Drawing upon findings from an Imagining America research project funded by the Mellon Foundation (2019–2023), this research paper and manifesto proposes five critical ways in which institutions of higher education can better support public humanities. Through over one hundred individual interviews, twenty multimedia case studies, a national graduate scholar survey, an online study group, and public conversations, we learned how public scholars have consistently conducted research that matters – responding to urgent challenges in the world, including on the pressing ecological, social, racial, and economic justice issues of our time. However, the diverse inter-generational Imagining America (IA) research team also found that most academic institutions are still not designed to support this important work. By favoring narrow disciplinary boundaries and norms and individualized methods over collective commitments and reciprocal partnerships, most institutions marginalize and disincentivize public humanities. Our research respondents overwhelmingly agreed that instead of change initiatives led from the top of the university, publicly engaged scholars themselves lead the way by virtue of their groundbreaking collaborative, relational, reflective, critical yet hopeful grounded research. The manifesto shared at the end of the paper proposes how to support this important work today.

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic in long-term care (LTC) has threatened to undo efforts to transform the culture of care from institutionalized to de-institutionalized models characterized by an orientation towards person- and relationship-centred care. Given the pandemic’s persistence, the sustainability of culture-change efforts has come under scrutiny. Drawing on seven culture-change models implemented in Canada, we identify organizational prerequisites, facilitatory mechanisms, and frontline changes relevant to culture change that can strengthen the COVID-19 pandemic response in LTC homes. We contend that a reversal to institutionalized care models to achieve public health goals of limiting COVID-19 and other infectious disease outbreaks is detrimental to LTC residents, their families, and staff. Culture change and infection control need not be antithetical. Both strategies share common goals and approaches that can be integrated as LTC practitioners consider ongoing interventions to improve residents’ quality of life, while ensuring the well-being of staff and residents’ families.

The article presents the results of research on the absolute chronology of the Nižná Myšľa cemetery. Due to its scale and location in a key region of the Carpathian Basin, it should be considered one of the most important Early Bronze Age sites in Central Europe. Many years of archaeological research have so far failed to provide adequate data on absolute chronology. This text presents the results of statistical and spatial analyses on a series of newly acquired 14C dates. They allowed us to present a model of the spatial and chronological development of the funerary space and to capture the stage of significant cultural change associated with the adoption of a new raw material—bronze.

Long-term care (LTC) residents often experience poor quality of life (QOL). Culture change has been proposed as an approach to improve resident centredness in care, thereby aiming to enhance residents' QOL. This article reports on one of the findings of the implementation of an organisational culture change approach, Neighbourhood Team Development (NTD). A retrospective cohort design was used to explore resident QOL scores. The sample included 232 residents across six Ontario LTC homes. Quantitative data were collected through the Resident Assessment Instrument–Minimum Data Set 2.0 (RAI-MDS 2.0) and the interRAI Self-Report QOL Survey for Long Term Care Facilities (SQOL-LTCF). Results demonstrated that culture change interventions, such as NTD, improve residents' QOL scores (+3.5 points, p = 0.0034). This article also adds to knowledge on the use of the SQOL-LTCF as a standardised assessment tool to measure QOL in LTC, and provides rationale to include resident QOL as a key outcome measure in quality improvement initiatives and care modelling in LTC homes.

The Beaker phenomenon in Britain is typically represented by a particular form of pottery and its inclusion in graves with flexed or crouched inhumations referred to as Beaker burials. Analysis of the full range of burial evidence, however, reveals a high degree of variability in funerary rites including cremation and skeletal disarticulation. Summed probability distribution analysis of radiocarbon dates provides evidence for continuity of these other, atypical rites from the pre-Beaker Late Neolithic (c. 3000–2450 cal bc) through the Chalcolithic (c. 2450–2200 cal bc) and into the Early Bronze Age (after c. 2200 cal bc). Regional diversity is apparent in Beaker period funerary treatments and grave good provision between these typical and atypical rites, as is differential selection of rites on the basis of age and biological sex. This evidence for within and between community funerary diversity has implications for understanding the large-scale processes of cultural and genomic transformation across this period of major transition in British prehistory.

Economists, political scientists, and journalists around the world have suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic will have long-term effects on twenty-first-century global society. As a precipitating factor in the final collapse of the post-1945 world order, the pandemic has been seen as an epochal turning point in human history. This article will examine the long-term effects that the pandemic may have on the protection and promotion of cultural heritage, which has become a major economic and political undertaking in the post-World War II era, with earlier roots in elite aesthetics and the rise of mass tourism in the nineteenth century. This article will identify some dramatic changes in economic activity and politics that may transform the social role of cultural heritage in the coming decades.

Person-centred care is recognized as best practice in dementia care. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a stakeholder engagement practice change initiative aimed at increasing the provision of person-centred mealtimes in a residential care home (RCH). A single-group, time series design was used to assess the impact of the practice change initiative on mealtime environment across four time periods (pre-intervention, 1-month, 3-month, and 6-month follow-up). Statistically significant improvements were noted in all mealtime environment scales by 6 months, including the physical environment (z = -3.06, p = 0.013), social environment (z = -3.69, p = 0.001), relationship and person-centred scale (z = -3.51, p = 0.003), and overall environment scale (z = -3.60, p = 0.002). This practice change initiative, which focused on enhancing stakeholder engagement, provided a feasible method for increasing the practice of person-centred care during mealtimes in an RCH through the application of supportive leadership, collaborative decision making, and staff engagement.

This paper examines the relationship between the use of late Irish passage tombs and the development of the British and Irish Grooved Ware complex, including its Orcadian origins. The architectural forms of these passage tombs and their associated material culture, symbolic repertoires, and depositional practices in Ireland and Orkney indicate sustained connections between people in these places. It is argued that these interactions strongly influenced the development of Grooved Ware and its associated material culture in Orkney and beyond. The results of recent dating programmes are synthesised, and the character of depositional practices from 3300 to 2700 cal bc are reassessed to highlight continuities in traditions of practice and representation. Together, these indicate that the adoption of Grooved Ware in Ireland did not herald an era of large-scale social transformation and that the primary use of late passage tombs did not suddenly cease at the end of the 4th millennium bc. Instead they continued as foci for largely unchanged forms of ceremonial activity until 2450 cal bc as part of a series of ongoing social and cultural shifts in people’s material culture and practices. It is argued that the current periodisation of the late 4th–3rd millennia bc in Ireland unduly emphasises a disjuncture between the Irish Middle and Late Neolithic. An alternative view of social and cultural change that refocuses attention on social agency is proposed.

How can an organisation move from awareness raising, in the form of natural history poster production, to the development of systems that change organisations? Through close integration of research and practice, the Gould League has achieved this transformation. It began with extensive research into best practice environmental education, going beyond the traditional boundaries of environmental education to areas that included the psychology of culture change, business management, systems thinking, governance, drug education, marketing and organisational psychology. This broad approach to research has led to the development of highly effective sustainability education programs, such as Waste Wise Schools and Sustainable Schools.

The Waste Wise Schools Program, funded by EcoRecycle Victoria and managed in consultation with the Gould League, is an action-based waste education program. Originating in Victoria in 1998, it has been adopted by over a third of Victorian schools and has led to widespread outcomes, including waste reductions of up to 95%. There is strong evidence from surveys that this program is sustainable in schools over time and research confirms that the program is contributing to changes in the waste-wise thinking and behaviour of the families of the children at these schools.

A model for culture change in schools, based on the experiences of the Waste Wise Schools Program, has also been developed. This model, a valuable tool in the continual improvement of Waste Wise Schools, has applications to sustainability education in general.

This paper explores the role played by a Human Resources (HR) department orchestrating culture change during the merger of two large State departments with dissimilar cultures. A 2-year case study determined what HR strategies were having the greatest impact on embedding new organisational values to produce a more flexible culture and how these practices could be accelerated. This paper indicates how a more strategic approach by HR departments can support and develop relational managing capability that accelerates cultures change towards a more flexible work environment.

This paper describes the context of the change process, the relevant literature, and outlines the research process. The findings from the phases of the data collection are summarised revealing the traumatic perceptions of the change process, but also the instrumental actions of some managers, working creatively with their teams to tackle new tasks and projects. The evidence suggests that these informal practices of task allocation were at the core of change agency in this case study and put the new flexible organisational values into action. The findings illustrate how the organisation moves from valuing managers for their technical competence to valuing managers for their relational competence.

The paper then discusses what strategic HR actions were accelerating this process and illuminates the critical role of building managers as change agents. The paper concludes by confirming the need for a strategic approach by HR during organisational change. Building manager capability and supporting informal change agency practices is presented as a core focus for HR during such organisational cultural change programmes.

The Special Issues series on social psychology of social change will provide a forum for research on the science and practice of interventions for social change that benefit individuals, organisations and society. This effort takes up Lewin's call for scientific research aimed towards solving social problems and generating new knowledge, but with a theory and practice of culture and cultural change at its centre. The effort elevates the dominant research approach in developing countries in Asia where there is more concern about opportunities for training and engaging in and publishing more applied work. The emphasis both on research excellence and on a holistic concern for society as central components for theorising about effective modes of realising social change in Asia and the Pacific is a long-term project that begins with the seven diverse articles in the special issue, which span different stages in the project — from clarifying its Asian philosophical basis, to empirical analysis of the problem and levers of change, to evaluation of the outcomes of action research.

The breakthrough of the Nordic Bronze Age (NBA) c. 1600 BC as a koiné within Bronze Age Europe can be historically linked to the Carpathian Basin. Nordic distinctiveness entailed an entanglement of cosmology and warriorhood, albeit represented through different media in the hotspot zone (bronze) and in the northern zone (rock). In a Carpathian crossroad between the Eurasian Steppes, the Aegean world and temperate Europe during this time, a transcultural assemblage coalesced, fusing both tangible and intangible innovations from various different places. Superior warriorhood was coupled to beliefs in a tripartite cosmology, including a watery access to the netherworld while also exhibiting new fighting technologies and modes of social conduct. This transculture became creatively translated in a range of hot societies at the onset of the Middle Bronze Age. In southern Scandinavia, weaponry radiated momentous creativity that drew upon Carpathian originals, contacts and a pool of Carpathian ideas, but ultimately drawing on emergent Mycenaean hegemonies in the Aegean. This provided the incentive for a cosmology-rooted resource from which the NBA could take its starting point.

The study of stable isotopes surviving in human bone is fast becoming a standard response in the analysis of cemeteries. Reviewing the state of the art for Roman Britain, the author shows clear indications of a change in diet (for the better) following the Romanisation of Iron Age Britain—including more seafood, and more nutritional variety in the towns. While samples from the bones report an average of diet over the years leading up to an individual's death, carbon and nitrogen isotope signatures taken from the teeth may have a biographical element—capturing those childhood dinners. In this way migrants have been detected—as in the likely presence of Africans in Roman York. While not unexpected, these results show the increasing power of stable isotopes to comment on populations subject to demographic pressures of every kind.