educative process in which strategies and mediums employed are fundamental.

For a sociologist, poverty is a social evil. A social worker does modalities related to poverty alleviation. An anthropologist sees the phenomenon as an obstacle in the human race. For a student of human development, it hiders the development right at the budding stage. A philosopher has so many unanswered questions related to poverty. An economist sees the phenomenon as a multidimensional process. Public health sees the phenomenon as the background of all ill health where as an epidemiologist sees it as a stage of health in the domain of epidemiology. In India, Bollywood made movies like ‘Mother India’ & ‘Boot Polish’ to portray poverty. Least of all, it is a tool that politicians use 24*7. The current article sees the phenomenon of poverty in the current circumstances especially in India. Process, obstacles, challenges, opportunities, emerging issues, alleviation strategies are all discussed upon in the article. Views of academicians, policy makers, nobel laureates, politicians, executives, civil society organizations & think individuals & institutions are embedded in the current article.

Following the complete removal of fuel subsidy in 2023 by the Nigerian government, the effects are still subject of debate to both proponents and opponents of the policy. While its proponents believe it had saved huge revenue and blocked leakages in government expenditures thereby saving funds for developmental project, its opponents believe it has worsened the socioeconomic conditions of the populace through wide spread poverty and inequality in the society. The study focuses on a critical analysis of the effect of fuel subsidy removal on poverty alleviation and bridging the inequality in Nigeria. The work adopted the documentary and qualitative research design. Also, secondary sources of data were explored to generate data needed for the study and content analysis method was used to analyze the derived data. The study findings reveal that the removal of subsidy have strong effects on societal poverty and inequality in Nigeria and thus far the impact of palliative measure put in place are yet to meaningfully change the status quo. The study therefore recommends the need for the government to ensure its policy formulation and policy implementation process are well guided to address the challenges posed by the removal of fuel subsidy.

This study compares conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American ecological environment news discourses from the ecolinguistic perspective. It examines their underlying ecological orientations and philosophies to advance language ecologization. The findings show that: 1) Conceptual metaphor types in the two corpora display both commonalities and variations; 2) Both corpora feature beneficial and destructive ecological orientations; 3) Chinese and American metaphors respectively, embody the philosophies of “harmonious coexistence between humanity and nature” and “America First”. These differences are shaped by economic and cultural contexts, socio-political factors, and ecological philosophies.

Women’s mental health is significantly impacted by psychological stressors such as stress, anxiety, depression, anger, self-silencing behaviour and fear of sexual assault. These negative emotions not only cause discomfort in life but also limit the freedom of expression and interaction. Self-defence is now considered a means of enhancing one’s mental capability and empowerment. The current study focuses on the effects of self-defence training in lowering negative psychological states related to women’s overall well-being. Seven quantitative studies meeting the inclusion criteria were systematically analysed to assess the effects of self-defence training on women. These studies were sourced from electronic databases, including ResearchGate, PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, and ScienceDirect, using keywords such as “self-defence training,” “mental health,” “women,” “psychological states,” “empowerment,” etc. The main psychological factors considered during this study include fear, stress, anxiety, depression, anger, and self-silencing behaviour. Findings indicate that self-defence training is effective in reducing fear, stress, anxiety, depression, anger, and self-silencing behaviour. Moreover, self-defence training also increases a person’s feeling of control and safety. Therefore, this review highlights the benefits of self-defence training in reducing negative psychological states, emphasising its value as a holistic approach to mental health and women’s empowerment in the 21st century. Further research may focus on the long-term impact of martial arts on mental health and improve techniques to ensure maximum psychological benefits.

This study investigates the syntactic and semantic relationship between the Chinese ba-construction and its English equivalents, using the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), particularly the transitivity system. The “ba”-construction is a distinctive structure in Mandarin Chinese that emphasizes the affectedness of an object and the result of an action. Translating such structures into English involves more than direct syntactic transformation; it requires careful consideration of how experiential meaning is expressed through different process types and participant roles. Drawing on a bilingual corpus of literary and journalistic texts, this research categorizes English translations of “ba”-constructions according to their process types in SFG: material, mental, relational, and verbal. The analysis reveals that while most “ba”-constructions are translated into material processes in English—preserving the action-result pattern—there are frequent and systematic shifts into other process types due to lexical, grammatical, and stylistic constraints. These shifts often result in the reconfiguration of participant roles, such as Goals becoming Phenomena or Actors taking on the role of Sensers or Carriers. The study argues that these transitivity shifts are not mere formal alterations but play a crucial role in maintaining semantic coherence and communicative intent across languages. It highlights the translator’s role as an active agent in negotiating meaning and form, and it affirms the value of SFG as a practical tool for translation analysis. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of cross-linguistic transitivity and provide insights for translator training and contrastive linguistics.

The viral Monumental Labs Instagram post showing robotic reproduction of Michelangelo's David sparked global debate about artificial intelligence (AI)'s role in art creation, garnering 2.9 million views and revealing deep cultural tensions around technological intervention in creative practices. Building upon the aforementioned discourse, and approaching this unique opportunity, this paper aims to examine how artistic expertise shapes public reception of automated art production. This research uses a mixed-methods analysis of 1,437 organic social media comments, combining automated sentiment analysis with human-coded thematic categorization across six professional artist categories. Comments were systematically filtered from 2,913 initial responses and analyzed using two-way ANOVA, chi-square tests, and qualitative discourse analysis to examine relationships between artistic identity and technological reception. Results illustrate that while both artists (-0.289) and non-artists (-0.272) showed negative sentiment on average, Fine Arts & Traditional Media practitioners expressed significantly more negative attitudes than Digital & Multimedia Arts professionals (p=0.041). Professional background significantly predicted comment themes (χ²=69.07, p=0.038, Cramér's V=0.155), with traditional artists emphasizing authenticity concerns and skill preservation, while digital artists focused on technical innovation and collaboration advocacy. In conclusion, artistic identity influences both the emotional depth and the conceptual structures used to assess technological integration in arts. Traditional artists express their concerns using philosophical concepts like ‘soul’ and ‘authenticity’ while non-artists emphasize concrete attributes such as ‘handmade’ features. These results are significant for cultural organizations and technology firms involved in the incorporation of artificial intelligence into creative processes.