bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Experts at Coordination: Examining the Performance, Production, and Value of Process Expertise
Authors: Barley William C , Treem Jeffrey W , Leonardi Paul M
Published: February 2020

This paper argues that coordination among domain experts can be viewed as a distinct form of knowledge in itself, and an area in which an individual may become an expert. We discuss why domain experts may be ill-equipped to coordinate their knowledge with the knowledge of others, and why individuals with process expertise may be better equipped to facilitate coordination between domain experts. Drawing on a qualitative study of nurses organizing emergency pediatric transfers, we demonstrate how process expertise is established, maintained, and enacted through situated communicative practices. The analysis characterizes process expertise as operating interdependently with, but distinct from, domain expertise, and shows how process expertise can aid in settings that demand complex coordination. This work challenges assumptions that coordination among domain experts is best addressed through supporting network connections or overcoming interpretive obstacles, and offers an alternative way to support coordination by cultivating process experts.
Internal double omental hernia: a rare cause of acute abdomen
Authors: Pacheco André C , Jervis Maria J , Pimenta Joana , Escrevente Ricardo , Caratão Fátima
Published: February 2020

Small bowel obstruction is one of the most common causes for acute abdominal pain leading to surgical admissions, occurring most frequently due to postoperative adhesions. Although less common, internal hernia is also a possible etiology, in which a delay on its therapy may lead to a not so dismal morbidity and mortality. Here, we report the case of a 24 year old Caucasian man that was admitted in our emergency department with an inaugural episode of sudden-onset epigastric pain associated with vomiting. After observation and diagnostic workup, the patient underwent urgent laparotomy that revealed an ischemic small bowel due to a double omental hernia, being successfully treated without enteric resection.
Genetic control of root architectural plasticity in maize
Authors: Schneider Hannah M , Klein Stephanie P , Hanlon Meredith T , Nord Eric A , Kaeppler Shawn , Brown Kathleen M , Warry Andrew , Bhosale Rahul , Lynch Jonathan P
Published: February 2020

Root phenotypes regulate soil resource acquisition; however, their genetic control and phenotypic plasticity are poorly understood. We hypothesized that the responses of root architectural phenes to water deficit (stress plasticity) and different environments (environmental plasticity) are under genetic control and that these loci are distinct. Root architectural phenes were phenotyped in the field using a large maize association panel with and without water deficit stress for three seasons in Arizona and without water deficit stress for four seasons in South Africa. All root phenes were plastic and varied in their plastic response. We identified candidate genes associated with stress and environmental plasticity and candidate genes associated with phenes in well-watered conditions in South Africa and in well-watered and water-stress conditions in Arizona. Few candidate genes for plasticity overlapped with those for phenes expressed under each condition. Our results suggest that phenotypic plasticity is highly quantitative, and plasticity loci are distinct from loci that control phene expression in stress and non-stress, which poses a challenge for breeding programs. To make these loci more accessible to the wider research community, we developed a public online resource that will allow for further experimental validation towards understanding the genetic control underlying phenotypic plasticity.
The WRKY53 transcription factor enhances stilbene synthesis and disease resistance by interacting with MYB14 and MYB15 in Chinese wild grape
Authors: Wang Dan , Jiang Changyue , Liu Wandi , Wang Yuejin
Published: February 2020

Resveratrol is notable not only for its functions in disease resistance in plants but also for its health benefits when it forms part of the human diet. Identification of new transcription factors helps to reveal the regulatory mechanisms of stilbene synthesis. Here, the WRKY53 transcription factor was isolated from the Chinese wild grape, Vitis quinquangularis. Vqwrky53 was expressed in a variety of tissues and responded to powdery mildew infection and to exogenous hormone application. VqWRKY53 was located in the nucleus and had transcriptional activation activity in yeast. A yeast two-hybrid assay and a bimolecular fluorescence complementation assay confirmed that VqWRKY53 interacted physically with VqMYB14 and VqMYB15, which have previously been reported to regulate stilbene synthesis. When Vqwrky53 was overexpressed in grape leaves, the expression of VqSTS32 and VqSTS41 and the content of stilbenes were increased. A yeast one-hybrid assay demonstrated that VqWRKY53 could bind directly to the promoters of STS genes. Overexpression of Vqwrky53 activated β-glucuronidase expression, driven by STS promoters, and co-expressing Vqwrky53 with VqMYB14 and VqMYB15 showed stronger regulatory functions. Heterologous overexpression of Vqwrky53 in Arabidopsis accelerated leaf senescence and disease resistance to PstDC3000.
Resource sharing linear logic
Authors: Kurokawa Hidenori , Kushida Hirohiko
Published: February 2020

In this paper, we introduce a new logic that we call ‘resource sharing linear logic (RSLL)’. In linear logic (LL), formulas without modality express some resource-conscious situation (a formula can be used only once); formulas with modality express a situation with unlimited resources. We introduce the logic RSLL in which we have a strengthened modality (S5-modality) that can be understood as expressing not only unlimited resources but also resources shared by different agents. Observing that merely strengthening the modality allows weakening axiom to be derivable in a Hilbert-style formulation of this logic, we reformulate RSLL as a logic similar to affine logic by a hypersequent calculus that has weakening as a primitive rule. We prove the completeness of the hypersequent calculus with respect to phase semantics and the cut-elimination theorem for the system by a syntactical method. We also prove the decidability of RSLL via a computational interpretation of RSLL, which is a parallel version of Kopylov’s computational model for LL. We then introduce an explicit counterpart of RSLL in the style of Artemov’s justication logic (JRSLL). We prove a realization theorem for RSLL via its explicit counterpart.
Divine Guidance
Authors: Jillions John A.
Published: February 2020

How are claims to God’s guidance to be understood against the background of fears, fundamentalism, and violence inspired by religious belief? But equally, how are acts of humanity, love, and sacrificial service to be understood, when they also claim to be inspired by God? How is healthy religion to be distinguished from unhealthy religion? Questions like these were the subject of lively debate in the first-century world of Corinth, where the views of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian residents mixed continually, and where Paul established one of the first Christian communities. While their differences were real, there was also common ground and a shared critique of destructive religion. This study looks at how believers and unbelievers confront questions about divine guidance, discernment, delusion, and rational thought. Part I looks at Greco-Roman views, focusing on the archeology of ancient Corinth and the writings of Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Posidonius, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and others. Part II surveys Jewish attitudes by looking at Philo and Josephus, Qumran, early rabbinic writers, and other intertestamental literature. Part III unpacks Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians to show that issues of divine guidance and discernment are woven throughout as Paul shapes a distinctly Christian approach. Part IV brings the historical strands together and considers religious experience research to draw some conclusions about discernment and delusion today in the hope that rational and mystical need not be mutually exclusive.
Roman Corinth
Authors: Jillions John A.
Published: February 2020

This chapter gives the historical background of Corinth, its destruction by Roman forces in 146 bce, and its establishment as a model Roman colony in 44 bce. When Paul was there in the mid-first century it was a bustling crossroads of commerce and ideas. Archeology shows that Corinthian culture was still feeling the effects of the Roman Revolution under Augustus, which brought a distinctly Roman emphasis to all aspects of religion and society. Augustus himself had been very conscious of divine signs surrounding his elevation and rule. This had a marked effect on attitudes toward divine guidance in public worship and in household piety. In settings both public and private close observance of the religious traditions of Rome (whether or not one believed in them) was viewed as essential to Roman unity and prosperity. This piety was self-consciously Roman, emphasizing simplicity, virtue, and service to the community and state.
The Literature of Divine Guidance
Authors: Jillions John A.
Published: February 2020

The popular literature of the era helps shed light on attitudes toward divine guidance. Unfortunately, aside from Paul’s letters there are no documents from first-century Corinth. However, as residents of a cosmopolitan Roman city, attentive to learning and rhetoric, the great writers would have been well known, especially Homer, Virgil, and Horace. Homer (Iliad and Odyssey) was the most influential writer; he reflected deeply on the questions posed by divine interaction with human beings. Virgil’s Aeneid, with a Roman perspective, likewise pondered the snares of divine guidance, concluding that the gods enlist heroes like Aeneas to fulfill divine purposes for Rome, not to vindicate the heroes or make them happy. In Horace religion is a much less pervasive theme and life is more independent of the gods, but he lifts up the Pax Romana and Augustus as the fulfillment of the divine plan.
Roman Philosophers
Authors: Jillions John A.
Published: February 2020

In contrast to the warm sympathy of Posidonius and the vast majority of the population, the prominent Roman philosophers ranged from cool to icy in their attitudes toward divine guidance. The Epicurean Lucretius was a conscientious atheist. Cicero rejected belief in divine guidance but accepted it in practice. Seneca rejected the practice while holding on to Stoic virtues. Pliny avoided the issue and focused on nature, admitting only to a vague divinity of “mortal helping mortal.” Of these, Cicero expended the most thought and ink on the subject, writing major works on the nature of the gods, divination, and fate. He defended his role as a priest in the College of Augurs on the grounds that he was thereby upholding Roman tradition, which was essential to the state’s social and political cohesion and stability. This was simply his patriotic public duty, and he didn’t need to actually believe any of it.
Philo
Authors: Jillions John A.
Published: February 2020

Philo of Alexandria (c. 15 bce–50 ce) was a contemporary of Paul and a leading representative of Hellenistic Judaism. Although there are continuing debates over how well he represents mainstream Jewish thought, he saw himself as faithful to the Torah and Jewish tradition. He regarded his faith, rooted in the revelation of the God of Israel, as all-encompassing and therefore capable of finding common ground with truth in Greek philosophy. Spiritual reinterpretation of Abraham, Moses, and other figures in the Hebrew Bible is fundamental to his approach, and he sees biblical study as inseparable from communion with God, who illumines the reader. He was especially impressed with the Theraputae, a quasi-monastic Egyptian Jewish community where such study was at the heart of life. Philo is also profoundly aware of God’s presence, providence, and guidance in human events of all kinds, not just in scripture.
Josephus
Authors: Jillions John A.
Published: February 2020

Josephus (37–100 ce) was a Jewish Roman scholar, historian, general, and advisor to Vespasian and Titus. For a brief period he led Jewish troops in a rebellion against the Roman occupation but was eventually reconciled to Roman rule and his own role as an intermediary. According to his autobiography, divine guidance figured prominently in his life, especially when he fully expected to be executed after being captured by Vespasian in the Jewish War. Although dreams and special revelation clearly play a role, Josephus, like Philo (for whom he had a high regard), places Moses and the scriptures at the center of divine guidance. But Judaism was not monolithic, and Josephus describes some of the features distinguishing Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. In common with most Jews of his day, Josephus displays a remarkable degree of freedom in approaching biblical interpretation.
Rabbinic Sources
Authors: Jillions John A.
Published: February 2020

The first and second centuries ce saw the flowering of classical Jewish teaching as expounded by the great rabbinic sages and their precursors (Hillel, Shammai). They were closely associated with the Pharisees as upholders of Jewish tradition against compromises with Greco-Roman ways. This early teaching forms the basis of the Mishnah, the collection of the earliest rabbinic oral law at the core of the Talmud. A “heavenly voice” (the Bat Kol) and other forms of individual divine guidance are not excluded, but the major role is given to scripture, the elders responsible for discernment, and the evolving body of decisions responding to new questions and conditions, “for the Law is not in heaven.” The age of the prophets was over, but God ’s presence (the Shekinah) remained in the life of the community with its teachers.
Divine Guidance
Authors: Jillions John A.
Published: February 2020

This chapter compares and contrasts the approaches to divine guidance in the Greco-Roman, Jewish, and early Christian worlds of Paul’s Corinth and their relevance for the present. Their debates about healthy and unhealthy religious life and rational thought remain remarkably contemporary. The chapter considers modern religious experience, both positive and negative, including a seminal event in the life of Martin Luther King. The Religious Experience Research Centre, based at the University of Wales, has collected over 6,000 accounts. The Centre interviewed at length two Eastern Orthodox scholars (Kallistos Ware and Lev Gillet) for their views on discerning the value of such experiences. They are wary of delusion and independently conclude that claims to divine guidance ought to be evaluated by what results they produce. But they and others hope that rational and mystical experience can be held together for the full flourishing of human life.
Introduction
Authors: Furman Nelly
Published: February 2020

Since 1875, Georges Bizet’s Carmen has held the lead as the world’s most performed opera and through its multifaceted cultural renditions, the story of Carmen can be said to have attained the status of a myth. Myths, like legends, are stories that speak to us over time and place about personal, social and cultural issues. In each of its versions, whether in a myriad of lyric productions, numerous ballets, or a multitude of films, the story of Carmen reflects shifting social interests and values. From enacting codes of love and differing expressions of desire to exposing the intersection of law and order, or celebrating ethnicity, Georges Bizet’s Carmen is a story as timely at the dawn of the twenty-first century as it was in the latter part of the nineteenth.
For the Love of Science
Authors: Furman Nelly
Published: February 2020

In Carmen, the narrator is a French historian who tells us his adventures in Spain and his meeting the famous bandit José and his lover, Carmen. The novella published in 1845 consisted of three chapters. In the last chapter, which is the basis of the opera’s plot, José himself recounts his relationship with Carmen and her death. In 1847, two years after the first publication of Carmen, Mérimée adds a fourth chapter to the original novella. This fourth chapter presents itself as a study of Romany, the language of the Roma, then called Gypsies. This fourth chapter, under the guise of being a scientific study of Romany, underscores the misogyny and racism already apparent in the earlier chapters.
Conclusion
Authors: Furman Nelly
Published: February 2020

Attraction, seduction, frustrated loves, crimes of passion, inform the plots of countless stories, films, and plays. These themes, while time worn, are also alluring challenges for creative artists. It explains the unending popularity of the story of Carmen and its modern remakes. Passion, once considered an illness, has since the eighteenth century gained acceptance and marriages of the heart are now commonplace and these have displaced the social stratification and sexual regulations that once defined marriage. The story of Carmen speaks to these societal changes in intimate human relations. Many of themes found in Bizet’s opera and Mérimée’s novella (seduction, sacrifice, law and lawlessness, racism, misogyny to name but a few) offer sources of inspiration to many artists. But the often-told story of Carmen also raises the question of originality in art.
Introduction
Authors: Kidambi Prashant
Published: February 2020

For the better part of six decades, James Cosmas Masselos has written prolifically about Bombay, a city that has served both as his archive and muse. This essay locates Masselos within a wider intellectual and historical context and identifies key strands in his pioneering scholarship on the city. The essay also provides an overview of the central themes that structure this book: community, templates, power and nationalism.
Mohammad Ali Rogay
Authors: Ranganathan Murali
Published: February 2020

Mohammad Ali Rogay, long-time participant in the Bombay Country Trade with China in the first half of the nineteenth century, and partner in the prominent trading firm of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy & Co, was also the most prominent Muslim citizen of Bombay during his lifetime. He was also the leader of the Konkani Musalman community which had been settled in Bombay for many centuries. In spite of his prominence in business and political spheres, very little information is available on him, nor has he, or the community he hails from, attracted serious scholarly attention. This essay outlines Rogay’s trading career in China and India, his public career in Bombay, his role as a patron of publishing and printing, his secular and religious charities, and his leadership of the Konkani Musalman community. A wide variety of sources including contemporary newspapers, government archives, private business archives, contemporary Urdu imprints and community histories, have helped in reconstructing Rogay’s life, which has largely remained obscure. This investigation explores the reasons why Rogay (and, by extension, his community) continues to remain on the fringes of the mainstream historical narrative on nineteenth-century Bombay.
Selling Home
Authors: McGowan Abigail
Published: February 2020

This essay explores the emergence of new forms of retail in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bombay, an era which saw the development of new shopping districts, department stores, showrooms, and retail culture in the city. In a city known for its market density and commercial vibrancy, elite retailers tried to reach out to consumers in new ways, enticing them in from the street with window displays, standardized product lines, and novel assemblages of goods, while also contacting consumers directly through catalogues, flyers, designs sent on request, and home deliveries. Focusing on major department stores like the Army and Navy Stores and Whiteaway Laidlaw, major nationalist concerns like the Bombay Swadeshi Store and Godrej and Boyce, as well as smaller showrooms featuring fewer ranges of goods, the essay argues that novel retail strategies efforts helped to shape not just how things were sold but what was desired in Bombay—noting in particular how efforts to sell domestic furnishings promoted new ideas about what the home should be.
A Tale of Four Worlds
Authors: Ottaway David , Ottaway Marina
Published: February 2020

First came the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire following World War I; then, in the 1950s and ’60s, the Nasser-inspired wave of Arab nationalism and socialism. The Arab world’s third great political cataclysm of the past 100 years—the 2011 uprisings—has also brought permanent changes, but not as its activists had hoped.Their consequences have differed greatly from area to area, splintering the Arab region into four different worlds. The Levant states have disintegrated, possibly irreversibly. The Gulf monarchies have embarked on far-reaching plans of economic and social change to stave off discontent. Egypt has retreated into military authoritarianism and a war on Islamists, threatening its future stability. Only the Maghreb countries, which have started integrating Islamists into their political systems, offer some hope for progress toward democracy. Marina and David Ottaway have brought together fifty years of experience observing the Arab world, and a wealth of first-hand information gathered from living and travelling extensively in the region. A Tale of Four Worlds is an indispensable analysis of the profound upheavals that have shaken—and continue to transform—Arab and global politics.
Why the Arab Spring?
Authors: Marina  , Ottaway David
Published: February 2020

Common explanations of why the Arab region erupted in 2011 are only partly accurate and have glaring omissions. The youth bulge is real butsuch bulges do not automatically lead to upheavals.Socio-economic conditions in Egypt or Yemen were dismal, but no more so in 2011 than in the previous decades. Tunisia, where the uprisings started, is a middle-income country, and Gulf monarchies are incredibly rich but still fearful of unrest. Artificial borders explain even less about countries’ stability. Syria and Iraq have borders drawn on maps by colonial powers after World War I, but Egypt’s date back millennia.A crucial factor in causing the disaffection of Arab citizens toward their government is the absence of “state projects,” a vision of what the country could and should be, and of inspiring leaders to embody that vision. Egypt had a project and a leader that inspired the entire Arab world in the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser, but that is no longer the case.
Egypt the Triumph of State Over Citizens
Authors: Marina  , Ottaway David
Published: February 2020

This chapter recounts the stages of the 2011 uprising in Egypt, from the fall of one military dictator to the rise of another. The upheaval ended three decades of sclerotic rule under Hosni Mubarak, and ushered in a brief period of democracy that saw the Muslim Brotherhood triumph in parliamentary and presidential elections for the first time in Egyptian history.After a year of tumultuous rule, Islamic President Mohammed Morsi was ousted in a military coup d’état in 2013thanks to the connivance of self-proclaimed democratic secularists. The new military dictator, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has set about uprooting all traces of Islamist presence in the country and eliminating all civil society activism as well. His goal has been to turn Egypt back fifty years to restore the military state established by Gamal Abdel Nasser, and imitate his pursuit of costly mega-projects to solve the country’s crushing economic and social problems.
The Maghreb a World Apart
Authors: Marina  , Ottaway David
Published: February 2020

The uprisings had unique consequences for Tunisia and Morocco. They led to the integration of Islamist parties into the political system, and introduced a political process based on carefully crafted compromises that preserved stability but left the youth deeply dissatisfied. These differences are also encouraging the two countries to turn away from the countries of the Middle East and to look to Europe and Africa for their futures.The choice of moderation and compromise on the part of Islamist parties helped greatly to achieve this outcome, but so did other factors. Tunisia is politically pluralistic, with a leftist trade union and political parties as well as an Islamist movement well embedded in a society that is embracing a mainstream centrist tradition which stems from the early post-independence period. In Morocco, the king’s ever-looming authoritywas a signal to secularists that Islamists would not be allowed to dominate, and to Islamists that they had to accept subservience to the monarch.However, this positive trajectory toward greater democracyrequires economic growth to continue. In this respect, the situation in Morocco is far more encouraging than in Tunisia.
China’s National Experiences and the Evolution of PRC Grand Strategy
Authors: Freeman Chas W.
Published: February 2020

This chapter focuses on the People’s Republic of China’s “grand strategy” in world affairs. Grand strategiy, for all powers, is rooted in the nation’s past and its historical evolution. As such, this chapter traces the various historical and cultural sources of China’s contemporary approach to the world. It argues that China has a deep sense of greatness—but also wounded pride. In particular, different sources of China’s traditions, encounters with the West, border insecurities, and preoccupation with the United States. The author argues that China’s relations with the United States are reaching a critical, and dangerous, point.
China’s Foreign Policy Making Process
Authors: Zhao Suisheng
Published: February 2020

China’s foreign policy must rely on opaque and behind-the-scenes coordination organs to work through a large number of bureaucratic agencies of the state, party, and military, whose primary roles are information gathering and the implementation and recommendation of policy. In addition, some new players, such as think tanks, media, local governments, and transnational corporations, have played a variety of roles to influence China’s foreign policy. This chapter examines the evolving role of the paramount leader, the foreign policy coordination and elaboration organs, the bureaucracies, and the new players in the making and transformation of China’s foreign policy. Providing a historical overview, it also observes how President Xi Jinping has centralized and personalized foreign policy making power in the name of strengthening a unified party leadership.
China’s Global Military-Security Interactions
Authors: Saunders Phillip C.
Published: February 2020

China’s national security calculations have become increasingly global in nature. The expansion of Beijing’s international military-security footprint has paralleled its diplomatic, economic, and cultural ties. This includes a range of military and security cooperation programs with other countries, involvement in multilateral security organizations, and unilateral developments undertaken by China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This chapter reviews China’s overseas security interests and the military missions the PLA has been tasked to perform by CCP leaders. It then discusses the PLA’s organization and capabilities, with an emphasis on those relevant for operating beyond China’s borders. China’s military and security interactions include traditional military missions (mostly focused on Asia), military diplomacy efforts to support Chinese foreign policy objectives by engaging foreign military counterparts and providing public goods, and a new emphasis on protecting China’s expanding overseas economic and security interests.
China’s Relations with Europe
Authors: Godement François
Published: February 2020

The relationship between China and European nations has been rewritten and largely turned around in the last four decades. From presence and influence in China, the main issues have shifted and now revolve around China’s presence and influence in and near Europe. Crucially, Chinese investment in Europe has now overtaken European investment in China. China’s relations with Europe are extensive and still growing. They include intensive state-to-state diplomacy, public diplomacy that involves European elites, an outsize trade relationship as well as an investment strategy leading to increasing friction, people-to-people exchanges that consist primarily of tourist and student flows from China to Europe, and cultural influences or soft power.
Decolonizing Feminist Theory
Authors: Alcoff Linda Martín
Published: February 2020

This chapter suggests an approach to decolonial feminism drawing from Latina feminist theory and practice. Rejecting an imperial feminism involves something else besides “going local”: it requires a genuine reorientation of feminist theory toward the everyday. This chapter considers how this affects the central debates about gender identities and gender liberation. How might we approach gender questions in the context of learning from, rather than teaching, lo cotidiano of the impoverished? This would counter the popular accounts of identity formation that view it as necessarily involving either authoritarianism from above, or irrationality from below. The chapter then explores the late theologian Ada-María Isasi-Díaz’s development of a mujerista theology, which adapted certain aspects of liberation theology’s “preference for the poor” to US Latinas.
Enrique Dussel’s Etica de la liberación, US Women of Color Decolonizing Practices, and Coalitionary Politics amid Difference
Authors: Pérez Laura E.
Published: February 2020

As a US woman of color and queer-centered critique, this chapter analyses coalitionary attempts that merely list oppressions yet reproduce them in their own failure to seriously engage the thought emanating from marginalized intellectuals, even within Third World and US people-of-color communities. To take seriously knowledge from negatively racialized and gendered US women of color is to engage that important bibliography/body of thought but also to examine and transform oneself. The essay specifically argues for recognition of the historic decolonial analyses of double, triple, and multiple oppressions and the “simultaneity of oppressions” theorized by US women of color in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s critiquing discourses privileging a single “key” contradiction rather than the complex “simultaneity of oppressions” that render class, “racial,” gender, and sexuality analyses more appropriately complex and useful. I also argue for a profound solidarity based on a politics of identification with the otherness of the other as an imbricated, interdependent part of our own selves and being even as it is a recognition of the irreducible difference of the other as such.
Decolonial Feminist Movidas
Authors: Méndez Xhercis
Published: February 2020

This chapter examines the set of relational dynamics that produce the “wages of gender,” namely the economic, social, political, and psychological “privileges”/“benefits” one gets from identifying with, aspiring to, and manifesting dominant racialized and heteronormative conceptions of sex/gender. Rather than frame the benefits reserved for heterosexual, middle-class, white females as “privileges” and emphasize women of color’s systematic exclusion from those “privileges,” it instead homes in on the inextricable relational and intimate violence woven into those “privileges.” Building on the political work of women of color, indigenous, and decolonial feminists who argue that gender was reconstituted and racialized in and through colonial/imperial practices, this chapter tracks the sets of “wages” that undermine efforts to organize across difference by underscoring what is politically at stake for differently situated bodies. It concludes with a list of ingredients and orientations that contribute to decolonizing feminist methodologies.
African, Latina, Feminist, and Decolonial
Authors: Delgadillo Theresa
Published: February 2020

This essay proposes that Marta Moreno Vega’s 2004 memoir, When the Spirits Dance Mambo, is a Latina feminist narrative that foregrounds African diaspora worldviews, thought, forms, and practices as resources for cultivating a path toward decoloniality. In this memoir, Abuela’s spiritual leadership and her introduction of the young Cotito into the practice of Espiritismo become a central prism through which Cotito innovatively apprehends the links between sacred and secular realms in the burgeoning mambo and salsa music scene of New York. Even more importantly, her engagement with this diasporan worldview allows Cotito to critically apprehend prevailing gender norms and their limitations. This essay, therefore, argues that an Afro-Latina feminism emerges in this memoir from the practice of embodied spirituality that also has sonic, aesthetic, and social dimensions in everyday life.
Hallucinating Knowing
Authors: DiPietro Pedro J.
Published: February 2020

Through ancestral and submerged sensual repertoires, through healing practices, spoken word poetry, and other forms of psychic praxis, Latina and Xicana feminist theorizing resists the westernizing idioms of cognitive impairment. This chapter examines the ways that the coloniality of gender—as an injunction to inhabit heterosexualist, human-centered, notions of sanity—exclude Latina and Xicana experience and knowledge from the realm of cognitive accuracy. It suggests that heterosexualism creates conditions for hallucinations to arise within Latinx communities. Specifically, it explores healing traditions several centuries long as they shape contemporary Latina and Xicana theories and their ties to hallucinating perception. Positing that hallucinating knowing carries the healing properties of spiritual practices among mixed-race indigenous-Latinx peoples, this chapter gathers evidence of gender-nonconforming subjectivities and the more-than-human remedies that they concoct in their negotiation of perceptual repertoires. More-than-human knowing ultimately illustrates the role of perceptual cross-referencing, or transitioning, between tangible and intangible domains.
Deracializing Representations of Femininity and the Marketing of Latinidad
Authors: Lugo-Lugo Carmen R. , Bloodsworth-Lugo Mary K.
Published: February 2020

Latinidad has been explained as a process, a set of ideas, or a symbolic space, situating it between a mechanism and a locale. Regardless of its exact articulation or constitution, a central feature of Latinidad involves its standing as a social construct; that is, an idea born from and developed by forces through social interaction. This chapter focuses on Latinidad not only as an identity, but perhaps more importantly, as an embodied experience that is mediated or at times driven by external influences. It focuses on Zoe Saldana, since within the world of Latina celebrities embedded within the US popular culture landscape, she embodies one of the more rare sets of circumstances and combinations of ethnicity, phenotype, and character portrayals to be found.
Football’s Role in How Societies Remember
Authors: Tuastad Dag
Published: February 2020

Based on several phases of ethnographic work over two decades, this chapter demonstrates how football creates the ideal conditions for debates over national social memories related to the Palestinian-Bedouin divide in Jordan. Social memory processes in football arenas represent two related social phenomena. Firstly, collective, historical memories are produced; Secondly, these collective memories are also enacted and embodied during football matches, through their symbolic and physical confrontations. Palestinian-Jordanian encounters on the football field have been especially important in this context, having embodied the memory of the 1970 civil war and having served as a medium through which to reprocess it. For Palestinians, as a stateless ethno-national group who lack the formal national institutions to preserve their national past in the form of museums or archeological digs, football, and particularly the al-Wihdat team, has become an important alternative. While until the early 1990s the fans’ lyrics emphasized identification with the armed struggle, today the dominant themes are Palestinian common descent, unity, and refugee identity. At the same time, al-Wihdat’s alter-ego, FC Faisaly, has been a focus of East Bank Jordanian nationalism, emphasizing tribal roots and values, Islamic tradition, Hashemite loyalty, and the tribal roots of the monarchy.
Sportswomen’s Use of Social Media in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena)
Authors: Ahmad Nida
Published: February 2020

Social media creates unique opportunities for sportswomen to create a self-brand through sharing aspects of their lives online. Insofar, the study of this phenomenon has been limited to the context of the Western world. This chapter presents the findings from a digital ethnography of the social media accounts of sportswomen from Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as interviews with these women. In contrast to research findings that show Western sportswomen using social media for self-branding and offering intimate details about their lifestyles, our findings shows that Middle Eastern sportswomen carefully consider what they share and how they share with their audiences, using different strategies to safely and effectively navigate the digital terrain, with the familial and cultural restraints playing a key role in their decision-making processes.
Legacies of Mega-Sporting Events in Developing Countries
Authors: Reiche Danyel
Published: February 2020

This chapter engages with the scholarship that emphasizes the benefits of mega-sporting events to host countries, from increasing their international prestige and influence on global politics, through to mobilizing national pride, and serving as a tool of economic development. This chapter also investigates the benefits gained by Lebanon as a result of hosting four regional mega-sporting events since the civil war ended in 1990. Additionally, it examines the similarities and differences between these four events by exploring, in particular, the tangible and intangible legacies. Apart from a review of academic and press articles, primary data was collected by interviewing key stakeholders in the Lebanese sports sector who were involved in the events. Our conclusion is that while the events provided Lebanon with some short-term promotional benefits, they introduced a heavy financial burden, especially in relation to stadium and sports hall construction. Resources to maintain those facilities became a source for corruption.
A Glitch in Time
Authors: Cubitt Sean
Published: February 2020

Déjà Vu, the 2006 film starring Denzel Washington directed by Tony Scott, is characterised by a number of glitches, marking aspects of the time-travel media and narrative as well as the condition described in the title. The chapter opens with a consideration of the economic doctrine of perfect communication and argues that no system can be both complete and coherent, so no communication can be both universal and without noise. The glitches are traced especially through a shot-reverse-shot sequence early in the film when the African American protagonist recognises his obligation to a dead African American woman, leading to a consideration of the film’s evocation of slavery. The challenge of noise emerges in the flawed distinction between continuity and discontinuity first raised in the editing and the glitches, central to the fictional quantum physics of the plot, and acted out in a flamboyant action sequence where hero and audience can see two times simultaneously.
The Non-identical World
Authors: Cubitt Sean
Published: February 2020

There exists a powerful fantasy that the world is not only describable in numbers but is composed of code, in which case the world-as-code can be rewritten. This theme has already emerged in the analyses of Oblivion and Déjà Vu, and is shared by a group of what are here named as ‘irreality’ films made during the global financial crisis. Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011) dwells on the fate of a protagonist who is the archetypal brain in a vat, another posthumous central character. The analysis draws out the historical formation of subjectivity and the history of the instincts that tie human personality to natural processes, discusses the utopian potential of the performative principles of software, reveals how, in a critical process shot, this utopianism is directed simultaneously towards the construction of community and of the romantic couple, and how these relate to the invisibility, in the repeated shots of the Chicago skyline, of the futures market housed in its downtown area.
Those Dying Generations
Authors: Cubitt Sean
Published: February 2020

Like other films analysed here, No Country for Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007) abandons humanism, but rather than offer recoding as a solution for historical impasses, it acts out two modes of history: as obligation, and as predestination. The border setting of the film’s action is more than metaphorical of these forms of history. It evokes both the fraught political-economic relations between the United States and Mexico and is acted out on a landscape whose emptiness and moral threat, the chapter argues, derives from the genocide of First Nations. This is revealed in a critical moment when a minor character tells an anecdote from the area’s history, the only mention of indigenous peoples, which reverberates in the depiction of Chigurh, the dark angel of vengeance who haunts the narrative.
Part 1: Making the Mass Image
Authors: Cubitt Sean
Published: February 2020

The final challenge in proving the relevance of anecdotal method for contemporary purposes lies in the need to confront the now-dominant mode of accessing moving and still image media. Vast databases of social and streaming media now contain, store, process, and deliver video, audio, and visual content. It is always possible to encounter one or two images at a time; but millions are now stored and constantly updated form a single mass image of the world, structured and restructured through metadata including human behaviours of searches, likes, and shares, in an evolving topology only partially designed for human users. For anecdotal method to have a claim, it must answer the question: Is it possible to encounter a database? Arguing that the mass image database is the logical outcome of a history of mechanical imaging, the chapter argues that humans are now reduced to behaviours, that time is no longer consolidated experientially but undergoing a chronoclasm, bringing the central position of the human to an end. It goes on to argue that this creates a new opportunity for ecocritical aesthetic politics by excluding the human, thus placing humanity on the side of both nature and technology. This opens a discussion of the nature of the ancestral dead labour, skills, and knowledge enshrined in technologies, and the obligation to the victims of ecocide and genocide, and to the proposal of an encyclopedic commons as the medium for ecocritical politics.
Introduction
Authors: Campanella Edoardo , Dassù Marta
Published: February 2020

A brief overview of the main topics discussed throughout the book, with a focus on the emotional roots of today’s geopolitical disorder. More and more countries are becoming trapped in a past that no longer exists. Nostalgia offers relief from socio-economic angst and becomes an emotional weapon in the political debate used by jingoist leaders. Although nostalgic nationalism is a global phenomenon, it is Brexit that epitomizes it in its purest form. Only in the United Kingdom is it possible to identify the three moments of a periodizing nostalgic narrative: the “golden days”; the “great rupture”; and the “present discontent”. The golden age is represented by the imperial era. The rupture came not only with the slow demise of the British Empire, but also with the decision to join the European project in 1973. The present discontent is caused by the unwillingness of many Britons to come to terms with Britain’s transformation into an ordinary nation-state. The rest of the chapter discusses the structure of the book. The first section looks at how nostalgia is abused to build national myths capable of mobilizing a country toward a common goal. The second dismantles some of the reality distortion created by Brexiteers’ nostalgic rhetoric.
The East India Company
Authors: Kohli Atul
Published: February 2020

The motives, mechanisms, and the impact of the East India Company’s rule over India (from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century) are analyzed. The key motive behind East India Company operations in India was the extraction of economic resources. The central mechanism of establishing rule was coercion used to defeat resistance by the traditional Indian elite. As for the impact, the evidence is overwhelming that the activities of the East India Company in India benefited Britain at India’s expense. The British gained from the East India Company via the transfer of Indian resources for private and public uses. The East India Company also helped establish a colonial pattern of trade during the first half of the nineteenth century. The negative impact on India was transmitted especially via the misuse of Indian savings—savings that may have been invested more productively within India—and via the destruction of indigenous manufacturing.
Britain’s Informal Empire
Authors: Kohli Atul
Published: February 2020

This chapter analyzes Britain’s informal empire in Argentina, Egypt, and China during the nineteenth century. The evidence is overwhelming that Britain’s primary concern in these regions was economic gain, without force if possible, but with force if necessary. The main mechanism of influence was to create and sustain stable-but-subservient governments in the peripheral countries. Once such regimes were established in client states, informal empire was sustained via a degree of cooperation between the metropolitan and the peripheral elite. The British gained handsomely from such arrangements, especially because they facilitated profitable trade, investments, and loans. Peripheral countries in turn experienced some economic growth but the pattern of development was lop-sided; these countries became commodity exporters without undergoing much industrialization.
Seeking Influence Abroad
Authors: Kohli Atul
Published: February 2020

Born an anticolonial nation, the United States burst upon the global scene as an imperial power at the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter analyzes the American expansion into the Caribbean, Central America, and Pacific Asia. When the United States became a major industrial power in the late nineteenth century, it sought profit and power overseas, especially new economic opportunities. The United States experimented with colonialism but settled on creating stable but subservient regimes in peripheral countries as the main mechanism of control. Benefits to the United States included gains in trade, opportunities for foreign investments, and profitable loans. Countries under US influence, including the Philippines, Cuba, and Nicaragua, experienced some economic growth but became commodity exporters with sharp inequalities and poor-quality governments.
Fighting Third World Nationalism
Authors: Kohli Atul
Published: February 2020

This chapter analyzes American interventions in the developing world during the Cold War. While a struggle against communism provided the context of the interventions in Iran, Vietnam, and Chile, the deeper motive was to dislodge nationalists who challenged American design to create a worldwide open economy order. The mechanisms varied, from covert coups in Iran and Chile to hard militarism in Vietnam. The benefits to the United States also varied; it experienced nominal success in Chile but a costly defeat in Vietnam. Democracy in both Iran and Chile was derailed, and both countries remained commodity exporters under American tutelage. By contrast, a repressive communist regime came to control Vietnam that has successfully pursued an economic program of industrialization and poverty alleviation.