Arts and Humanities

Abstract: The cost of study abroad has been a barrier to access for a greater number of students. As a high-impact program, alternative access to study abroad should be pressing. Literature considers study abroad and artificial intelligence in isolation of each other; indicating a deeper widening research gap challenging artificial intelligence as not adequately fitted for alternate resource. Review methodology were limited to high-quality academic research databases. The findings revealed that AI has the capacity to expand access to study abroad through state agency support for institutions, and personalized learning. Access can be enhanced when institutions reverse from operating AI as an isolation, but as exploration of study abroad. Advancing AI supported study abroad programs requires greater investment in technological infrastructure and resources.

Abstract: Mental health of adolescents is a major global public health priority with about one in seven adolescents suffering from mental disorders. Despite India’s adolescent population being the world’s largest, there is a dearth of rigorously evaluated and culturally adapted school-based mental health programmes. A quasi-experimental time series design (O₁→X→O₂→O₃→O₄) was used to recruit 200 adolescents of 12–16 years of age through probability stratified random sampling from a higher secondary school. Mental health characteristics were assessed using a validated 80-item Mental Health Status Scale, which included five domains physical, intellectual, psychological, familial, and social. Data were analyzed using repeated measures ANOVA, MANOVA and one way ANOVA. Trial was registered with Clinical Trials Registry of India (CTRI/2026/04/107261). Baseline results showed that mental health characteristics were mostly poor, with 100% of the participants scoring poorly in the intellectual domain. "Post-intervention, participants reported a statistically significant, very large increase in overall mental health scores (mean gain = 18.53, 95% CI: 17.98–19.08; F(1,199) = 3872.54, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 6.28) and showed statistically significant improvement across all five domains (p < 0.001). However, the social domain had the lowest mean post-test score (M = 4.77). Female adolescents and adolescents aged 14–15 years improved significantly more than their male counterparts (p < 0.001 for both). The findings provide evidence for the effectiveness of a school-based life skills programme for improving multiple dimensions of adolescent mental health and support its integration into school curricula in India as a scalable and cost-effective strategy.

Abstract: False statements produced by a language model arrive with the same confident form as true ones, with no mark to guide verification, and this indistinction bears fully on the university classroom. This article reviews the peer-reviewed literature under a declared protocol that retained thirty-two works and one continuously updated resource, drawn from technical research on detection, epistemology, cognitive psychology, critical thinking, and educational research. The argument starts from an epistemic and functional characterization of the system, to which we attribute the lack of access of its own to the output and of a criterion of truth of its own, whence it follows that every correction comes from a reference external to the generative process, which we call external anchoring. On that basis, the classes of divergence are ordered according to whether they are measured against facts about the world or against the material supplied by the user, the detection procedures are reviewed together with their declared limits, and four criteria applicable from a public interface are formulated, grouped into two families and crossed with the typology in a table. The closing sections examine two effects on the reader, cognitive satisfaction and the externalization of epistemic vigilance, and the institutional conditions that their correction demands.

Abstract: Po and opo are usually linked with respectful or deferential address in Tagalog. Although this association is genuine, it does not apply in all cases. A speaker is able to disagree, correct, refuse, or stay angry while still using po. It is also possible to show respect in a close relationship even when po is not used. The problem arises from this inconsistency. This preliminary study looks into what Tagalog-speaking adults believe po and opo are achieving in situations where the form used does not match the stance they report. The research method includes scenario elicitation, stimulated semi-structured interviews, judgments of paired utterances, and a small comparison between spoken and typed responses. The analysis maintains a separation between the form employed, the relationship between the speaker and the person being addressed, the stance that the participants themselves report, and the function that they assign to the form. Human-AI interaction is included merely as a comparative case. A conversational system can use po and opo fluently, which allows the respectful form to be examined without having to assume that the system has a human-like attitude. The study does not interpret using more po as proof of greater respect, fewer instances of po as evidence of cultural decline, or AI as a cause of language change. Its question is more specific: when po is used, what can that fact show, and what still needs to be learned from the relationship, the situation, and the speaker's own explanation?

Abstract: The accounts of Arthur Rimbaud's poetry that feature Symbolism, synesthesia, metaphor, and the poetics of the voyant are all common but have failed to fully connect the lexical oddities of local incongruity and the psychological mechanisms of coherence in the context of individual poems. Poetic deviations have been described in Rimbaud (without denying that there are any), but not with any systematic or replicable regard to the grammatical characteristics or the contextual solution of the deviations. This article presents a qualitative stylistic and semiotic analysis of a purposive corpus that includes poems: Voyelles, Le Bateau ivre, Larme, L’étoile a pleuré rose…, Tête de Faune and Les Premières Communions as examples of related poems. All expressions have been coded based on the grammatical locus, semantic expectation violation, sensory configuration, and contextual effect. The apparently impossible combinations of Rimbaud's poems are not random ornament, nor are they capable of being translated into metaphor, the analysis reveals. The concepts that are expressed by colors shift from what is seen to sounds, times, odors, and abstractions; agency and transitivity shift to verbs; and relations that cannot be expressed in ordinary use shift to nominal constructions. The disruptions first prevent the literal composition, and later generate the contextual reconstruction through imagery, sounds, embodiment, and intertextual association. The article has been divided into three systematic types of semantic impertinence (adjectival, verbal and nominal) and discusses how they shift the meaning of Rimbaud's poems. It thus adds a dimension to Cohen's idea that is not a unified, universal one, but rather depends on a specific context, and that can overlap metaphor and literary synesthesia, but is neither one nor the other.

Abstract: Background. – Despite extensive research on cerebral dominance and handedness, their functional congruence across sexes remains under-explored. Objective. – This study evaluated the neuropsychological concordance between brain dominance patterns (left, right, integrated) and handedness types (right, left, mixed), alongside sex-based differences in agreement rates. Method. – A comparative descriptive design was utilized among 350 university students (M = 19.07, SD = 0.87; 154 males, 196 females). Standardized behavioral measures assessed hand preference (172 right-handed, 106 left-handed, 72 mixed) and hemispheric cognitive processing (144 left-brain, 62 right-brain, 144 integrated-brain dominance). Results. – revealed a statistically significant overall concordance between brain dominance and handedness (49.7%, k = .238, p < .001). Furthermore, males demonstrated a significantly higher concordance rate than females (61.0% vs. 40.8%), indicating a small-to-moderate sex effect, X² (1, N = 350) = 14.11, p < .001. Conclusion. – These findings indicate a moderate agreement between cerebral dominance and handedness, with significantly higher congruence in males. Thus, sex should be routinely accounted for when assessing neurocognitive functional asymmetry.

Abstract: This study aims to assess the current state of Artificial Intelligence (AI) education in design schools, identify gaps and challenges, and propose recommendations for enhancing AI preparedness. After a comprehensive literature review on the implications of AI in creative disciplines and education, a mixed-methods approach will use content analysis of top-ranked Design schools and expert interviews. The study assesses how Design Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) integrate AI into their curricula to equip students with the skills needed to prepare for professional careers in the AI paradigm. The findings further inform recommendations for improving AI education in design, ensuring graduates are well-equipped for the AI-driven design landscape. This research is significant as it provides valuable insights for design schools to improve their AI education offerings. The main objective is to evaluate the current state of AI design education, identify gaps and challenges in AI integration from faculty, staff, and HEI stakeholders, and develop recommendations to enhance AI readiness in design schools. By addressing these issues, this study proposes a framework to help design schools better equip graduates with the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in the AI-driven design landscape.

Abstract: Aura farming, the display of composed, unpredictable movement that reads as effortless charisma, has moved in two years from gaming slang to staged competitions. The trend runs on folk rules of surprising precision: short, unforeseeable moves win; polish is irrelevant; and visible effort voids the verdict, so that farming aura overtly is the one reliable way to lose it. Digital culture research has documented adjacent phenomena but offers no account of what these audiences are actually judging or why the effortlessness clause holds. This paper provides one. Aura, it argues, is a verdict read in the global mode of gestural meaning: a judgment on the integration of a persona with its own movement, made on the display as a whole rather than assembled from its parts. The farming paradox then dissolves as a collision of grains: the accounting grain in which points are tallied cannot capture, and actively corrupts, the global grain in which the verdict is read. The account explains why the trend belongs to the predictive-machinery era, treats NPC streaming as its structural inverse, and yields testable predictions about segmentation, persona congruence, and attributed origin.

Abstract: Academic excellence and leadership are becoming more dependent on a person's self-organization, perseverance, accountability, time management skills, resilience, teamwork, and ethical behavior. Paramilitary institutions stress the importance of drill, code, and inspections, responsibility, and interrelation between individuals, work, and leadership to achieve a high standard of performance. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how the paramilitary discipline can be used to foster academic excellence and leadership in students and young professionals. The article analyzes the existing literature on self-control, grit, and military education, leadership, school discipline, and academic performance. The paper's hypothesis is that the most successful aspects of the paramilitary discipline can be used in a school and university settings to improve students' time organization, resilience, acceptance of responsibility, teamwork, self-regulation, and leadership. The research found that the qualities cultivated by the paramilitary type of education can lead to improvements in students' academic performance. Moreover, conscientiousness, self-control, and discipline, and paramilitary educational practices, in general, are associated with better academic and performance outcomes. The paper concludes by stating that schools and universities should not seek to adopt coercion and punishment-based aspects emphasized by the army. Instead, the educational institutions should focus on developing a code, mentoring, reflection, and discipline as a manifestation of the respect for individuals. The study provides a theoretical basis for the paramilitary discipline as the means of achieving excellence by proposing a theoretical model in which the discipline is an intervening variable that affects academic performance and leadership directly. The study suggests that paramilitary-type education can be smart and used to 'bring the drill to a classroom' to transform society's understanding of what it means to be a scholar and leader.

Abstract: This comparative study examines the intersection of spatial displacement, political exile, and spiritual resilience in the works of Song Dynasty poet Su Shi and Medieval Italian poet Dante. Involuntarily uprooted from their respective political centers, the Song imperial court in Kaifeng and the Republican commune of Florence, both authors transformed the trauma of geographic banishment into sites of profound literary and philosophical transcendence. Through a comparative analysis of Su Shi’s exile prose and poetry alongside Dante’s Convivio and La Divina Commedia, this paper argues both writers developed a posture of ‘quiet defiance’ grounded in ‘radical serenity.’ While Dante remapped his physical estrangement into a cosmic itinerary of moral order and divine justice, Su Shi synthesized Confucian duty, Daoist spontaneity, and Chan Buddhist detachment to cultivate a resilient, untrammeled acceptance of peripheral existence. By mapping these geographies of banishment, the physical expulsion across borders and the existential isolation, this study demonstrates how involuntary displacement can be reclaimed as an interior geography of spiritual liberation. In doing so, it challenges conventional East and West dichotomies regarding agency, exile, and selfhood, revealing that the displaced subject is not merely a passive victim of geopolitical force, but an active architect of inner emancipation.

Abstract: This study explored the effectiveness of participatory adult education approaches in enhancing training and capacity development among emerging farmers in rural communities of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. The study examined how participatory and experiential learning contribute to farmer empowerment, knowledge acquisition, innovation adoption and sustainable rural development. A qualitative Participatory Action Research (PAR) design was employed with a purposive sample of 80 respondents comprising emerging farmers, agricultural extension officers, facilitators and lecturers. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, reflective workshops and direct observations and were analysed thematically. Findings indicated that participatory workshops, farmer field schools, peer learning and practical demonstrations improved farmer participation, practical learning, problem-solving and knowledge sharing. Respondents also reported greater confidence in applying sustainable agricultural practices and increased opportunities for exchanging local and indigenous knowledge. Participatory learning further strengthened social interaction, innovation and community resilience. The study concludes that participatory adult education can provide an effective approach for strengthening agricultural training and rural development when learning is practical, learner-centred and grounded in local realities. It recommends greater institutionalisation of participatory training, stronger extension support, investment in climate-smart agriculture and collaborative partnerships among government, universities, civil society and farming communities.

Abstract: Education in the Philippines continues to face the challenge of integrating cultural heritage into classrooms in ways that are meaningful, policy-aligned, and sustainable. Mindanao’s oral epics, folktales, and musical traditions embody resilience, identity, and collective memory, yet remain at the margins of formal curricula. This study addresses that gap by introducing the Technographic Framework for Multilingual Literature and Musical Orality in Education (TFMLMOE), which connects heritage with curriculum design through artificial intelligence as an interpretive lens. Guided by a qualitative interpretive design that employed corpus construction, sentiment analysis, hybridity mapping, and audio pattern recognition, the research examined cultural materials including the Ulahingan, Tudbulul, Darangen, folktales in Cebuano, Maranao, Chavacano, and English, as well as ritual chants and gong ensembles. The analysis was anchored in Orality-Literacy Theory, Multilingual Hybridity, Ethnomusicology, Digital Humanities and Technography, and Peace Studies with Values Integration, providing a multidimensional lens for interpretation. A total of sixty-five scholarly sources spanning 1975 to 2025 were reviewed; following Creswell and Poth’s (2018) methodological guidance, this breadth ensured saturation of themes and strengthened validity through multiple perspectives. Findings revealed ten themes like oral epics as vehicles of language and values, modern texts as sites of hybridity and identity negotiation, musical orality as collective memory, and artificial intelligence as a means of uncovering hidden cultural patterns. From these findings, the framework is articulated through four components: corpus analysis, cultural preservation, values integration, and curriculum application. It aligns with CHED mandates, MTB-MLE and OBE compliance, UNESCO principles, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. While the study is limited to selected Mindanao communities, it advances scholarship and policy by revitalizing cultural heritage and positioning it as a dynamic resource for pedagogy, resilience, and cultural revitalization.

Abstract: Digital storytelling is an emerging pedagogical strategy whereby the traditional art of storytelling is merged with modern technologies and multimedia, where learners construct narratives through combinations of storylines, images, sound, audio, video, animation, music, and texts. As modern education systems emphasize such skills as creativity, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, digital literacy, and learner autonomy, there are plenty of opportunities for integration of these skills within digital storytelling. This paper explores digital storytelling as a pedagogical strategy of the 21st century and discusses its theoretical background, features, educational application, advantages, and difficulties of implementation. The analysis shows that digital storytelling can be a very helpful tool for active, collaborative, experiential, and student-centered learning. It also considers the importance of digital storytelling for the development of multiliteracy and multimodality, as well as its applicability in the context of contemporary teacher education and technologically enhanced learning environment. The paper concludes that digital storytelling should not be considered just a technological exercise, but a pedagogical strategy where learners construct knowledge and communication skills, reflect their experiences, and critically evaluate digital media.

Abstract: Industrial heritage is increasingly reused for cultural consumption, yet sites embedded in difficult institutional histories also require the governance of difficult memories and the reorganisation of site narratives. This study examines the transformation of the former Hefei Prison into Hechai 1972 Cultural and Creative Park. Using a qualitative interpretive single-case design, it analyses historical and policy documents, official and media texts, spatial materials, field observations, and interviews through the perspectives of critical heritage studies, memory governance, and spatial production. The findings show that industrial production was historically embedded within prison administration and the reform-through-labour system, whereas these attributes were reordered in contemporary public narratives. Prison memory was retained through selective retention, low-intensity interpretation, targeted access, externalisation, and reframing. Industrial memory was foregrounded but detached from prison institutions, labour relations, and historical actors, producing a de-institutionalised representation. Urban industrial memory, nostalgia for everyday urban life, and cultural and creative consumption subsequently functioned as substitute narratives and were reproduced through exhibitions, commercial uses, visitor practices, and social-media circulation. The regeneration therefore operates through an interlocking mechanism of heritage-attribute ordering, memory governance, narrative substitution, and spatial reproduction. The study argues that material conservation alone cannot ensure interpretive integrity. Culture-led reuse requires a coherent and publicly accessible system connecting material remains with institutional history and historical actors. These findings clarify the regeneration mechanisms and ethical boundaries of dissonant heritage in China and provide insights for comparable sites with difficult institutional pasts.

Abstract: The concept of sense of place has long been central to human geography, environmental psychology, landscape studies, and heritage discourse. Traditionally understood as the emotional, experiential, and symbolic meanings people attach to places, sense of place has evolved alongside changing interpretations of landscape and heritage. This paper revisits the concept of sense of place and critically examines its interaction with landscape and heritage frameworks. By tracing theoretical developments and exploring contemporary challenges—such as globalization, heritage commodification, and climate change—the paper argues that sense of place remains a vital integrative concept. It enables a deeper understanding of how landscapes and heritage sites are lived, remembered, contested, and managed. The paper concludes that recognizing the dynamic and relational nature of sense of place is essential for sustainable landscape planning and inclusive heritage practices.

Abstract: Artificial intelligence is commonly portrayed as a technical innovation that inaugurates a new social epoch defined by efficiency, automation, and rational governance. This article advances a dialectical anthropological critique of such narratives by situating artificial intelligence within the historical dynamics of capitalism, colonial power, and struggles over labor and knowledge. Drawing on Marxian political economy, Fanonian analyses of colonial domination, Gramscian theories of hegemony, Polanyian insights on market disembedding, and Comaroffian critiques of contemporary capitalism, the article conceptualizes artificial intelligence as a social relation rather than a neutral technology. It argues that artificial intelligence represents an intensified moment in the commodification of intelligence itself, reshaping labor, epistemology, and governance while reproducing global inequalities. At the same time, artificial intelligence generates contradictions that destabilize established regimes of value and authority, opening spaces for contestation and alternative futures. By foregrounding historical materiality, contradiction, and praxis, the article calls for a critical anthropology of artificial intelligence that is attentive to power, committed to decolonial epistemologies, and oriented toward emancipatory transformation.

Abstract: The concept of civilization has long occupied a central place in historical, sociological, and anthropological inquiry. Classical theories frequently portrayed civilizations as coherent cultural entities, developmental stages, or large-scale historical organisms. More recent scholarship, however, has emphasized fragmentation, power asymmetries, colonial entanglements, epistemic plurality, and the contested nature of social order. This article proposes a relational theory of civilizational intelligence that seeks to bridge these traditions without reducing civilizations to unified organisms or deterministic historical trajectories.Rather than treating civilizations as bounded entities possessing collective minds, the article conceptualizes them as contested relational assemblages composed of heterogeneous actors, institutions, knowledge systems, infrastructures, ecological processes, and power relations. Civilizational intelligence is defined as the capacity of these assemblages to negotiate complexity, manage conflict, integrate diverse forms of knowledge, respond to socio-ecological transformations, and sustain conditions for collective adaptation under uncertainty.Drawing on complexity theory, political ecology, critical governance studies, anthropology, and decolonial scholarship, the article develops a multidimensional framework organized around relational adaptation, epistemic plurality, power-sensitive governance, ecological embeddedness, collective learning, and anticipatory coordination. Comparative illustrations from historical and contemporary societies demonstrate how adaptive capacities emerge not from systemic coherence alone but from the dynamic interaction of cooperation, contestation, and institutional transformation.The article argues that future civilizational resilience in the Anthropocene will depend less on technological sophistication or economic expansion than on the capacity to navigate diversity, inequality, ecological constraints, and planetary interdependence. In this sense, civilizational intelligence is not a property of civilizations as unified entities but an emergent and continuously negotiated process operating across multiple scales of human organization.

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between middle-class formations and authoritarian governance through the prism of social reproduction, insecurity, and political continuity. Rather than interpreting middle-class engagements with authoritarian regimes primarily through ideology, coercion, or political alignment, the article argues that authoritarianism increasingly functions as a reproductive regime: a set of institutional, moral, and bureaucratic arrangements that promise continuity amid economic volatility, institutional erosion, and social fragmentation. Positioned between declining material security and enduring aspirations of stability, middle classes emerge as a contradictory social formation whose strategies of reproduction are both enabled and constrained by authoritarian power.Drawing on Marxist theories of reproduction, Polanyi’s analysis of social protection, Bourdieu’s work on habitus and distinction, Weber’s sociology of authority, and anthropological scholarship on governance and uncertainty, the article conceptualizes authoritarianism as a historically situated response to crises of reproduction. Through comparative illustrations from Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, it shows how authoritarian governance reorganizes access to housing, education, employment, legality, and respectability—key infrastructures of middle-class life. The article contributes to dialectical anthropology by reframing authoritarianism as a dynamic field of class practice, contradiction, and struggle rather than a fixed political form.

Abstract: Digital humanities has become increasingly capable of scaling textual analysis, yet the interpretive labour that sustains its claims often remains obscured behind visualisations, classifiers, and annotation layers. This study responds to that methodological tension by introducing a Stylistic Diagnostic Protocol for Ḥadīth that treats stylistic judgment as an explicit object of method rather than an implicit background intuition. Using Prophetic Ḥadīth as a working corpus, it examines how evaluative interpretation can be rendered reproducible without eroding analytical depth. The protocol operationalises a set of markers including lexical restraint, semantic proportionality, rhetorical coherence, pragmatic alignment, and variant stability, tracing their patterned behaviour across defined units of analysis and structured annotation schemas as points of interface between inherited scholarly practice and formalised digital procedures. It unfolds through a stepwise workflow of text delimitation, segmentation, genre profiling, marker extraction, cross-variant testing, and structured reporting, with each stage designed to preserve a transparent audit trail of analytical decisions and interpretive constraints. Rather than supplanting transmission-based scholarship or issuing definitive judgments of authenticity, the framework generates bounded stylistic integrity profiles that function as diagnostic signals of relative stability, tension, or anomaly within a critically mediated digital research environment. Whether such formalisation fosters convergence or clarifies the contours of principled disagreement remains an open and generative question for digitally supported humanities inquiry.

Abstract: This article examines how different configurations of geographical indication (GI) law and intangible heritage policy shape the governance of cheese heritage, through a comparative analysis of Camembert de Normandie in France and Canastra cheese within the broader artisanal Minas cheese system in Brazil. While Camembert is a globally renowned PDO cheese that remains absent from UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage lists, artisanal Minas cheeses have recently been inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List despite their comparatively modest international visibility. Drawing on documentary analysis of UNESCO nomination materials, IPHAN safeguarding dossiers, the EU GI register and selected academic and media sources, the article situates these cases within critical debates on terroir, heritagisation and sustainability. The analysis shows that Camembert exemplifies a mature terroir governance regime centred on PDO institutions and domestic cultural politics, whereas Canastra illustrates a more hybrid landscape in which national and international intangible heritage recognition has overtaken the consolidation of cooperative structures, territorial branding and tourism linkages. The comparison argues that UNESCO’s 2003 Convention functions less as a universal recognition mechanism than as one contingent instrument within national agri‑food and heritage governance assemblages, whose effects depend on pre‑existing institutional fields and community–state. Conceptually, the article contributes to critical heritage studies by problematising “list‑centrism”—the prioritisation of UNESCO inscription over domestic reforms and cooperative governance—and by showing how foodways become key sites where GI regimes and ICH – Intangible Cultural Heritage frameworks intersect, overlap and diverge, producing uneven capacities for producers and regions to mobilise cheese heritage as a cultural and economic resource.