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In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar's diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar's own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women's bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she's jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar's diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to address the complexity of missing persons cases and highlight the linguistic differences that arise in this type of crime. Missing persons cases are typically very complex investigations. Without a body, crime scene forensics is not possible, and police are often left only with witness and suspect statements. Forensic linguistics methods may help investigators to prioritise or remove suspects. There are many competing approaches in forensic linguistic analysis; however, there is limited empirical research available on emerging methods.

This research investigates Statement Analysis, a recent development in linguistic analysis that has practical applications in criminal investigations. Real-world statements of individuals convicted of or found to be not guilty of their involvement in missing persons cases were used in the analyses. In addition, Behaviour Sequence Analysis was used to map the progressions of language in the suspects' statements.

Results indicated differences between the guilty and innocent individuals based on their language choices, for example, guilty suspects in missing [alive] cases were found more likely to use passive language and vague words because of high levels of cognitive load associated with the several types of guilty knowledge suspects in missing persons cases possess. Of particular interest is the use of untruthful words in the innocent suspects’ statements in missing [murdered] cases. While typically seen in deceptive statements, untruthful words in innocent statements may result because of false acquittals.

This research provides some support for Statement Analysis as a suitable approach to analysing linguistic statements in missing persons cases.

With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.