bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Edu-capitalism and the governing of early childhood education and care in Australia, New Zealand and the United States
Authors: Smith Kylie , Tesar Marek , Myers Casey Y
Published: January 2016

This article examines the effects of edu-capitalism and neoliberal education policies across Australia, New Zealand and United States to disrupt hegemonic policy logic based on neutral human capital. Current frameworks, standards and assessment tools govern and control how early childhood educators see and assess children and in turn develop and implement pedagogy. Issues of gender, class and ethnicity are invisible with the assumption that all children who are offered high-quality early childhood programmes have equal opportunities to be productive and therefore successful citizens. Success can be understood through universal outcomes for children and markers of what quality teaching looks like for educators. This epistemological shutter renders race-, class- and gender-based privilege as invisible or non-existent. In doing so, dominant White Western understandings of the world drive what and who is marked as ‘success(ful)’, while non-Western knowledge continues to be seen as primitive, insignificant and in need of intervention. Through analysing policy text supported by the work of post-thinkers, the rethinking, re/imagining, and remapping of early childhood that this article performs do not offer consensus but make room for both problematizations of and possibilities within the contemporary concerns of different theoretical and geographical perspectives from Australia, New Zealand and United States.
Fatigue Alters Landing Shock Attenuation During a Single-Leg Vertical Drop Jump
Authors: Tamura Akihiro , Akasaka Kiyokazu , Otsudo Takahiro , Sawada Yutaka , Okubo Yu , Shiozawa Jyunya , Toda Yuka , Yamada Kaori
Published: January 2016

Background:

Landings in fatigue conditions are considered to be one of the factors that cause noncontact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. Additionally, it is known that fatigue alters lower extremity landing strategies and decreases the ability to attenuate shock during landing.

Purpose:

To determine characteristics of knee kinematics and shock attenuation during the landing phase of a single-leg vertical drop jump in a fatigued condition. The hypothesis was that knee kinematics during the landing phase of a single-leg vertical drop jump would demonstrate a significant difference between before and after fatigue.

Study Design:

Controlled laboratory study.

Methods:

Thirty-four college females participated in this experiment. They were randomly assigned to either the fatigue (n = 17) or control group (n = 17). The fatigue group performed the single-leg vertical drop jump before and after the fatigue protocol, which was performed on a bike ergometer. Knee kinematics data were obtained from the 3-dimensional motion analysis system. The ratio of each variable (%) was calculated, comparing the pre- to postfatigue protocol. Unpaired t tests were used to compare changes in kinematic variables between the fatigue-induced group and control group.

Results:

Peak knee flexion angular velocity increased significantly in the fatigue group (106.1% ± 8.0%) in comparison with the control group (100.7% ± 6.6%) ( P < .05). However, peak knee flexion angle and acceleration had no differences between each group. Peak knee adduction/abduction angle, velocity, and acceleration also had no differences between each group.

Conclusion:

Fatigue decreased the ability to attenuate shock by increasing angular velocity in the direction of knee flexion during single-leg drop jump landing. These findings indicate the need to evaluate the ability to attenuate shock by measuring knee flexion angular velocity when fatigue is considered.

Clinical Relevance:

Measuring knee angular velocity during landings might be an important evaluation parameter in the consideration of the knee injury prevention.
Distinct GAB2 signaling pathways are essential for myeloid and lymphoid transformation and leukemogenesis by BCR-ABL1
Authors: Gu Shengqing , Chan Wayne W. , Mohi Golam , Rosenbaum Joel , Sayad Azin , Lu Zhibin , Virtanen Carl , Li Shaoguang , Neel Benjamin G. , Van Etten Richard A.
Published: January 2016

Key Points

Scaffolding adaptor protein GAB2 is required for BCR-ABL1–evoked myeloid and lymphoid leukemogenesis. SHP2 and p85 binding to GAB2 activate distinct signaling pathways and are required differentially for myeloid and lymphoid leukemogenesis.
Polycomb-dependent epigenetic landscape in adult T-cell leukemia
Authors: Fujikawa Dai , Nakagawa Shota , Hori Makoto , Kurokawa Naoya , Soejima Ai , Nakano Kazumi , Yamochi Tadanori , Nakashima Makoto , Kobayashi Seiichiro , Tanaka Yuetsu , Iwanaga Masako , Utsunomiya Atae , Uchimaru Kaoru , Yamagishi Makoto , Watanabe Toshiki
Published: January 2016

Key Points

ATL involves genome-wide reprogramming of the H3K27me3 pattern that is distinct from other cell types. Druggable epigenetic mechanisms are associated with ATL cell development and HTLV-1–mediated transformation.
Deletion of Pten in CD45-expressing cells leads to development of T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma but not myeloid malignancies
Authors: Mirantes Cristina , Dosil Maria Alba , Hills David , Yang Jian , Eritja Núria , Santacana Maria , Gatius Sònia , Vilardell Felip , Medvinsky Alexander , Matias-Guiu Xavier , Dolcet Xavier
Published: January 2016

Key Points

CD45-driven expression of Cre generates the first mouse model that allows specific and exclusive deletion of Pten in hematopoietic cells. Pten deletion in CD45-expressing cells causes T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, but no other hematologic malignancies.
Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma patient-derived xenograft models capture the molecular and biological heterogeneity of the disease
Authors: Chapuy Bjoern , Cheng Hongwei , Watahiki Akira , Ducar Matthew D. , Tan Yuxiang , Chen Linfeng , Roemer Margaretha G. M. , Ouyang Jing , Christie Amanda L. , Zhang Liye , Gusenleitner Daniel , Abo Ryan P. , Farinha Pedro , von Bonin Frederike , Thorner Aaron R. , Sun Heather H. , Gascoyne Randy D. , Pinkus Geraldine S. , van Hummelen Paul , Wulf Gerald G. , Aster Jon C. , Weinstock David M. , Monti Stefano , Rodig Scott J. , Wang Yuzhuo , Shipp Margaret A.
Published: January 2016

Key Points

Our generated PDX models reflect the immunophenotypic, transcriptional, genetic, and functional heterogeneity of primary DLBCL. The experimental and analytical approach will inform the development of additional PDX models and facilitate preclinical drug discovery.
Assessment of k-mer spectrum applicability for metagenomic dissimilarity analysis
Authors: Dubinkina Veronika B. , Ischenko Dmitry S. , Ulyantsev Vladimir I. , Tyakht Alexander V. , Alexeev Dmitry G.
Published: January 2016

Background

A rapidly increasing flow of genomic data requires the development of efficient methods for obtaining its compact representation. Feature extraction facilitates classification, clustering and model analysis for testing and refining biological hypotheses. “Shotgun” metagenome is an analytically challenging type of genomic data - containing sequences of all genes from the totality of a complex microbial community. Recently, researchers started to analyze metagenomes using reference-free methods based on the analysis of oligonucleotides (k-mers) frequency spectrum previously applied to isolated genomes. However, little is known about their correlation with the existing approaches for metagenomic feature extraction, as well as the limits of applicability. Here we evaluated a metagenomic pairwise dissimilarity measure based on short k-mer spectrum using the example of human gut microbiota, a biomedically significant object of study.

Results

We developed a method for calculating pairwise dissimilarity (beta-diversity) of “shotgun” metagenomes based on short k-mer spectra (5≤k≤11). The method was validated on simulated metagenomes and further applied to a large collection of human gut metagenomes from the populations of the world (n=281). The k-mer spectrum-based measure was found to behave similarly to one based on mapping to a reference gene catalog, but different from one using a genome catalog. This difference turned out to be associated with a significant presence of viral reads in a number of metagenomes. Simulations showed limited impact of bacterial genetic variability as well as sequencing errors on k-mer spectra. Specific differences between the datasets from individual populations were identified.

Conclusions

Our approach allows rapid estimation of pairwise dissimilarity between metagenomes. Though we applied this technique to gut microbiota, it should be useful for arbitrary metagenomes, even metagenomes with novel microbiota. Dissimilarity measure based on k-mer spectrum provides a wider perspective in comparison with the ones based on the alignment against reference sequence sets. It helps not to miss possible outstanding features of metagenomic composition, particularly related to the presence of an unknown bacteria, virus or eukaryote, as well as to technical artifacts (sample contamination, reads of non-biological origin, etc.) at the early stages of bioinformatic analysis. Our method is complementary to reference-based approaches and can be easily integrated into metagenomic analysis pipelines.
IPLaminator: an ImageJ plugin for automated binning and quantification of retinal lamination
Authors: Li Shuai , Woodfin Michael , Long Seth S. , Fuerst Peter G.
Published: January 2016

Background

Information in the brain is often segregated into spatially organized layers that reflect the function of the embedded circuits. This is perhaps best exemplified in the layering, or lamination, of the retinal inner plexiform layer (IPL). The neurites of the retinal ganglion, amacrine and bipolar cell subtypes that form synapses in the IPL are precisely organized in highly refined strata within the IPL. Studies focused on developmental organization and cell morphology often use this layered stratification to characterize cells and identify the function of genes in development of the retina. A current limitation to such analysis is the lack of standardized tools to quantitatively analyze this complex structure. Most previous work on neuron stratification in the IPL is qualitative and descriptive.

Results

In this study we report the development of an intuitive platform to rapidly and reproducibly assay IPL lamination. The novel ImageJ based software plugin we developed: IPLaminator, rapidly analyzes neurite stratification patterns in the retina and other neural tissues. A range of user options allows researchers to bin IPL stratification based on fixed points, such as the neurites of cholinergic amacrine cells, or to define a number of bins into which the IPL will be divided. Options to analyze tissues such as cortex were also added. Statistical analysis of the output then allows a quantitative value to be assigned to differences in laminar patterning observed in different models, genotypes or across developmental time.

Conclusion

IPLaminator is an easy to use software application that will greatly speed and standardize quantification of neuron organization.
Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for multiple sclerosis: is it a clinical reality?
Authors: Bakhuraysah Maha M. , Siatskas Christopher , Petratos Steven
Published: January 2016

Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is a treatment paradigm that has long been utilized for cancers of the blood and bone marrow but has gained some traction as a treatment paradigm for multiple sclerosis (MS). Success in the treatment of patients with this approach has been reported primarily when strict inclusion criteria are imposed that have eventuated a more precise understanding of MS pathophysiology, thereby governing trial design. Moreover, enhancing the yield and purity of hematopoietic stem cells during isolation along with the utility of appropriate conditioning agents has provided a clearer foundation for clinical translation studies. To support this approach, preclinical data derived from animal models of MS, experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, have provided clear identification of multipotent stem cells that can reconstitute the immune system to override the autoimmune attack of the central nervous system. In this review, we will discuss the rationale of HSCT to treat MS by providing the benefits and complications of the clinically relevant protocols, the varying graft types, and conditioning regimens. However, we emphasize that future trials based on HSCT should be focused on specific therapeutic strategies to target and limit ongoing neurodegeneration and demyelination in progressive MS, in the hope that such treatment may serve a greater catchment of patient cohorts with potentially enhanced efficiency and lower toxicity. Despite these future ambitions, a proposed international multicenter, randomized clinical trial of HSCT should be governed by the best standard care of treatment, whereby MS patients are selected upon strict clinical course criteria and long-term follow-up studies of patients from international registries are imposed to advocate HSCT as a therapeutic option in the management of MS.
Central Nervous System–Toxic Lidocaine Concentrations Unmask L-Type Ca2+ Current–Mediated Action Potentials in Rat Thalamocortical Neurons: An In Vitro Mechanism of Action Study
Authors: Putrenko Igor , Ghavanini Amer A. , Meyer Schöniger Katrin S. , Schwarz Stephan K. W.
Published: January 2016

BACKGROUND:

High systemic lidocaine concentrations exert well-known toxic effects on the central nervous system (CNS), including seizures, coma, and death. The underlying mechanisms are still largely obscure, and the actions of lidocaine on supraspinal neurons have received comparatively little study. We recently found that lidocaine at clinically neurotoxic concentrations increases excitability mediated by Na+-independent, high-threshold (HT) action potential spikes in rat thalamocortical neurons. Our goal in this study was to characterize these spikes and test the hypothesis that they are generated by HT Ca2+ currents, previously implicated in neurotoxicity. We also sought to identify and isolate the specific underlying subtype of Ca2+ current.

METHODS:

We investigated the actions of lidocaine in the CNS-toxic concentration range (100 μM–1 mM) on ventrobasal thalamocortical neurons in rat brain slices in vitro, using whole-cell patch-clamp recordings aided by differential interference contrast infrared videomicroscopy. Drugs were bath applied; action potentials were generated using current clamp protocols, and underlying currents were identified and isolated with ion channel blockers and electrolyte substitution.

RESULTS:

Lidocaine (100 μM–1 mM) abolished Na+-dependent tonic firing in all neurons tested (n = 46). However, in 39 of 46 (85%) neurons, lidocaine unmasked evoked HT action potentials with lower amplitudes and rates of de-/repolarization compared with control. These HT action potentials remained during the application of tetrodotoxin (600 nM), were blocked by Cd2+ (50 μM), and disappeared after superfusion with an extracellular solution deprived of Ca2+. These features implied that the unmasked potentials were generated by high-voltage–activated Ca2+ channels and not by Na+ channels. Application of the L-type Ca2+ channel blocker, nifedipine (5 μM), completely blocked the HT potentials, whereas the N-type Ca2+ channel blocker, ω-conotoxin GVIA (1 μM), had little effect.

CONCLUSIONS:

At clinically CNS-toxic concentrations, lidocaine unmasked in thalamocortical neurons evoked HT action potentials mediated by the L-type Ca2+ current while substantially suppressing Na+-dependent excitability. On the basis of the known role of an increase in intracellular Ca2+ in the pathogenesis of local anesthetic neurotoxicity, this novel action represents a plausible contributing candidate mechanism for lidocaine’s CNS toxicity in vivo.
Daily cycle in oxygen consumption by the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis Stephenson
Authors: Maas Amy E. , Jones Ian T. , Reitzel Adam M. , Tarrant Ann M.
Published: January 2016

In bilaterian animals, the circadian clock is intimately involved in regulating energetic metabolism. Although cnidarians exhibit diel behavioral rhythms including cycles in locomotor activity, tentacle extension and spawning, daily cycles in cnidarian metabolism have not been described. To explore a possible circadian metabolic cycle, we maintained the anemone Nematostella vectensis in a 12 h light/dark cycle, a reversed light cycle, or in constant darkness. Oxygen consumption rates were measured at intervals using an optical oxygen meter. Respiration rates responded to entrainment with higher rates during light periods. During a second experiment with higher temporal resolution, respiration rates peaked late in the light period. The diel pattern could be detected after six days in constant darkness. Together, our results suggest that respiration rates in Nematostella exhibit a daily cycle that may be under circadian control and that the cycle in respiration rate is not driven by the previously described nocturnal increase in locomotor activity in this species.
Development of Novel Photocatalyst and Cocatalyst Materials for Water Splitting under Visible Light
Authors: Maeda Kazuhiko , Domen Kazunari
Published: January 2016

Overall water splitting using a semiconductor photocatalyst with sunlight has long been viewed as a potential means of large-scale H2 production from renewable resources. In general, the reaction can be accomplished when a photocatalyst is modified with a suitable cocatalyst that efficiently promotes water reduction. It is therefore essential to develop both photocatalysts and cocatalysts in harmony. Certain metal (oxy)nitrides are potential candidates as water-splitting photocatalysts because of their suitable band edge positions for water reduction/oxidation, small band gaps (<3 eV), and stability under irradiation. However, efficient water splitting using visible-light-responsive oxynitrides has still remained a challenge. This account describes our recent developments over the last 10 years of new oxynitrides as well as cocatalysts for overall water splitting under visible light.
Women’s Studies and Contingency: Between Exploitation and Resistance
Authors: Arrigoitia Melissa Fernández , Beetham Gwendolyn , Jones Cara E. , Nzinga-Johnson Sekile
Published: January 2016

We know the numbers: 76 percent of faculty in US universities is contingent. We are captivated by the viral news pieces—“Thesis Hatement,” “Academia’s Indentured Servants,” “Death of a Professor,” and “The PhD Now Comes with Food Stamps”—and we follow hashtags on Twitter—#NotYourAdjunctSidekick. But in what ways does women’s studies’ relatively precarious place within academia fit into these conversations? How do feminists working in a variety of disciplines reconcile their feminist labor politics with the need to grow their programs and departments under the edicts of the corporate university, particularly when relying upon contingent labor to do so? These questions were at the heart of three collectively organized sessions on feminist contingency at the 2014 annual National Women’s Studies Association Conference (NWSA) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the highlights of which are presented here. This article hopes that the lessons learned in this historic event—lessons about silence-breaking and collectivizing, but also about inequity, privilege, shame, and guilt—will be used in women’s studies classrooms, departmental meetings, and beyond, contributing to the growing conversation about this important issue, and perhaps even offering action steps toward solutions.
Sexual Divestments from Empire: Women’s Studies, Institutional Feelings, and the “Odious” Machine
Authors: Agathangelou Anna M. , Olwan Dana M. , Spira Tamara Lea , Turcotte Heather M.
Published: January 2016

This article provides a critical genealogy of the shifts and transformations in the field of women’s studies amid a longer trajectory of radicals and freedom fighters who have consistently challenged US empire and the co-opted elements of academic institutionalization. Conjoining archives of anti-colonial and Black feminist movements of the 1960s and ’70s with contemporary debates in feminist theory, the article argues that critiques of sexual empire that were often located within women’s studies have long laid the foundations for the most radical visions of sexual and gender revolution—movements generated through global militant anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, Black, and antiracist struggles of the mid-to-late-twentieth century. And yet, it is precisely such analyses and visions that have been consistently disciplined, devalued, and silenced within the academy, particularly through the institutionalization of women’s studies. This collective article challenges the institutional amnesia that comes with problematic promises of inclusion. It is simultaneously attentive to the corporeal effects of these histories on global landscapes and lives. It demystifies the violence and social stratifications inherent in the institutionalizations of the field. In so doing it lays bare the sharp contradiction between the logics of war and profit-making and the collective justice projects of decolonization, freedom, and revolution that compel our deepest dreams and desires for just futures.
Uneven Relationalities, Collective Biography, and Sisterly Affect in Neoliberal Universities
Authors: Gannon Susanne , Kligyte Giedre , McLean Jan , Perrier Maud , Swan Elaine , Vanni Ilaria , van Rijswijk Honni
Published: January 2016

This article deploys a collective biographical methodology as a political and epistemological intervention in order to explore the emotional and affective politics of academic work for women in neoliberal universities. The managerial practices of contemporary universities tend to elevate disembodied reason over emotion; to repress, commodify, or co-opt emotional and affective labor; to increase individualization and competition among academic workers; and to disregard the relational work that the article suggests is essential for well-being at work. The apparent marginalization of feminist and feminine ways of being, thinking, and feeling in academia is examined through close readings of three narrative vignettes, which are based on memories of the everyday academic spaces of meetings, workshops, and mentoring. These stories explore moments of the breaking of ties among women and between men and women, as well as document how feminist relationalities can bind and exclude. The article suggests that academic ties are both part of the problem and the solution to countering neoliberal policies, and that academic relationships, especially with other women, are often experienced as unrealized spaces of hope. Building on feminist scholarship about race and diversity, the article reflects on how relational practices like collective biography create both inclusions and exclusions. Nevertheless, it suggests that the methodology of collective biography might engender more sustainable and ethical ways of being in academic workplaces because it provides the resources to begin to create a new collective imaginary of academia.
Free Choice in the Responsum of Joseph Albo: The Case of the Katlanit
Authors: Weiss Shira
Published: January 2016

Joseph Albo’s sole surviving responsum reflects the interplay of philosophy and halakha in the late medieval era. Albo demonstrates innovation as he uses broader theological concepts, such as human free will, to impact his halakhic ruling. The article explores the reasoning behind Albo's ruling on the halakhic status of the katlanit ("murderous wife"), the twice widowed woman who seeks remarriage, a highly debated topic in the Middle Ages. According to the Talmud, such a widow was prohibited to remarry due to the assumption that she was in some way responsible for the deaths of her two late husbands, either due to her fortune (mazal) or health (ma‘ayan). The high mortality rate in the wake of the Black Death and intensified religious persecution in the fourteenth century increased the number of katlaniot. As a result, significant rabbinic leaders, (including Albo's teacher, Hasdai Crescas, whose responsum is no longer extant), applied innovation to their Talmudic interpretation and demonstrated leniency in their legal ruling in order to prevent such widows from being relegated to lives of solitude or from being forced to violate halakhic norms in order to procreate. Albo's responsum reflects the impact of philosophy upon halakha as he highlights the fundamental nature of free will as a Jewish value. He rules that a woman whose husband's death was not due to personal fate, but rather to mass martyrdom, the cause of which is free choice in contrast to mazal -- does not constitute the katlanit that the Talmud prohibited from remarrying, since the widow's mazal cannot be blamed.
The Taste of Conviviality: A Poem on Food by Leon Modena
Authors: Andreatta Michela
Published: January 2016

A survey of textual sources relating to Jewish eating habits in pre-modern Italy should also include a composition penned by the Venetian rabbi Leon Modena (1571-1648). Written on the occasion of the wedding of an affluent member of the Venetian community, the text humorously depicts, in verse, the dishes that—according to Modena—were served at the reception. Comprised of eight short units of verse, each devoted to a different dish and varying in length and meter, the composition reflects the assortment of food typical of festive occasions: delicacies like capon, duck, sausages and pastries are presented in an orderly sequence and their taste, texture, and shape are extolled. In a verbal display in which the gap between the real and the fictional table is annulled, some of the dishes even speak in the first person inviting the banqueters to enjoy the pleasures of commensality and dine heartily in honor of the bride and groom. Composed in a witty and punning language in which biblical and rabbinical allusions are masterfully mingled, Modena’s culinary epithalamium vividly captures a convivial occasion, thus casting light on the experience of fine dining in early modern Jewish Venice with its related social conventions and practices. By confirming the aesthetic value attributed to food in Jewish culture and its symbolic significance, Modena’s ‘menu in verse’ allows us to explore the ways in which food and poetry, both perceived as forms of art that bring pleasure and refinement, intersected, while being defined and conditioned by historical circumstances, cultural trends (meal- and food-related poetry was a common feature of Italian baroque literature), religious identity and social mores.
The Cognate Boost: A Study of Picture Naming across Proficiency Levels with L2 Learners of Russian
Authors: White A. Kate
Published: January 2016

The purpose of this study was to investigate the “cognate boost” in Russian. Based on the Revised Hierarchical Model of bilingual memory and the theory of nonselective language storage in bilinguals, it was assumed that cognates would facilitate the performance of L1 English learners of L2 Russian in a picture-naming task, though this effect would be modulated by proficiency level. Twenty-two college-level learners of Russian from two proficiency levels were asked to complete a picture-naming task in Russian. Half performed a task with cognates present and half without. An analysis of response time and accuracy showed that cognates facilitate the performance of lower proficiency speakers, while higher proficiency speakers are not affected. These results support the theories mentioned previously and show a cognate effect despite the differing orthographies of English and Russian. This paper presents the results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses and their implications for theories of language acquisition and storage.
Loving in the Iraq War Years
Authors: Stuelke Patricia R.
Published: January 2016

This article analyzes Alicia Erian’s fiction in relation to two entangled sets of wars: the 1980s US feminist Sex Wars, and pre– and post–9/11 US-Iraq Wars. While Erian’s early fiction dramatizes the affective experience of growing
“A Vast Holiday Frolic”: The Touristic Potential of Sherman’s March to the Sea
Authors: Knight Nadine M.
Published: January 2016

This article examines the writings of Union soldiers who participated in the Civil War campaigns of Sherman’s March to the Sea and his Carolinas campaigns. I argue that amidst the more mundane descriptions of the daily routines of military life—miles marched, the conditions of the food and the weather—some soldiers also took a keen pleasure in viewing Georgia and the Carolinas as a tourist destination. The soldiers’ use of touristic rhetoric reflects the significant cultural influence that nineteenth-century tourism had in the United States; more importantly, touristic rhetoric creates opportunities for praising a Southern landscape and culture from which slavery has been largely excised. These rhetorical strategies allow Sherman’s soldiers to downplay the destructiveness of their actions and pave the way toward reconciliation with the South after the war’s end.
The Tourist Gaze in the Spanish Civil War: Agnes Hodgson Between Surgery and Spectacle
Authors: Hanley Jane
Published: January 2016

International volunteers in the Spanish Civil War negotiated fraught aspects of modernity, including links between technology and violence, the ethics of transnational engagement, and the interconnection between national identity and changing roles for women. To understand their experiences they drew on existing knowledge of Spain and a range of interpretive frameworks available to understand their life in war. Agnes Hodgson was an Australian nurse who volunteered for the Republicans. Her experiences, recorded in her diary, reflect neither the politically committed volunteer’s disillusionment nor the romance of war as confirmation of masculinity present in other narratives. Hodgson uses a tourist gaze to frame parts of her journey, a strategy also employed by Australians in earlier conflicts. Tourism in war reveals aspects of wartime leisure while providing an alternative model for reconciling traumatic experiences. The fusion of the genre of war testimony, which fundamentally relates change, with the genre of travel narrative, which traditionally projects stasis, disrupts the prevailing tropes of both genres.
Saul Bellow on the Soul: Character and the Spirit of Culture in Humboldt’s Gift and Ravelstein
Authors: Salomon Willis
Published: January 2016

Saul Bellow’s fiction is decidedly philosophic, particularly as he celebrates depth of personhood in his characters while denigrating superficiality. The discursive action of this focus on personal depth involves the idea of soul, which, for Bellow, resonates in individual characters in his fiction as well as in the “character” of culture, usually viewed in historical decline, one of his preoccupations. This essay examines this dual understanding of soul — as a function of individual character and as the “character” of culture — in two of Bellow’s novels: Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and Ravelstein (2000). Both are concerned with the tension between the grandeur of art and ideas and the depredations of rising commercial culture in America. In Humboldt’s Gift , Bellow offers an initial view of the messy genius of a great intellectual, while in Ravelstein the persona of a great intellectual is fully developed and even more explicitly presented in terms of the relation between such “greatness of soul” and cultural and intellectual decline in late-capitalism. In both novels, an aesthetic of great personhood works through characterization, with “greatness” revealing itself metonymically as aestheticized relational energy and in the genius for seeing revealed essences. In the characters of Von Humboldt Fleisher and Abe Ravelstein, characters based on two of Saul Bellow’s teachers and intellectual heroes, Delmore Schwartz and Allan Bloom, Bellow explores a type of intellectual heroism, the loss of which, he believes, has severe, even catastrophic, cultural consequences.
Against Philosophy: Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous as Therapeutic Literature
Authors: Evron Nir
Published: January 2016

This essay examines the representation of philosophy in Yaakov Shabtai’s single completed novel, Past Continuous (1977). It argues that while Shabtai was evidently concerned with philosophy as an intellectual activity, and with the philosophizing intellectual as a social type, his novel — contrary to several influential interpretations — does not seek to impart a philosophical view. Rather, the novel’s close depiction of its characters’ intellectual preoccupations and obsessions is cautionary in intent: its aim is not to offer an all-encompassing theory of life but to warn its intellectual reader against the need to search for such a theory in the first place. The novel’s cautionary dimension affiliates it both with what Richard Rorty has described as the post-metaphysical tradition in twentieth-century thought — a mode of writing that he associates with the “therapeutic” works of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey — and with the age-old literary genre of anti-philosophical satire, as practiced by Aristophanes, Voltaire, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. After situating Past Continuous in these contexts, the essay proceeds to discuss the social-historical background that informed the novel’s early reception and influenced the prevalent critical tendency to philosophize its meaning.
“Recover the world that is buried under the debris of false description”: The Influence of Romantic Poetry on Saul Bellow’s Dean’s December
Authors: Sánchez-Canales Gustavo
Published: January 2016

The defense of the human being’s individuality is a major issue that Saul Bellow (1915-2005) addresses throughout his literary career. Worried by the pernicious effects that modern civilization exerts over the individual’s inner self, in Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and in The Dean’s December (1982) Bellow shows that the reconstruction of the inner self can only be accomplished through the imaginative mind or, in a romantic phrase, through the human being’s poetic genius.” This essay explorea the significance of this issue in The Dean’s December in light of William Blake’s “Then She Bore Pale Desire,” “London,” and “The Chimney Sweeper”; W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Long-Legged Fly”; and P. B. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and “England in 1819.” In a romantic manner, Bellow’s Albert Corde escapes from the city — a symbol of Blake’s “fallen world,” Yeats’s “dying generations” and “underclass,” and tyranny as expressed in Shelley’s sonnet — and, much like Bellow’s Augie March, Eugene Henderson, and Moses Herzog, ends up going to nature, epitomized by the Mt. Palomar observatory, in order to find his long-awaited peace of mind.
“Schooling in grief”: Effects of Suffering in Saul Bellow’s The Victim and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen
Authors: Flath James W.
Published: January 2016

Suffering is at the core of Jewish-American literature in general and in the fiction of Saul Bellow and Chaim Potok in particular. Bellow and Potok, affirmative writers who believe in man’s redemption through suffering, portray characters that evoke the Job-like “suffering man” whose endurance and faith in God are finally rewarded. “Schooling in grief,” a phrase borrowed from Bellow’s Herzog (1964), can also be applied to Bellow’s The Victim (1947) and Potok’s The Chosen (1967). The paper reads these two novels with the notion of the I/It and I/Thou relationship as explained in Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923). The characters in The Victim and The Chosen move from the I/It to the I/Thou encounter through suffering, which eventually leads towards mutual understanding and love for the other.
Enacting embodiment and Blue Muffins
Authors: Fraleigh Sondra
Published: January 2016

In this article, a dance of my imagining draws upon topics of embodiment, imperfection and lack of art, political art, implicatedness, boredom and being stupid. Questions of abstraction and records of thought hinge on discussions of disembodied movement, technology and performance. Key choreographic works include Blue Muffins; Bill T. Jones, GHOSTCATCHING; Troika Ranch, and Interactive Installations. Key sources include Susan Kozel’s Closer (2007); Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind (2012); and Francisco Varela’s, The Embodied Mind (1991). The article explains movement and stillness as bodily enactments that can be arrested and recorded in arts technologies. Such records become part of why we care to make art, and how we make it matter.
Shifting the self, intertwining the other: Exploring the potential of things in performance
Authors: Nuding Elise
Published: January 2016

This article draws on my experience of making and performing Shift, spin, warp, twine (2014) to explore the complex, messy relationship between people and things. Combining reflections on the practice with scholarship from a range of disciplines concerned with the study of material culture, it offers some thoughts on the potential of working with things in performance.
Towards a posthuman ethics: Moving with others in Karl Cronin’s Somatic Natural History Archive
Authors: Morris Michael J.
Published: January 2016

If the body is understood as a dynamic process of materialization, a becoming in relation to the world of which it is a part, then to engage with the movement behaviours of other forms of life is to orient the becoming of the body towards other ways of being in the world. Through its engagement with the movements and bodies of non-human plant and animal life, Karl Cronin’s Somatic Natural History Archive (SNHA) enacts a posthuman ethics, disrupting ‘the human’ with corporeal possibilities made available through the practice of embodiments derived from Cronin’s encounters with non-human others.
butoh 1.2.3…(wrecked beach)
Authors: Preece Bronwyn
Published: January 2016

A performer’s poems: written from the precarious and fragile, evocative alchemistic moments that butoh (re)presented for me…on this day, in and for that moment. Penned immediately following three consecutive day, outdoor events, these words capture my body-as-participant in Kokoro Dance’s 19th Annual Wreck Beach performances, Vancouver, Canada (July 2014). The poems chart the subtle fluidity and changing landscape – internally/externally – of each fresh performance. Performing in the waters of British Columbia’s west coast was particularly resonant following the Fukushima disaster (directly relating ‘our’ butoh back to its origins as a response to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) – and these poems capture in their essence one woman’s quest to understand and relate to the built and the meltdown of ‘environment’ through a somatically, embodied ecological perspective.

Embedded and woven through these lines are references specific to choreographic elements of the piece, the location, the timing and/or local Indigenous Musqueam legends….from the Argentina vs. Germany World cup, to the sand dunes, to Xe-ls, the Creator… their imbrication enlivens the congruency of what was birthed on the beach, and the particulars are designed to conflate our understanding of the potency (and urgency) demanded of our/this place and time. My poetry is movement, simultaneously holding within its lexicon a tension between understanding, applicability, the local and the universal. My poetry is a butoh dance open to your interpretation. I offer it as a gift….
Participation and spectatorship in Tino Sehgal’s These Associations
Authors: Hildebrandt Antje
Published: January 2016

These Associations (2012) by British-German artist Tino Sehgal was commissioned as the thirteenth, and final, artwork of the Unilever Series. It took place in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall between July and October 2012. As one of the people involved in the project and as a practice-based researcher, I am in a curious critical position: both deeply involved and immersed in the work, yet also striving to retain a degree of critical distance. From a methodological position I have the double privilege of ‘having been there’, not only as an observer, a spectator, a visitor, a viewer or an on-looker of the work but also as a participant in the work. In this article I take full advantage of the inside/outside perspective, proposing that it is possible to speak critically from within the art object.
Becoming plural: The distribution of the self in collaborative performance research
Authors: Colin Noyale
Published: January 2016

This article seeks to explore the shifting sense of identity experienced in collaborative choreographic practices. In this critical discussion I develop a concept of collaboration based upon my collaborative work in two specific practical enquiries. I reflect on how each practice accounts for a collaborative site of multiple selves; or better perhaps, I want to suggest that collaboration in dance research can on the one hand reveal the tension between self and other; and on the other hand it belongs to a process that tends towards the experience of a plurality of selves. The critique of the self as an individual entity is nothing new. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic view of subjectivity, for example, has permeated the discourse on collaboration in performance studies since the 1990s. However, the entanglement of digital and computational technologies with our human experience has further deepened the gap between the subject as a singular, unified individual and the sense of multiplicity expressed through computational-associated terms such as the networked or distributed self. If contemporary subjectivity is foremost relational, what might collaborative dance research illuminate in relation to distributed subjectivities? The essay considers the relationship between the plurality of self that I have experienced as a performer/choreographer engaged in (collaborative) practice as research and the specificity of process and product which has emerged out of these collaborations.
‘Our jolly marin wear’: The queer fashionability of the sailor uniform in interwar France and Britain
Authors: Stephenson Andrew
Published: January 2016

Examining autobiographies, letters, newspaper reports and photographs, this article argues that French sailor wear with its military exoticism and gender-blurring possibilities was adopted by fashionable metropolitan British and French groups in the interwar years as a recognizable signifier of an emerging gay and bisexual identity. The appropriation of the French military uniform by gay and bisexual men and by lesbians was tied, on the one hand, to their firsthand experience of travel to the Mediterranean coast, and to ideas about the Mediterranean ports as places of sexual liberalism and bohemianism that featured in contemporary ballet and the theatre. On the other hand, such promiscuous associations also drew upon popular mythologies about the sailor’s erotic appeal and his voracious sexual appetite that were circulating within contemporary French novels, the illustrated press, popular films and songs. As the appropriation of the naval uniform became visible in photographs documenting its growing fashionability in gay clubs, fancy dress balls and parties in Paris and London, sailor wear registered as queerly resonant to its wearers and admirers, leading to the French sailor becoming a recognizable and much-admired promiscuous gay icon.
Fashion brands and gay/lesbian-inclusive advertising in the USA
Authors: Chae Yoori , Kim Yumin , Johnson Kim K. P.
Published: January 2016

Within the United States general attitudes towards gays and lesbians (GL) are rapidly undergoing change. Several researchers have previously documented that heterosexual consumers respond negatively to advertisements featuring same-sex couples. At this critical juncture, it is important to reexamine consumer response to fashion advertisements featuring GL images. Using a small qualitative study (n = 10) and an experiment (n = 202) our research purpose was to determine whether consumer attitude towards advertisements, brand attitude, brand distinctiveness and/or brand attractiveness varied based on the level of inclusiveness of GL images (i.e. GL-inclusive vs. non-inclusive). Results from the qualitative project demonstrated most participants responded positively to the advertisements featuring GL images although two participants were worried about unidentified ‘negative’ influences on the sexual orientation of heterosexual viewers. The inclusiveness level of GL images did not negatively influence attitude towards the advertisements or brand attitude. Rather, GL-inclusive advertising resulted in higher ratings of brand distinctiveness and attractiveness as compared to the non-inclusive advertising. Implications and limitations of this study as well as suggestions for future research are discussed.
Dilapidated Dwelling
Authors: Keiller Patrick
Published: January 2016

Where I live, there seem to be two kinds of space. There is new space, in which none of the buildings are more than about ten years old, and there is old space, in which most of the buildings are at least twenty years old, a lot of them over ninety years old, and all are more or less dilapidated.

Patrick Keiller begins his 1998 essay The Dilapidated Dwelling with a concise and simple description of the issues he raises in both the essay and the film to which it relates, The Dilapidated Dwelling, 2000. In both film and word Keiller’s description of the UK’s physical infrastructure at the turn of the millennium was both depressingly evident and in need of explanation. Continuing in the vein of his most famed films London, 1994, and Robinson in Space, 1997, The Dilapidated Dwelling is narrated by an invisible voice that probes the peculiarities of the economic, political and social conditions of late 20th century Britain through the prism of its infrastructure, urban blight and, in particular, its housing.

The narrator, a woman is recalled to Britain after two decades in the Arctic investigates ‘the predicament of the house’, discovering that the most recent advances in industrial manufacture have left the house building industry practically untouched. By contrast, changes to the global economy and the emergence of the digital age have conspired to create wealth that has seen the market price of the existing, dilapidated housing stock skyrocket. Revisiting the ideas of Constant, Buckminster Fuller and Archigram she discusses the anomalies of housing supply and demand that have allowed some to escape housing poverty and yet leave millions in ‘dilapidated dwellings’.

To coincide with the the launch of its three year project Housing – Critical Futures, Architecture, Media, Politics, Society, is republishing Keiller’s essay and re-showing his film. The essay is reprinted from Keiller’s recent book, The View From the Train, Vesro, 2013; and the film is shown as part of a one day series of film screenings and debates about the effects of housing on issues of public health, Housing, Health and Film. Screened at the Bluecoat Chambers Art Gallery, Liverpool, the film is accompanied by debates from architects, filmmakers and public health officials.