Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s 2018 novel De purs hommes fictionalizes recent incidents of homophobia in Senegal to interrogate the relationship between queer men and social dynamics in the country. This article demonstrates that the novel deploys multidirectional critical discourse and oblique narrative tactics to highlight the foundational role in Senegalese culture and society of the fraught dichotomy between private and public life. Bryson contends that the novel unearths these queer roots in order to incorporate all normative identities into queer existence, conceptually blurring the social barriers to LGBTQ+ agency in the country.

Infectious diseases became an increasing public health threat as humans transitioned from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to stable, agrarian communities. It is accurate to say the international community was not optimally prepared for the 2014-2015 Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in West Africa, which eventually spread and caused secondary cases in the United States. From that experience, much was learned about the management of an EVD outbreak, from prevention and treatment, to the need for a “whole of society” response. However, it is clear from the evidence that much still needs to be done to improve preparedness for Ebola and other emerging infectious diseases in the region. The current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo both mirrors these challenges and demonstrates new ones reflected in violence, hampering efforts to prevent spread of EVD within and beyond the country. The journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness (DMPHP) is taking a forward-looking approach, establishing a task force of editors to quickly review and approve manuscripts relating to EVD for immediate electronic publication and open access. The intent is to make emerging information available to front-line responders and policy decision-makers as quickly as possible.

While gender gaps in political participation are pervasive, especially in developing countries, this study provides systematic evidence of one cultural practice that closes this gap. Using data from across Africa, this article shows that matrilineality – tracing kinship through the female line – is robustly associated with closing the gender gap in political participation. It then uses this practice as a lens through which to draw more general inferences. Exploiting quantitative and qualitative data from Malawi, the authors demonstrate that matrilineality's success in improving outcomes for women lies in its ability to sustain more progressive norms about the role of women in society. It sets individual expectations about the gendered beliefs and behaviors of other households in the community, and in a predictable way through the intergenerational transmission of the practice. The study tests and finds evidence against two competing explanations: that matrilineality works through its conferral of material resources alone, or by increasing education for girls.

Immigration disrupts the bonding process in families. Maintaining close relationships with adult children can be an important protective factor for older immigrants' health and wellbeing. Quantitative research explaining such close relationships is rare. This study examined factors associated with close parent–child relationships in a purposive sample of 236 older Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles who provided information regarding 365 children. Two-level regression models were estimated to investigate factors contributing to cohesive parent–child relationships among these older adults. The findings showed that co-residence, a characteristic that distinguishes immigrant families from most non-immigrant families, was associated with lower parent–child relationship quality. Frequent contact was associated with closer relationships. While receiving instrumental and monetary support from children was associated with favourable ratings of relationships with children, providing such support to children was not related to parents' assessment of relationship quality. Parental perceptions of children being respectful was also associated with better relationship quality ratings. Overall, the findings demonstrate how family-related changes in the immigration context shape parent–child relationships in later life. Implications for future research and practice are provided.

Bicultural individuals vary in the degree to which their two cultural identities are integrated. Among Asian-Americans, for instance, some experience their Asian and American sides as compatible whereas others experience them as conflicting. Past research on judgments finds this individual difference affects the way bicultural individuals respond to situations that cue their cultures. Asian-Americans with high bicultural identity integration (BII) assimilate to norms of the cued culture (e.g., they exhibit typically American judgments when in situations that cue American culture), whereas Asian-Americans with low BII do the opposite, contrasting against the cue (e.g., they exhibit typically Asian judgments when in American situations). We investigated whether this dynamic similarly affects creative performance, which differs cross-culturally in that novelty is encouraged more by American than East Asian norms. In two experiments, we found that cues to American (vs. Asian) culture increase the novelty of solutions in divergent thinking tasks for Asian-Americans with high BII (assimilative response) yet decrease it for Asian-Americans with low BII (contrastive response). We discuss theoretical implications for culture and creativity research and practical implications for firms seeking to foster creativity.

Some studies have shown that bilinguals gesture more than monolinguals. One possible reason for the high gesture frequency is that bilinguals rely on gestures even more than monolinguals in constructing their message. To test this, we asked French–English bilingual adults and English monolingual adults to tell a story twice; on one occasion they could move their hands and on the other they could not. If gestures aid bilinguals in information packaging and/or lexical access, bilinguals should tell shorter stories with fewer word types than monolinguals when their gestures are restricted. In fact, we found that gesture restriction affected bilinguals’ stories only in French, the language in which they used more gestures. These findings challenge the interpretation that bilinguals gesture frequently as an aid in constructing their message. We argue that cultural norms in gesture frequency interact with gesture use in message construction.

This article reports mean scores on the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (Version III) for 211 randomly selected healthy term (≥ 37 weeks gestation) Australian infants at one year of age. Mean scores were significantly different from standardised norms in all subscales except fine motor. Australian infants scored higher on cognitive and receptive language (p < .01) and lower on expressive language and gross motor (ps < .01) subscales. These findings raise questions regarding the validity of this test in the Australian population and suggest that the test be re-normed on Australian children for valid interpretation of scores in this cultural context.

The cultural norms or core values for sustainable development are an amalgamation of core social values and core environmental values. Widely-shared core social values became strikingly articulated following the Second World War via such instruments as the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1948 Human Rights Declaration. By contrast, widely-shared core environmental values did not surface until some two decades after the Second World War, being first clearly expressed in the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, to be followed by the 1982 World Charter for Nature and, more recently, by the 1992 Rio Declaration. I find that whereas the emerging core social values have until quite recently been essentially innocent of environmental concerns, the emerging core environmental values have been from the start generally couched in social terms.

Key ethical issues regarding the cultural norms underlying sustainable development include the questions of how to strike a proper balance between anthropocentric and ecocen-tric justifications; and a proper apportionment of the global biosphere between humankind and the other life on earth. Several lines of evidence suggest to me that the environmental and social strands of widely-shared core values for sustainable development are beginning to merge, and that there has begun to occur a slow but progressive development in mainstream thinking toward a recognition of an unbreakable link between social development and environmental conservation.

A number of major stumbling blocks to the achievement of sustainable development exist of course, amongst them the imbalance between human numbers plus needs and available natural resources, the prevalence of totalitarian and corrupt regimes, and the ineffective system of peaceful world governance. Despite obstacles to sustainable development, a trend towards a commitment to it seems evident in such components of society as governments, intergovernmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, academia, religious bodies, and grass-roots movements.