The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into religious knowledge production raises critical questions regarding religious authority, ethical agency, and the future of Islamic legal decision-making. This study examines how AI-generated responses to Islamic legal questions perform against epistemological, methodological, and ethical requirements traditionally associated with Islamic legal reasoning. Employing a qualitative, comparative, and interpretive research design, the study analyzes ten fatwas concerning women’s travel without a maḥram issued by classical and contemporary Muslim scholars and compares them with corresponding responses generated by ChatGPT-5.5. The analysis is guided by three evaluative dimensions: the classical doctrine of shurūṭ al-muftī; juristic reasoning, including source accuracy, representation of juristic disagreement, taṣwīr al-masʾalah (case formulation), and taḥqīq al-manāṭ (context-sensitive application); and Maqāṣid-based ethical reasoning. The findings indicate that ChatGPT-5.5 can effectively summarize juristic opinions and identify dominant legal positions, but demonstrates limitations in contextual reasoning, normative prioritization, ethical deliberation, and moral accountability. The analysis further identifies a structural ‘responsibility gap’ arising from AI’s lack of intentionality and legal agency. Within the scope of the ten ChatGPT-5.5 responses examined, the findings support an augmented iftāʾ model in which AI may assist with legal research and analysis while outputs remain subject to qualified human scholarly review.
This study examines the effectiveness and limitations of customary conflict resolution among the Yali community in Yahukimo, Papua, focusing on its capacity to address collective trauma and sustain peace. Employing critical ethnography, data were collected through participant observation, semi-structured interviews with 27 participants, and document analysis during two months of fieldwork. The findings demonstrate that customary reconciliation practices, including pig feasts, symbolic exchanges, and public ceremonies, maintain strong cultural legitimacy and restore social relationships through shared values. However, these mechanisms inadequately address psychosocial trauma, particularly among women and children, while institutional tensions between customary authorities and formal state mechanisms undermine sustainable peacebuilding. The study highlights the limitations of symbolic reconciliation in addressing deeper emotional wounds and structural inequalities. It proposes a hybrid reconciliation framework integrating indigenous cultural practices, culturally sensitive psychosocial support, and formal recognition of customary governance. By emphasizing the interconnectedness of cultural legitimacy, inclusive healing, and institutional collaboration, this study contributes to indigenous peacebuilding scholarship and demonstrates that sustainable reconciliation requires moving beyond ceremonial settlements toward comprehensive approaches that address collective trauma and strengthen locally grounded peace governance.
This article develops a classification framework for Laugh-Track Insertion Points (LIP) in sitcoms by conceptualizing LIP as observable locations of recorded laughter within completed television programs. While previous research has examined sitcom humor through narrative structure, pragmatics, interaction, cultural context, and mediated laughter, less attention has been paid to how Laugh-Track placement itself organizes humor as an analyzable feature of television texts. Building on prior studies of U.S. and Chinese sitcoms, existing LIP categories are reconstructed and reorganized into a coherent framework. The proposed framework adopts a three-layer structure consisting of upper-level types, major categories, and operational subcategories. By clarifying category definitions, category overlap, and coding criteria, the framework contributes to sitcom studies, humor research, and comparative media analysis by making Laugh-Track-marked moments more systematically comparable across works and cultural contexts.
Anthropocene extinction refers to an era of unprecedented biodiversity loss driven by human activity. Rewilding narratives have emerged as a genre that fictionalizes attempts to reverse this loss. Charlotte McConaghy’s Once There Were Wolves is one such narrative that thematizes contemporary rewolfing debates. Using an econarratological approach, this article examines how the novel constructs trans-species empathy through three interrelated narrative strategies: bridge characterization, animal-centered perspective-taking, and symbolic twinning. These strategies mediate access to wolf experience, ground interpretation in species-specific behavioral and ecological cues, and create cross-species parallels without erasing difference. Drawing on Fritz Breithaupt’s account of empathy as a selective and allegiance-forming process, the article shows that such narrative proximity does not produce an impartial or universally expansive empathy. Instead, the novel repeatedly prioritizes particular nonhuman animal perspectives, creating conditions in which empathy may develop into selective allegiance when competing claims emerge. The article argues that Once There Were Wolves presents trans-species empathy as both a mode of cross-species connection and a morally ambivalent form of ecological engagement, revealing the possibilities and limits of imagining nonhuman animal life through narrative form.
This study examines advertising representation in three postcolonial countries including Guyana, Togo, and Trinidad and Tobago from the perspectives of audiences and producers. The research interrogates how diversity and social identity in advertising texts are perceived in these three countries. Across audience member and professional practitioner accounts, four overarching themes were identified: ‘lack of vocal authenticity’, ‘need for cultural resonance’ and ‘desire for diversity and local representation’, and ‘privileging Wester timbre’. While audience members emphasized their experiences of cultural and linguistic representation, professional practitioners provided insights into production practices and client expectations. The theme of privileging Western timbre was supported by evidence from both participant groups in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago but was not directly evidenced in Togo. The research reveals that ensuring representation of ‘authentic’ diversity in postcolonial advertising texts is a complex mediation of identity and hybridity. The findings further suggest that audio and visual representations reflecting locally recognizable cultural identities may contribute to perceived authenticity and cultural resonance, although the study does not directly assess advertising effectiveness.
