This conceptual article introduces mokopuna (grandchild, descendant) reworlding, a theorising of Indigenous cultural identity grounded in the position every person occupies within whakapapa (genealogy): he mokopuna, he tūpuna (ancestors). Each of us is a beloved descendant, held within a circulation of aroha (love, compassion) flowing from tūpuna, Ranginui (the sky father), Papatūānuku (the earth mother), and our earth sky kin. To love is to be loved: when adult attention turns toward mokopuna, we enact the posture the living world has always held toward us, and the tūpuna position occurs of itself as the current passes onward. From here, colonisation is reread not as a force that severed whakapapa, which was never within its power, but as one that worked, structurally and deliberately, to loosen our attention from a current that never ceased flowing. The remedy is therefore not a fight but a return: he mauri tuku, he mauri ora (a released life force is a living life force). Reworlding names this attunement, through which ordinary acts of loving children become sites of cosmological and political restoration. The article contributes an Indigenous framework in which self-determination is expressed through mauritau, the settled state of a people who know themselves loved, and offers the Indigicene, an ever-present epoch coined and declined here, as evidence that whakapapa accumulates rather than periodises.
This article uses a case study of Moral Re-Armament (MRA), a twentieth-century Christian social movement, to explain how family remains a durable element of American political culture. When groups or political actors criticize—or theorize—dominant models of family life as too restrictive on individual members, especially women as mothers and children, defenders of the heteropatriarchal family step in to assert that the family is really a site of unity among members. As one such defensive movement, MRA idealized families as harmonious, offering what I call an “antitheory” of power dynamics within the family. This antitheory counteracts previous critiques of the family by absorbing and deploying elements of their critique. Such discursive repurposing makes new political formulations possible, and, in the case of MRA, the antitheory of familial power allowed the movement to apply its insights about the need for unity among workers and industrialists as America entered the Second World War. In conclusion, I show how this discursive innovation created space for the twinned defenses of “family values” and free market capitalism among neoliberals in the second half of the twentieth century.
In her 1893 address “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” Ida B. Wells observed that “those who commit the murders write the reports.” This article takes Wells’s indictment as a genealogical key for reading the United States as a moral state: one that establishes and justifies norms through its institutions and records, deciding whose suffering counts as a public wrong. Its objective is to examine how the state’s 2025–2026 actions affect Black women and how they resist, analyzing federal vital statistics and legal documents alongside independent data (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Violence Policy Center, NAPAWF–Ipsos) and reading from a womanist standpoint that names the harm as misogynoir, linking weathering to disenfranchised grief, hypothesizing that unrecognized grief is itself a chronic stressor. This article examines how Black women experience interconnected losses across five areas: health (Black women dying from pregnancy-related causes at 3.2 times the rate of White women), employment (widespread job losses and displacement), voting rights (greater difficulty proving racial discrimination in voting districts), historical memory (efforts to erase or undermine historical and scientific evidence), and violence (weakened police accountability). These losses accumulate as physiological wear, and the state that produces them disenfranchises the grief they cause. The article traces womanist practices of counter-reporting, collective mourning, and restorative rest, and recommends restoring federal data systems, disparate-impact enforcement, and the Voting Rights Act.
Abahambe (“they must go”) is an isiZulu and isiXhosa expression prominent in South African political and protest discourse calling for undocumented immigrants to leave the country. Although proponents associate the slogan with concerns about unemployment, healthcare, crime, and competition for resources, its use raises broader questions about Afrophobia, belonging, violence, and the exploitation of African migrants. This article examines the rationale and implications of Abahambe within the broader context of transnational migration in South Africa. Drawing on a qualitative literature review and content analysis of relevant media and social media discourse, it examines how the slogan is constructed and used in contemporary migration debates. The analysis is informed by Pan-Africanism, Ubuntu, and biblical models of solidarity with strangers and foreign nationals. The article argues that, although the socio-economic concerns surrounding migration warrant attention, exclusionary uses of Abahambe risk reinforcing Afrophobic attitudes, legitimising hostility towards African migrants and obscuring broader structural causes of poverty, unemployment and inequality. In response, it advances a Pan-Africanist framework grounded in Ubuntu and solidarity that emphasises shared humanity and African interconnectedness while acknowledging host communities’ concerns. This framework offers an alternative for examining migration, belonging and socioeconomic tensions without endorsing exclusion or hostility towards fellow Africans.
Compassion for self and others could be among the most important indicators for thriving, sustainable relationships. This could be especially true in midlife, when substantial relational renegotiations often occur among women, their children, and aging parents. Little is known about how compassion for self and others is negotiated during this period. The present qualitative study explored compassion and self-compassion among 50 Latter-day Saint women aged 40–70 from six countries. Participants shared stories about mothers or grandmothers and reflected on how those narratives influenced their own lives and current transitions. Inductive and theory-informed coding identified three primary patterns: compassion directed toward self, compassion directed toward mothers, and compassion directed toward both self and mother. Across these patterns, participants evaluated relational context, personal capacity, and perceived need when describing compassionate responses. Rather than functioning as stable traits, compassion and self-compassion appeared in these accounts as context-sensitive processes that shifted with circumstances, available resources, and evolving interpretations of family narratives. These findings suggest that intergenerational narratives can provide a way for women to appraise need and capacity and describe different expressions of compassion and self-compassion. These narratives may inform understanding of resilience, family relationships, and therapeutic practice.
