bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Perceptuo-affective organization of touched materials in younger and older adults
Authors: Drewing Knut
Published: January 2024

In everyday interaction we touch different materials, which we experience along a limited number of perceptual and emotional dimensions: For instances, a furry surface feels soft and pleasant, whereas sandpaper feels rough and unpleasant. In a previous study, younger adults manually explored a representative set of solid, fluid and granular materials. Their ratings were made along six perceptual dimensions (roughness, fluidity, granularity, deformability, fibrousness, heaviness) and three emotional ones (valence, arousal, dominance). Perceptual and emotional dimensions were systematically correlated. Here, we wondered how this perceptuo-affective organization of touched materials depends on age, given that older adults show decline in haptic abilities, in particular detail perception. 30 younger participants (~22 years, half females) and 15 older participants (~66 years) explored 25 materials using 18 perceptual and 9 emotional adjectives. We extracted 6 perceptual and 2 emotional dimensions. Older and younger adults showed similar dimensions. However, in younger participants roughness and granularity judgments were done separately, while they were collapsed in a single dimension in older people. Further, age groups differed in the perception of roughness, granularity and valence, and older people did not show a positive correlation between valence and granularity as did younger people. As expected, control analyses between young males and females did not reveal similar gender differences. Overall, the results demonstrate that older people organize and experience materials partly differently from younger people, which we lead back to sensory decline. However, other aspects of perceptual organization that also include fine perception are preserved into older age.
The effect of a task-specific training on upper limb performance and kinematics while performing a reaching task in a fatigued state
Authors: Dupuis Frédérique , Prud’Homme Félix , Tougas Arielle , Campeau-Lecours Alexandre , Mercier Catherine , Roy Jean-Sébastien
Published: January 2024

Background

Fatigue impacts motor performance and upper limb kinematics. It is of interest to study whether it is possible to minimize the potentially detrimental effects of fatigue with prevention programs.

Objective

To determine the effect of task-specific training on upper limb kinematics and motor performance when reaching in a fatigued state.

Methods

Thirty healthy participants were recruited (Training group n = 15; Control group n = 15). Both groups took part in two evaluation sessions (Day 1 and Day 5) during which they performed a reaching task (as quickly and accurately as possible) in two conditions (rested and fatigued). During the reaching task, joint kinematics and motor performance (accuracy and speed) were evaluated. The Training group participated in three task-specific training sessions between Day 1 and Day 5; they trained once a day, for three days. The Control group did not perform any training. A three-way non-parametric ANOVA for repeated measures (Nonparametric Analysis of Longitudinal Data; NparLD) was used to assess the impact of the training (Condition [within subject]: rested, fatigued; Day [within subject]: Day 1 vs. Day 5 and Group [between subjects]: Training vs. Control).

Results

After the training period, the Training group significantly improved their reaching speed compared to the Control group (Day x Group p < .01; Time effect: Training group = p < .01, Control group p = .20). No between-group difference was observed with respect to accuracy. The Training group showed a reduction in contralateral trunk rotation and lateral trunk flexion in Day 2 under the fatigue condition (Group x Day p < .04; Time effect: Training group = p < .01, Control group = p < .59).

Conclusion

After the 3-day training, participants demonstrated improved speed and reduced reliance on trunk compensations to complete the task under fatigue conditions. Task-specific training could help minimizing some effects of fatigue.
The bZIP transcription factor BIP1 of the rice blast fungus is essential for infection and regulates a specific set of appressorium genes
Authors: Lambou Karine , Tag Andrew , Lassagne Alexandre , Collemare Jérôme , Clergeot Pierre-Henri , Barbisan Crystel , Perret Philippe , Tharreau Didier , Millazo Joelle , Chartier Elia , De Vries Ronald P. , Hirsch Judith , Morel Jean-Benoit , Beffa Roland , Kroj Thomas , Thomas Terry , Lebrun Marc-Henri
Published: January 2024

The rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae differentiates specialized cells called appressoria that are required for fungal penetration into host leaves. In this study, we identified the novel basic leucine zipper (bZIP) transcription factor BIP1 (B-ZIP Involved in Pathogenesis-1) that is essential for pathogenicity. BIP1 is required for the infection of plant leaves, even if they are wounded, but not for appressorium-mediated penetration of artificial cellophane membranes. This phenotype suggests that BIP1 is not implicated in the differentiation of the penetration peg but is necessary for the initial establishment of the fungus within plant cells. BIP1 expression was restricted to the appressorium by both transcriptional and post-transcriptional control. Genome-wide transcriptome analysis showed that 40 genes were down regulated in a BIP1 deletion mutant. Most of these genes were specifically expressed in the appressorium. They encode proteins with pathogenesis-related functions such as enzymes involved in secondary metabolism including those encoded by the ACE1 gene cluster, small secreted proteins such as SLP2, BAS3, BAS4, and AVR-Pi9 effectors, as well as plant cuticle and cell wall degrading enzymes. Interestingly, this BIP1 network is different from other known infection-related regulatory networks, highlighting the complexity of gene expression control during plant-fungal interactions. Promoters of BIP1-regulated genes shared a GCN4/bZIP-binding DNA motif (TGACTC) binding in vitro to BIP1. Mutation of this motif in the promoter of MGG_08381.7 from the ACE1 gene cluster abolished its appressorium-specific expression, showing that BIP1 behaves as a transcriptional activator. In summary, our findings demonstrate that BIP1 is critical for the expression of early invasion-related genes in appressoria. These genes are likely needed for biotrophic invasion of the first infected host cell, but not for the penetration process itself. Through these mechanisms, the blast fungus strategically anticipates the host plant environment and responses during appressorium-mediated penetration.
Reimagining Archives: Radically Rethinking Design, Identity, and Multiplicity
Authors: Chuk Natasha
Published: January 2024

The ever-expanding accessibility and integration of digital technologies in everyday life offers artists the chance to forge new paths of creativity, expression, and engagement between themselves and participants. Digital artists Stephanie Dinkins, Morehshin Allahyari, Adrian Aguilera, and Skawennati demonstrate these affordances by reclaiming forgotten, untold, and silenced identities, stories, spaces, and cultures toward the design and creation of mutable, participatory, archival art projects focused on indigenous, marginalized, and non-western worldviews. Through design principles that foster collective teaching, learning, and creating, their work reflects the world as relational, unfixed, and multiple, wherein many perspectives and knowledges converge and materialize. This essay analyzes these artists’ works to illustrate the possibility for the existence of multiple worlds, the value of participatory design, and the sociopolitical significance of the archive to argue that digital technologies and networks can be creatively and thoughtfully deployed to decenter the dominant worldview of modernity by re-imagining ways of uncovering, preserving, organizing, and accessing cultural knowledge. By doing this, the institutional logics derived from colonial ideologies are disrupted and reflect a new ontology of knowledge acquisition in the form of collaboration, participation, and distributed agency, enabling the co-creation and engagement with multiple realities toward the making of a digital pluriverse.
The Other World: Diasporas and Their Memories of War
Authors: Rashid Azra
Published: January 2024

Survivors of genocide living in diaspora face a discontinuity of history and memory that is forced upon them. Theirs is a history that hardly registers in the dominant discourses of history, trauma, and migration in the countries at either end of their journeys. It is not registered in their countries of origin because they left and it fails to make a mark in their countries of arrival because it is a past that is not shared by others. For women survivors of war living in diaspora, the politics of marginalization and an absence of representation of their losses complicate their ability to mourn. This paper offers a brief meditation on representations and framing of the trauma of women survivors of war living in diaspora, and the utility of academic and creative methods, namely Research-Creation, that allow us a re-framing of the narrative by creating a space for feminist solidarity and remembering.
New Canadian Experimental Eco-Cinema: Placemaking, Immersiveness, and Alternate Ecologies of Relationality
Authors: Longfellow Brenda
Published: January 2024

This article explores the sensory and experimental practice of three recent eco-films, Geographies of Solitude, vulture, and Lichen, all of whose formal strategies are oriented around a desire to recalibrate perception of the natural world and to attune spectators to the diversity and proliferating life of “other-than-human relatives.”
The Multiscalar Worlds of Remediation: Sitting Halfway Down a Meandering Path
Authors: Boucher Isabelle
Published: January 2024

This hybrid environmental creative nonfiction invites the reader to consider a small, contaminated patch of land tucked inside an industrial neighborhood in Montréal (Tiohtià:ke). By exploring the multiscalar geographies and histories of this site—now a municipal phytoremediation testbed—I seek to reframe the notion of remediation against the extractive and colonial logics that underpin Western technoscientific imaginaries and practices of healing. Thus, I will address the “pluriverse” as a coalescing of multiple and incommensurable scales of living and non-living, political and affective, and social and economic processes that define a seemingly desolate urban wasteland (Povinelli 2016). Through photography and repeated visits, I consider ancient Carboniferous worlds and persistent toxicants (Hird 2013); Suncor refineries and a neighborhood; soil (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015), trees, bacteria (Hird and Yusoff 2019), and those who inhabit and continue to care for this place.
Worlds Meeting Worlds: Murmuration, Aesthetics, and Odeimin Runners
Authors: Kahgee Adrian , Schlums Debbie Ebanks
Published: January 2024

The Odeimin Runners art collective seek paths to create work outside of colonial institutions and systems and instead think about what it would mean to mutually nurture communities and relationships. In our practice, we think through and weave together Indigenous and Black/Caribbean philosophies such as the teachings of the odeimin (strawberry) plant, Dolleen Manning’s Mnidoo—worlding, and the relational thinking of Glissant. Through community engagement and the development of an online story map incorporating process cinema methods, Odeimin Runners reflect an Indigenous worldview of All Our Relations which intuits a pluriversal world. Bringing together stories from different cultures and ways of being and experiencing the world, we make connections across time and dimensions. The hope in this “acolonial” work, on the outskirts of colonial frameworks, lies in producing nourishment that contributes to the flourishing of the multiple, interconnected worlds.
From Abiyala to Turtle Island
Authors: Victor Carmen
Published: January 2024

This hybrid article offers a glimpse into a plurality of Indigenous worldviews in the context of the contemporary art exhibition Arctic/ Amazon that took place at the Power Plant in Toronto, Canada in 2022. The article highlights the important connections between knowledge and culture in artworks by artists who translate practice, materiality, and knowledgeways into contemporary interventions.
A Message From the Pluriverse: The Spiritually Fluid Gift of Philip Cote’s Walls of Welcome
Authors: Brereton William
Published: January 2024

Called Walls of Welcome, Philip Cote—an Anishinaabe-Algonquin artist and spiritual elder—created a large-scale panorama inside the interior walls of the Roncesvalles United Church’s sanctuary in late 2021. Located in the west end of Tkaronto/Toronto—and believed to be the first Indigenous art mural inside a church in Turtle Island/North America (if not globally)—the wall painting visually narrates the Ojibway creation story and alludes to “The Eighth Fire.” The latter stems from an Anishinaabe prophecy that we (human beings) can unite in our shared humanity. Walls of Welcome gives us all a message from the pluriverse and a spiritually fluid lens for seeing our foundational stories. My paper explores how this mural brings communities together through the power of art and builds a new world for trust-building and healing that epitomizes truth and reconciliation.
(Re)Entering Many Worlds: Teaching and Collaborating to Design the Pluriverse
Authors: Adams Robyn , Baerg Aliyah , Bailey Shawn , Black Honoure , Coar Lancelot , Derksen Danton
Published: January 2024

In this article we share stories that are still developing out of our design studio.

By designing for the pluriverse we were inspired to create alternative and future imaginaries to counter the humancentric one-world notion. Learning that there was not just one story, but instead the stories were infinite and eternal, we sought to counter the frictions of capitalism, colonialism, and extractivism that have shaped the world we now reside in. We explored this by examining how Indigenous ways of knowing, land connectivity, and decoloniality empower the poetics of experimentation and design. As instructors we share our journey with our students. Three stories by students highlight this journey into the pluriverse.
Impacto de los programas de inserción sociolaboral en la calidad de vida de las personas usuarias: estudio transversal del caso de Fundación Deixalles
Authors: López-Bermúdez Alfonso , Caro Blanco Fernanda , Mestre Miquel Joana Maria
Published: January 2024

Introducción. En el marco de las políticas de activación, los itinerarios de inserción sociolaboral se han ido consolidando como uno de los elementos clave para favorecer la mejora de la empleabilidad y la integración social de las personas en situación de vulnerabilidad respecto al mercado de trabajo. Sin embargo, la evaluación de la efectividad de dichos itinerarios se centra en criterios puramente cuantitativos que hacen referencia exclusivamente a la dimensión laboral: número de inserciones, número de horas trabajadas, tipología contractual, etc. Este artículo tiene como objetivo valorar la incorporación de criterios cualitativos que consideren la calidad de vida de las personas participantes, permitiendo conocer el impacto de los programas, valorando la inserción social y respaldando la intervención profesional desde el trabajo social. Metodología. A pesar de que la calidad de vida esté considerada como un constructo cualitativo, existen instrumentos cuantitativos basados en la evidencia que permiten su medición, por ello se ha aplicado una metodología cuantitativa, a través del cuestionario “Escala GENCAT de Calidad de Vida” (Shalock y Verdugo, 2003), que permite conocer la calidad de vida de una persona mediante ocho dimensiones diferentes. La aplicación del cuestionario se realiza de manera transversal, con un patrón pre-test post-test, al total de participantes de los programas de inserción más representativos de Fundación Deixalles, lo que ha permitido evaluar el impacto de los programas y de las intervenciones profesionales en la calidad de vida de las 52 personas participantes. Resultados. El estudio realizado permite la medición de la calidad de vida alcanzada por las personas que participan en los programas de inserción sociolaboral, posibilitando la evaluación de los mismos y demostrando la eficacia y efectividad de la intervención profesional, independientemente de los criterios cuantitativos que evalúan su efectividad mediante el logro, o no, de un empleo. Los resultados muestran cómo, a corto plazo, se produce una mejora en todas las dimensiones de la Escala GENCAT. Discusión y conclusiones. La incorporación de criterios cualitativos, como la calidad de vida y su medición a través de instrumentos cuantitativos basados en la evidencia, permite evaluar la eficacia de los programas, desde un enfoque o modelo de intervención novedoso en trabajo social, como el modelo centrado en la persona o el enfoque basado en derechos. La consideración de la calidad de vida y la introducción de instrumentos objetivos basados en la evidencia que permitan su medición, deben ser un referente de buenas prácticas en la intervención en procesos de inserción sociolaboral, aceptando el bienestar y la felicidad de la persona como uno de sus ejes vertebradores.
Segregación escolar del alumnado con necesidades educativas especiales en Educación Infantil en el contexto local
Authors: Guiral Borruel Claudia , Murillo Torrecilla F. Javier
Published: January 2024

Esta investigación busca profundizar en la segregación escolar del alumnado con necesidades educativas especiales del segundo ciclo de Educación Infantil estimando su magnitud, determinando la incidencia de la titularidad del centro y de su adscripción al Programa Bilingüe y describiendo su evolución. Para ello, se realiza un estudio ex post facto con datos de los 10.182 estudiantes del segundo ciclo de Educación Infantil matriculados en alguno de los 77 centros ordinarios públicos y privados-concertados situados en dos ciudades de tamaño medio-grande de la Comunidad de Madrid. Los resultados indican que la magnitud de la segregación escolar está en torno al 0.20 (ISG); que la incidencia de la titularidad es baja (4.6 %), pero es alta la del Programa Bilingüe (17.2 % de promedio); y que la segregación ha descendido ligeramente en los últimos años, pero las diferencias entre centros atendiendo a su titularidad y adscripción al Programa Bilingüe han crecido. Con ello, se concluye que hay que prestar atención a la segregación en Educación Infantil y tomar medidas para combatirla. También se destaca la necesidad de replantear el Programa Bilingüe por su incidencia en la segregación escolar.
Synthesis and characterization of modified PVC waste with different diamines for Hg(II) removal
Authors: Hadi Mohammed Ameen , Hamed Ameera Hassan , Aldabbagh Areej Kamal Assim
Published: January 2024

PVC waste, after removing contamination (P1), was cross-linked with 1,3-diaminopropane, hexamethylenediamine and 1,4-diaminonaphthalene (P2, P3 and P4). The cross-linked PVC was characterized by FTIR, SEM and CHN elemental analysis. The influence of the type of crosslinking agent on the thermal properties and swelling of PVC was also investigated. P3 was characterized by the highest water absorption, and P4 had the best thermal stability. All cross-linked polymers showed good effectiveness in removing Hg(II) ions, especially PVC modified with hexamethylenediamine.
Introduction
Authors: Debies-Carl Jeffrey S.
Published: January 2024

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. First, it discusses the important folklore concepts of legends and legend tripping. Then, it surveys a range of possible explanations for alleged paranormal experiences, suggesting that a synthetic approach combining these perspectives is ideal. It then proceeds to outline the methodology—both ethnographic and comparative—and goals of the book before concluding by offering an overview of the structure and content of the remaining chapters.
Rites and Rituals
Authors: Debies-Carl Jeffrey S.
Published: January 2024

This chapter makes sense of the wide range of strange behaviors that are distinguishing features of legend trips: vandalism, leaving items on graves, calling names into empty space, and the like. Recognizing legend tripping’s inherently ritualistic character is key to understanding these. Common, fundamental patterns to these behaviors are identified that reveal their social and psychological logic as means of calling up apparently paranormal experiences. Some require pleasing otherworldly forces, others angering them, but these are all variations of the same underlying rationale. The chapter examines additional variations on ritual and their relation to legend, like verbal incantations, material objects, differences between specialized rituals and more generalized ritualistic thinking, and the importance of subjective mood. It argues that while most of these activities are benign, they can easily lead to problems like conflict with non-participants.
Close Encounters of the Supernatural Kind
Authors: Debies-Carl Jeffrey S.
Published: January 2024

During many legend trips, something happens that serves as proof of paranormal encounter and a legend’s claims. This chapter explores these experiences and the numerous factors that facilitate the sense of anomalous experience. A range of environmental factors, psychological biases, and social influences can help contribute to profound experiences even in the absence of anything overtly supernatural. Two factors are essential: a sense of expectation or willingness to entertain possibilities and the absence of a single, coherent legend, which can accommodate almost any occurrence. These allow for a wide range of experiences to be interpreted as supernatural encounter, including natural phenomena, things that have nothing to do with the legend, things that contradict the legend, and even just feelings or mood. The chapter explores other implications of this process as well.
Telling the Tale
Authors: Debies-Carl Jeffrey S.
Published: January 2024

This chapter analyzes the final step of the legend trip process, in which participants try to make sense of the possibly paranormal things they have experienced through storytelling and discussion. It will illustrate how this is really an interpretative, group process as well as a very active one. Discussants cannot simply apply pre-packaged interpretations they heard elsewhere, because these do not neatly fit their experience or meet with the consensus of the group. Instead, they draw on these as possible resources as they debate and discuss what happened and what it might mean. Because of the inherent ambiguity of the experience and the absence of authorities who can explain or legitimate it, a range of discursive peculiarities emerge. In the end, this discussion does not really settle anything. Instead, it only perpetuates the legend, refueling and updating it, allowing it to stay relevant over time, and inspiring future legend trippers
“Of Biblical Proportions”
Authors: Horigan Kate Parker
Published: January 2024

This chapter looks into flood motifs found within the personal narratives of Hurricane Katrina survivors. It discusses the analysis of interviews conducted for the Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston (SKRH) project. Survivors used the traditional punishment narrative to convey dynamic expressions of local concerns. Additionally, survivors draw on familiar biblical motifs and juxtapose the promises and limitations of making meaning from the flood. The chapter then details folklorist Kyrre Kverndokk's study of Norwegian media coverage of Hurricane Katrina that featured the major discursive tropes of news outlets and media narratives finding answers on how meaning is assigned to modern disasters.
Weathering the Storm
Authors: Laudun John
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the ideas of weather, personal property, and identity by referencing a collection of memes and oral legends in line with the American car culture. It elaborates on the notion of weathering a storm, which triggers a striking continuity in ideas. Memes and legends draw upon similar reserves which could be folk ideas but enact them differently. The chapter notes how trucks are presented with scenes of rugged individualism, which only highlights the storm as an enactment of powerful forces at work. It also features the definition of waiting five minutes, which suggests that the future is unknowable.
The Folk Wisdom of Lawns
Authors: Richardson Todd
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on the folk wisdom of lawns. It cites that lawns and lawn care have long been tied to popular notions of good citizenship. The suburban lawn functions as both a symbol and site of the American dream. The chapter then looks into the climate's role in lawns and lawn care while considering how climate is somehow both foundational and irrelevant when it comes to proper lawn care. The literature on lawns often talks about suburbs being designed to look like endless parks, but there are boundaries everywhere aside from the ones marked by the ubiquitous chain-link fencing.
Puerto Rican Children’s Literature on the Archipelago
Authors: Acevedo-Aquino María V.
Published: January 2024

This chapter provides a window into Puerto Rican children’s literature that has served as means to resist colonial discourses and invisibility throughout the years. The creation of textbooks in Spanish by Puerto Rican educators and politicians challenged a strong narrative of assimilation that emerged as a result of the 1898 US military invasion (Kerkhof 261); additionally, picture books likeLa gran Victoria by Verónica De la Cruz, inspired by the manifestations of Summer 2019 that led to the impeachment of governor Ricky Roselló, resist US hegemony. The chapter highlights stories produced on the archipelago, as well as initiatives that encourage production, access, documentation, research, and integration of Puerto Rican literature across contexts. Further consideration is given to authors, illustrators, scholars, publishers, and readers from the diaspora who continue to expand what it means to be Puerto Rican from their complex, experiential, and critical approaches.
Creole vs. Standard English
Authors: Sanderson-Cole Karen , Lalla Barbara
Published: January 2024

This chapter takes a roughly chronological view (beginning in the 1950s) to discuss issues related to representation of voice in Caribbean children’s literature. The significance of this issue is interrogated against a historical and cultural background that has traditionally constrained the ways in which the Caribbean child could be represented within a narrative. A number of issues raised include defining children’s literature; what constitutes appropriate material for children; negotiating voice—who sees—adult or child; language choice—Standard or Creole; and language variety. The issues surrounding voice within the region are many and writers continue to be challenged to achieve the delicate balance between representation and subject matter in a manner that does not alienate their ultimate audience—the child. Books covered include Jean D’Costa’s Voice in the Wind(1978), Zee Edgell’s Beka Lamb(1982), Merle Hodge’s Life of Laetitia(1993), Trish Cooke and Caroline Binch’s Look Back!(2019), and Coleen Smith-Denis’s Inner City Girl (2009).
Constructing Puerto Rico
Authors: Espada-Brignoni Teófilo
Published: January 2024

The Spanish-American War sparked the interest of readers and writers in the US. These far and proximal lands became the object of conversations and negotiations on how to represent colonized others, including in books for children. Children’s books played a role in the socialization of children in the US on how to see themselves, their country, and colonized lands. This chapter provides a discourse analysis of Marian George’s A Little Journey to Puerto Rico (1900), part of a travel series promoted by A. Flanagan Company for use in US classrooms. Her book provides children with a justified benign image of North American imperialism and teaches them to see Puerto Rico as a land of exploration, potential exploitation of resources, and leisure. Her writing is characterized by the use of creative voyeurism and yes-but statements, allowing George to socialize US children into seeing others as different and inferior.
“What Will I Be Called in the Future?”
Authors: Reyes Michael C.
Published: January 2024

Traditionally, Haitian representations of Anacaona, the Taíno ruler of indigenous Hispaniola, have been structured as tragedies. In this tradition, the violence suffered by Anacaona is meant to represent the gratuitous brutality of European colonialism and the hypocrisy of its stated justifications. This chapter argues that Edwidge Danticat defies this tradition by purposely structuring her young adult novel Anacaona: Golden Flower as a romance quest rather than a tragedy, thus avoiding transforming Anacaona into one of the island’s first anticolonial martyrs. To show this, this chapter analyzes the ways in which Danticat strategically displaces historical elements that have the potential to invite tragic readings of Anacaona’s life into the narrative and literal margins of her text. By doing so, Danticat can celebrate Anacaona’s life as a mother, artist, and leader to her people, and remind her young readers of Caribbean descent that they will not be defined by their victimization.
Growing Up Speculative
Authors: Matas Jarrel De
Published: January 2024

This chapter applies ideas from comic book studies and folklore to the young adult speculative fiction novels The Amazing Absorbing Boy, written by Trinidadian Rabindranath Maharaj, and Children of the Spider, written by Guyanese Imam Baksh. Each novel attends to experiences of migration, identity formation, and personal growth through narratives focalized on children. Whether it is Samuel of The Amazing Absorbing Boy migrating from Trinidad to Canada, or Mayali of Children of the Spider moving through the fictional portal of Zolpash to Georgetown, Guyana, readers are invited to consider the ways in which Caribbean children negotiate their belonging in unfamiliar worlds. The use of speculative fiction tropes such as shape-shifting and superhero personas allow the child protagonists of each novel to overturn power dynamics involving adults and children. Thus, the author considers the Caribbean speculative fiction genre to constitute a power that represents the world anew, empowering readers to appreciate the perspectives of Caribbean children in literature.
“Do They Dream? Do They Cry?”
Authors: Franchini Pauline
Published: January 2024

Children’s novels written by Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, and Gisèle Pineau deal with social and political issues regarding Caribbean people and their diaspora. Gender relationships and violence against women within a postcolonial context feature prominently in their adult novels. This chapter intends to examine to what extent adult texts leave their mark in these authors’ books for young readers, where specific issues of the female condition seem to be overshadowed, or at least addressed in a less pessimistic way. Children’s literature does offer a window into girls and women’s struggles in a postcolonial, male-dominated society. Boundaries between adult and children’s literature may be more permeable than expected.
White Noise/Black Codes
Authors: Allred Jeff
Published: January 2024

This essay utilizes the theoretical model of the discourse network, brainchild of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, and the historical paradigm of systematic management, a modern inscription system with roots in Civil War–era military communications and corporate railroad operations, to unpack the surprising complexity of the media landscape of The Unvanquished andits equally surprising implications for the Sartoris family network. When Granny Millard and Ringo “hack” the Union Army’s communications system to appropriate mules and money for redistribution among their war-ravaged neighbors in Yoknapatawpha County, we see how the military’s written chain of command becomes vulnerable to “occupation” not only by southern sympathizers but by members of marginalized social groups—women, children, African Americans, the elderly—headquartered in a plantation slave cabin rather than a formal command center. Here Faulkner demonstrates “the activity and agency available to users of modern media,” working to empower “uncredentialed subjects” in an “unlikely space.”
“The Family of Man”
Authors: Yamamoto Yuko
Published: January 2024

This essay examines Faulkner’s appearances as a US cultural ambassador in Nagano, Japan, in conjunction with the 1956 exhibition of The Family of Man, a collection of images curated by photographer Edward Steichen, as twin elements of US cultural diplomacy in support of the Eisenhower Administration’s Atoms for Peace initiative. Like The Family of Man, the shortfilm Impressions of Japan, which stars William Faulkner, was sponsored by the Japanese office of the US Information Service, as what Yamamoto calls “‘visual aids’ in the context of atomic diplomacy.” Carefully edited for its images and verbal content, Impressions of Japan places scenes from Faulkner’s Nagano sessions—with high school students, with academics—beneath voiceovernarration that steer their significance away from immediate geopoliticalrealities and nuclear fears toward humanistic evocations of a “multicultural world family.”
The Visual Components Of The Animated Bodyscape
Authors: Agnoli Francis M.
Published: January 2024

This chapter traces the formation of the animated figure, the most apparent way to convey a racialized identity within an animated text. The process begins with character design, with subsequent personnel adapting and building on those model sheets through storyboarding, key and in-between animation, and color correction. Through this journey across production processes, this chapter highlights how animation’s non-indexicality, iconicity, and plasmaticity effect the construction and ascription of racialized identities in Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and The Legend of Korra (2012-14).
Gender, Genres, and the Queer Family Romance of Edith Van Dyne’s Aunt Jane’s Nieces Series
Authors: Pugh Tison
Published: January 2024

L. Frank Baum’s Aunt Jane’s Nieces novels, a series of ten books attributed to his aristocratic pseudonym Edith Van Dyne, feature the heroines Patricia Doyle, Elizabeth DeGraf, and Louise Merrick undertaking a range of exciting adventures. In building thisseries, Baum integrates three typically distinct genres into a unique hybrid: his Americanized genre of fairy tale, the nascent genre of detective fiction, and the protean and female-centered genre of romance. Each of these genres offers potential models of agency for women characters in an era of rapidly shifting gendered norms, yet each genre’s innovations are counterbalanced by time-worn narrative conventions, structures, and themes. Furthermore, by investing the niece’s Uncle John with ultimate (financial) authority, and with this character presiding over efforts to strengthen the chaste family romance over the possibility of heteroerotic attraction, the series constrains the female characters’ amatory independence in strikingly queer ways.
Queer Ethics and Baum’s Prejudices
Authors: Pugh Tison
Published: January 2024

The Conclusion considers the ethical stakes of reading L. Frank Baum’s fictions in light of their frequent denigrations of various non-White peoples. Baum’s fiction demands an ethical engagement that does not turn a blind eye to such issues but considers them in relation to queer intersectionalities, those that seek to unite disparate people in the quest for a more just world despite differences in race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or other such markers of personal identity. Baum’s fictions merit inclusion in any queer canon of children’s literature, but any such queer canon must encourage readers to perceive that queerness most often reflects a desire or identity rather than a virtue, and thus that queer people are as susceptible to moral and ethical failings as others. Such a queer canon would paradoxically point readers to a deeper understanding of the challenges of intersectionality and the ethical complexities of enjoying Baum’s fiction.
Introduction
Authors: Bishop Paula J. , Leonard Kendra Preston
Published: January 2024

Our collection focuses not on those whose names are the best known nor on the most celebrated but on the many women who had power in collective, subversive, or other ways hidden from standard histories. We define “power” here as the ability to incite or drive change, to begin or support new endeavors, or to alter the status quo and established hierarchies, even if those actions are mostly unknown in a historiographical sense. In exploring this power, the authors in this collection engage with several larger topoi of feminist methodologies. Collectively, we re-examine primary sources in regard to women’s work in music, expanding our ideas of what primary sources are, and how we must re-engage with those sources using feminist and queer methodologies as well as critical race theory in order to overcome previous, biased readings of such sources. Musicology has always privileged certain kinds of scholarship, sources, and approaches, and has assigned valence based on a male-normative view, placing certain types of work above others. This means that the presence—or notable omission—of women in primary sources has often gone unstudied and unaccounted for. We navigate the conundrum in which work with music and gender has stood under two banners: that which claims that women had an advantage in music production because of their scarcity in the industry and yet at the same time deems them dilettantes. Finally, we seek to reveal the work of women who have, by societal pressure, personal circumstance, or preference, operated in the shadows of male stars.
“She Takes up Music as a Profession”: Women Organists in the Nineteenth-Century South
Authors: Bailey Candace
Published: January 2024

This essay examines several women musicians in Mobile, Alabama, and contextualizes their work in both antebellum and Reconstruction practices. In particular, it focuses on Maria Dillon Kowalewski-Poetz, an Irish woman who moved to the United States to follow her husband who seems to have abandoned her soon after their marriage in 1835. She set herself up as a singing teacher in Pensacola, Florida, during the 1840s but moved to Mobile in 1845, where she remained until her death in 1897. In Mobile, she created her own musical opportunities, transitioning from local music teacher to cathedral organist (1846) to head of the Mobile Musical Association in the 1870s. Kowalewski reinvigorated cultural life in the city after the Civil War.
Agnes Woodward’s Whistling School and White Women’s Musical Labor in the United States
Authors: Clark Maribeth
Published: January 2024

This essay considers Agnes Woodward’s development of the California School of Artistic Whistling, founded in 1909 to provide students structures to interpolate birdsong into their musical performances of songs, brief instrumental pieces, nature presentations, and readings. As director of this school, Woodward served as a mentor to countless young, middle-class women whistlers. Because of Woodward and the bird whistling method that she developed, and her commitment to mentoring young musicians, numerous women experienced artistic and financial success as public performers.
Women’s Compiled Scores in Early Film Music
Authors: Leonard Kendra Preston
Published: January 2024

Women from all classes across the United States were recognized as highly successful and effective composers and arrangers. In contemporary and later interviews and publications including The American Organist, Moving Picture News, and Moving Picture World, accompanists such as organists Rosa Rio and Alice Smyth-Jay and violinist Helen Ware describe composing motifs or themes for characters and events in silent films that they then used to create full scores for the motion pictures they accompanied. Industry insiders credited accompanist-composers who were deemed especially good at their jobs with the success of many theatres and for providing artistic excellence in the burgeoning medium. Women’s music for feature films, shorts, and newsreels served to suggest, shape, and help define the musical tastes of the time, to educate listeners, and to show how music could serve as a creative, narrative, and interpretative force in the cinema.
Housewives’ Choice?: Vera Lynn as Lady DJ in the 1950s and 1960s
Authors: Baade Christina
Published: January 2024

During the late 1950s, DJ assignments were written into singer Vera Lynn’s multi-year contract with the BBC, which also featured other popular singers (including women) as DJs. Between 1957 and 1959, Lynn aired over 50 times as a DJ in the Light Programme series Records at Six and Vera’s Evening Record Album, in which she played her own recordings and those of other similar performers. By examining the repertory, critical reception, and representations of Lynn as a singer-DJ, as found in BBC archival documents and contemporary press coverage, this chapter will yield insights into a little explored role for women in the music industry and complicate received narratives of postwar popular music culture.
Goldie and the Gingerbreads: A Case Study of the All-Girl Band in 1960s Rock ’n’ Roll
Authors: Greening Brittany
Published: January 2024

1963 saw Goldie and the Gingerbreads sign to Decca Records, marking the beginning of a tradition of all female rock ‘n’ roll bands that endures today. Despite their lack of hit singles, Goldie and the Gingerbreads are influential in the production of a space for women in rock ‘n’ roll, and their construction of an all-female musical group parallels the traditions of collectivism which would become prominent in second wave feminism. I argue that, while the impact of Goldie and the Gingerbreads is often overlooked by rock ‘n’ roll historians, the group in fact laid the groundwork for feminist practice and for female participation in the context of rock ‘n’ roll. Their influence can be seen directly in musical movements such as the female repurposing of early punk rock by groups such as the Slits and the Raincoats, and, consequently, in the Riot Grrrl movement.
Come Go with Me to Freedom Land: Black Women Musicians and the Unexplored Sonic History of the March on Washington
Authors: Kernodle Tammy
Published: January 2024

Through an examination of the performances of folksinger Odetta, concert artists Camilla Williams, Marian Anderson, and Eva Jessye, and gospel artist Mahalia Jackson at the MOW, this essay attempts to reclaim the unacknowledged and in some cases poorly documented aspects of the event in order to facilitate understanding of how black women musicians and their curation and performance of specific song repertories shaped the liberation ideology and public relations strategy of the black liberation movement. It draws on the work of activist, historian, and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon in illuminating how black women operate in the ritualized role of cultural worker who uses the black song traditions as a means of invoking the historical past in the present, while simultaneously nurturing the unrealized hope for the future.
Season to Taste
Authors: Smith Caroline J.
Published: January 2024

Between 2000-2010, many contemporary American women writers were returning to the private space of the kitchen, writing about their experiences in that space and then publishing their memoirs for the larger public to consume. Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women’s Food Memoirs explores women’s food memoirs with recipes in order to consider the ways in which these women are re-writing this kitchen space and renegotiating their relationships with food.Smith begins this book with an historical consideration of the way in the space of the kitchen, as well as the expectations of women associated with it, have shifted considerably since the 1960s. Better Homes and Gardens as well as the discourse of the Second Wave feminist movement tended to depict the space as a place of imprisonment. The contemporary popular writers examined in Season to Taste, such as Ruth Reichl, Kim Sunée, Jocelyn Delk Adams, Julie Powell, and Molly Wizenberg, respond to this characterization by instead presenting the kitchen as a place of transformation. In their memoirs and recipes, these authors reinterpret their roles within the private sphere of the home as well as the public sphere of the world of publishing (whether print or digital publication). The authors examined here explode the divide of private/feminine and public/masculine in both content and form and complicate the genres of recipe writing, diary writing, and memoir. These women writers, through the act of preparing and consuming food, encourage readers to reconsider the changing gender politics of the kitchen.
Design Challenge
Authors: Smith Caroline J.
Published: January 2024

Season to Taste begins by considering the way in which popular culture representations of the kitchen and cooking as well as the image of the housewife tends to privilege the experiences of white women. Chapter 1 focuses on the physical space of the kitchen, analyzing the ways in which its redesign over the past decades has mirrored middle to upper-class, white, US-American women’s changing roles. Better Homes and Gardens from 1960-2010 are analyzed. In the 1960s, the magazine placed more importance of the living spaces of the home while contemporary editions of the magazine prominently feature the kitchen. As its readers’ roles evolved, the private space of the kitchen became a more publicly enjoyed space, shifting to a more central location in the home and being occupied by family members other than the female head of the household.
“Lifting as They Climb”
Authors: Timreck Lee Ann
Published: January 2024

Lewis and Fuller used their sculpture as a platform against racial and gendered injustice, both through their imagery and their narrative. This chapter focuses on Lewis’s and Fuller’s personal experiences as Black women and the constraints of the nineteenth century “cult of true womanhood,” the challenges they faced in depicting Black womanhood in art, and the importance of their gendered visualization of the Black emancipation experience. Throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, Black women—regardless of their education, wealth, or class status—struggled under the twin burdens of race and gender discrimination. By contextualizing the imagery and narrative of each artist’ emancipation sculpture through a lens of nineteenth-century gender and race discrimination, the reader gains a broader historical understanding of the sacrifices and accomplishments made by Black women after emancipation.
The Velveteen Rabbit at 100
Authors: Fraustino Lisa Rowe
Published: January 2024

Across disciplines with vastly different methods, purposes, and audiences, The Velveteen Rabbit after 100 years in print continues to enrich popular, critical, and creative discourse around its famous question, “What is REAL?” The introduction touches the ways the story has been reproduced in popular culture before discussing relevant life details of its author, Margery Williams. A detailed middle section outlines the critical reception of the book and dialogues with the rather small body of academic scholarship existing on the text before this volume. The introduction ends with a summary of the thirteen essays and how they add contemporary perspectives to our understanding of the classic text.