bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Innovation” Discourse and the Neoliberal University: Top Ten Reasons to Abolish Disruptive Innovation
Authors: Newfield Christopher
Published: May 2020

Innovation is a core neoliberal economic strategy, and the research university is a privileged site for its incubation and practice. Most senior university officials believe that the university’s stature, funding, and fate depend on maintaining its reputation as a primary innovation source and look to purge elements that do not appear to fit that purpose. This chapter argues that this neoliberal policy agenda is, in effect, fighting the latest and possibly the last economic war. The chapter begins with a brief intellectual history of innovation as a business concept, focusing on the development and influence of Clayton Christensen’s innovation theory. It then offers a critical analysis of the role of innovation in the contemporary global research university. In turn, it presents the argument of Giovanni Arrighi and others that the “Western development pathway” has reached a hard limit. Finally, the chapter posits that the sustainable, post-neoliberal economy-to-come will depart from the current pathway by replacing energy-intensive technology with skilled and educated labor.
“How Kind of You to Recognize Me”
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: May 2020

The book begins autobiographically with Cassin recounting how, as a young Hellenist starting to make her name in the early 1970s in Paris, she had been recommended to Lacan to help him get a better understanding of the Presocratics and went on to meet him once a fortnight for several months.Not convinced he in fact understood anything of what she tried to explain to him, the sessions ended quite abruptly in a somewhat comical scene of misrecognition.This missed encounter nonetheless acknowledges the transformative impact Lacanian psychoanalysis would have on Cassin’s approach to philology and philosophy and sets the scene for the rest of the book.
The Presence of the Sophist in Our Time
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: May 2020

Cassin distinguishes between the way Freud read the Greeks, reinterpreting their great myths in allegorical fashion, and Lacan’s more nuanced attention to the philosophical arguments, notably of the Sophists and Presocratics, and their understanding of language, speech, or logos. As Lacan says, “The psychoanalyst is a sign of the presence of the sophist in our time, but with a different status,” and Jacques the Sophistbecomes an extended commentary on this sentence.Sophistry is often presented as philosophy’s negative alter ego, its bad other, yet the two are shown to be inextricably bound together. Cassin uses the term “logology,”coined by Novalis, to connect the shared approach of both Lacan and the Sophists to language, which becomes uncoupled from universal truth as an Aristotelian frame of reference.
Logos-Pharmakon
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: May 2020

Pointing to the ambivalence of pharmakon as both poison and remedy, this chapter explores the long tradition of the curative or reparative powers of language, from the sophists through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa. The extended reading of Gorgias’sEncomium of Helen shows his dramatic performance as “the first pharmaceutical performance,” since as he talks he produces a new, eternally praiseworthy Helen. Likewise, the TRC is read as a form of psychoanalysis at the level of the nation which is inscribed within a tradition of discursive therapy that goes from sophistry to psychoanalysis, via catharsis. It is less concerned with truth as “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” whether it be historical, judicial or individual, but in producing “enough truth” to build the rainbow nation.
Sense and Nonsense, or Lacan’s Anti-Aristotelianism
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: May 2020

At stake in this chapter is a reading of Lacan and the Sophists as sharing a common and radical challenge to the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction (something “cannot be and not be at the same time”). This is what Cassin has elsewhere theorized as the Aristotelian “decision of meaning,” or logos as an operation of exclusion of its “bad others,” including polysemy, homonymy, and nonsense.Equivocation becomes for Cassin, as it is for Lacan, not simply one aspect among others of language (and by extension, of translation), but its very condition of possibility. Through a detailed reading of key sections of Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud and Lacan are, when read in the light of Aristotle and in terms of this decision of meaning, seen as perhaps first and foremost Sophists.
Secularism: The Golden Lie
Authors: Ward Graham
Published: May 2020

In contemporary rhetoric, secularism, modernity, and atheism are invoked as the end of a linear narrative of historical progress, but with the anthropological insights of Bruno Latour regarding scientific atheism, Graham Ward argues that secularism and modernity are abstract, mythological concepts, a “golden lie” upon which the modern state is built (as in Plato’s Republic). Latour recognized the exclusion of the concept of “God” in scientific investigation, while at the same time scientists raised the level of “fact” to that which is absolutely true (i.e., outside of time and space). In a similar way, the demythologizing project of the Enlightenment sought to exclude religious traditions and history from the modern, secular state, but in the process, it developed a new mythology of the anti- or a-religious that began circa 1500. Instead, the basic concepts of this worldview, such as the “immanent frame,” the “buffered self,” disenchantment, and “exclusive humanism” imply their own falsehood. Even the French laicité has shifted from an antagonism toward religion to an attempted neutrality for the sake of inclusivity and the bureaucratic state.
The Secular Pilgrimage of Orthodoxy in America
Authors: Guroian Vigen
Published: May 2020

With the notable exception of the Russian mission in Alaska, for the most part the Orthodox Church did not come to America as mission but followed its people’s departure from the homeland, often under extremities of war, social upheaval, or natural disaster. There was no preparation for coming here. They left behind historical Orthodox cultures and were immersed immediately into a society that the Orthodox faith had no role in shaping, a secular society that bafflingly was also religious, though not in any familiar way. Through conversation with theologians and public intellectuals like Schmemann, Parsons, Herberg, Berger, and Berry, this essay first traces the lineage of secularism back to Christianity. The unmooring of virtue from the transcendent, more specifically from the salvific sacrifice of Christ, has yielded secularism as a “step-child” of Christianity. In response, many Orthodox Americans turn to ethnic identity as a means of imbuing daily life with the faith. This, however, is more a sign of a dying church than a means of sustaining its life. The challenge is to renew a sense of the sacred, a liturgical worldview, within the pluralism of American society.
A Secularism of the Royal Doors: Toward an Eastern Orthodox Christian Theology of Secularism
Authors: Gallaher Brandon
Published: May 2020

The opposites, sacred and secular, are in an ‘original’ or ‘polemical unity’ in Christ and do not have their reality except in Him in a polemical attitude toward one another bearing witness in this way to their common reality and unity in the God-Man. History’s movement consists of divergence and convergence from and toward Him. One cannot, therefore, understand secularism and the secular and secularization apart from the fact that the secular is what is continuously being accepted and becoming accepted by God in Christ. Influenced by the work of Bonhoeffer, Bulgakov, and Richard Kearney and invoking Orthodox liturgy and iconography, Gallaher points to a church that images Christ and the Trinity by manifesting itself in kenosis. He argues for a move from an Orthodox anti-secularism that simply denounces and shakes its fist at the West to a positive Orthodox theology of secularism that tries to see how Orthodoxy might witness boldly to Christ in the modern pluralistic and secular West.
Fundamentalists, Rigorists, and Traditionalists: An Unorthodox Trinity
Authors: Appleby R. Scott
Published: May 2020

Living with paradox and uncertainty is inevitable for those who are ordered and mastered by the God who is Absolute Mystery. Fundamentalism is not a traditional religious way of being, nor is it an orthodox mode of religiosity. Educated and formed epistemologically under the banner of techno-scientific modernity, fundamentalist actors approach religion with a rational and instrumental view. In response to their modern anxiety, they turn to absolutism, dualism, and millennialism to persuade their secular and religious peers of the urgency of the situation for religion in the world. Indeed, the fundamentalist mode of religiosity in the twenty-first century is critically engaged with secularism. The antidote to fundamentalism, then, is stubborn, principled and creative fidelity to the religious tradition in all its mystery, complexity, nuance, fluidity, and richness. Therefore, the retrospective emphasis on tradition of Orthodox and Catholic Christians makes “fundamentalism” a non-starter. Instead, Appleby argues that we may more accurately speak of “rigorists” and “traditionalists” among the Orthodox, which movements have been marked by their rejection of modernity and not just selective use or rejection of modern ideas and technologies.
“Orthodoxy or Death”: Religious Fundamentalism during the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Authors: Asproulis Nikolaos
Published: May 2020

This essay first contextualizes the question of the relationship between the religious and secular aspects of contemporary Greece that lies behind of any discussion of fundamentalism. It is important to note that the Greek case looks quite different from other Western societies. Despite the (external) change or progress in various aspects of institutions or daily life, religiosity remains high in Greece, and the religio-political identity of Greek Orthodoxy has allowed the Church to maintain a voice in the public square. This study then provides a brief overview of the main aspects of religious fundamentalism (e.g., reactivity, selectivity, inerrancy, moral Manicheanism) in contemporary Greece, and it concludes by describing the basic contours of an Orthodox secular theology—focusing on the incarnation, eschatology, unity of truth, and the modern existential concern—that offer a response to the current state of this Orthodox fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism as a Preconscious Response to a Perceived Threat
Authors: Mayer Wendy
Published: May 2020

Fundamentalisms bear a family resemblance for a reason, and that reason lies in the human brain. Using cognitive theories of morality, many of the features of fundamentalisms can be shown to be independent of religion. They are triggered rather by largely automatic moral intuitions, which elicit specific social behaviors. This helps to explain why fundamentalisms are not specific to transcendental religions or in particular to monotheisms but develop across a wide variety of religions. What the individual religion contributes is, for the most part, what specific values it holds sacred. In this respect, if in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity tradition is, in itself, a sacred value, in fundamentalisms tradition is something that is appealed to for authority, as well as subjected to reduction, rewritten, and coopted. This research suggests that fundamentalism is something larger than a purely modern phenomenon. In demonstrating that the reactivity of fundamentalisms is triggered by threats to the sacred rather than secularization itself, it opens up the way to exploring the phenomenon in the longue durée across a significantly larger range of historical periods and cultures.
Bergsonism in the Thought of Léopold Sédar Senghor
Authors: Diagne Souleymane Bachir
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the role of Bergson’s thought in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s philosophy of Negritude, showing how the distinction between modes of perception made by Bergson is integral to Senghor’s characterization of African art. For Senghor, Bergson’s distinction between modes of knowing and perception (an analytic, separating intelligence versus a comprehending or synthetic intelligence) is translated into the distinction between the “reason-eye” characteristic of Western aesthetic perception and the “reason-embrace” integral to the full experience of African art. Recognizing that this distinction between modes is between “two depths of the soul” rather than “two [fundamentally different] souls” not only defends Senghor’s thought against accusations that it is the unacknowledged reprisal of French philosopher and anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s theories of primitive mentality, but also leads away from a relatively common view of this thought as reductively essentializing.
Senghor’s African Socialism
Authors: Diagne Souleymane Bachir
Published: May 2020

This chapter is devoted to Senghor’s political writings, showing what Senghor—as a statesman—owes to Bergson’s thought, an influence that occurs largely through the work of French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, himself strongly influenced by Bergson. In Teilhard de Chardin and Bergson’s work, Senghor finds the Marxist humanist framework for his theory of “African socialism”: a vitalist, spiritualist vision of society in which Bergsonian élan vital, Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of cosmogenesis,and a Marxist version of total liberation from the forces of alienation combine to bring about a true humanism. At the moment of decolonization in Africa, this vision shapes the contours of Senghor’s ideas for the planning and organization of the newly independent nations.
Time and Fatalism
Authors: Diagne Souleymane Bachir
Published: May 2020

This chapter takes up G.W. Leibniz’s formulation of Islamic thought as a philosophy of fatalism: fatum mahometanum,or Turkish (or Islamic) fatalism. Against the prejudice that Islam is a doctrine of absolute predestination, founded on a cosmology of a closed work in which the future is already determined, this chapter shows Iqbal’s Quranic cosmology as a continuously emerging universe, open to the creative action of the human individual. Bergson’s philosophy, in its revolutionary reconfiguration of time as duration, is essential to the thought of such a cosmology; in this, Bergsonian thought allows an escape from the binds of fate and predestination and bears a deep affinity with the version of Islamic thought advanced by Iqbal.
Affectivity
Authors: Gschwandtner Christina M.
Published: May 2020

Chapter 5 focuses on the role of emotion, affect, mood, and disposition in liturgical experience. It briefly considers the ambivalent role pathos plays in the tradition and then goes on to focus on the ways in which liturgy shapes certain kinds of affective dispositions, such as compassion, peace, and joy. It also considers the role liturgical models play in this.
Conclusion
Authors: Gschwandtner Christina M.
Published: May 2020

This book has attempted to give a substantive account of liturgical practice in a particular religious tradition, that of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The hope was that paying close attention to the “lifeworld” of a specific tradition would help us to ascertain its structures more easily without the kind of abstraction often practiced in the (philosophical) study of religion while also not remaining at a purely empirical level.
The Philosophers' Gift
Authors: Hénaff Marcel
Published: May 2020

When it comes to giving, philosophers love to be the most generous. For them, every form of reciprocity is tainted by commercial exchange. In recent decades, such thinkers as Derrida, Levinas, Henry, Marion, Ricoeur, Lefort, and Descombes, have made the gift central to their work, haunted by the requirement of disinterestedness. As an anthropologist as well as a philosopher, the author of this book worries that philosophy has failed to distinguish among various types of giving. This book returns to Mauss to reexamine these thinkers through the anthropological tradition. Reciprocity, rather than disinterestedness, the book shows, is central to ceremonial giving and alliance, whereby the social bond specific to humans is proclaimed as a political bond. From the social fact of gift practices, the book develops an original and profound theory of symbolism, the social, and the relationship between self and other, whether that other is an individual human being, the collective other of community and institution, or the impersonal other of the world.
Introduction
Authors: Hillewaert Sarah
Published: May 2020

Through the discussion of a religious sermon, this chapter introduces readers to the intersections of ethical self-fashioning, semiotics, and modernity and how these play out in the context of Lamu. Setting up the theoretical framework of the book, it provides insights into anthropological approaches to everyday Islam, questions of morality and modernity, and the linguistic anthropological angle from which this book approaches these issues. The introduction further situates Lamu within Kenyan and transnational politics by highlighting current events that shape outsiders’ perception of Lamu and by providing a short historical overview of the relation between Lamu and the Kenyan mainland.
Reframing Morality through Youthful Voices
Authors: Hillewaert Sarah
Published: May 2020

Chapter Four analyzes the interactional practices of young Lamu residents in a variety of contexts. Particularly, it looks at how young people are able to differently present themselves by drawing upon a broad linguistic repertoire and upon their awareness of the evaluation of different language varieties. For example, a young Swahili woman, in an attempt to speak with authority, shifts between English-infused Standard Swahili and local Swahili dialects when addressing her peers or elders respectively. The chapter thus shows how young people use linguistic tactics to negotiate new social positions, but also how a moral narrative of modernity can be linked to or mediated within linguistic practices. The analysis simultaneously raises the question of reception and whether young people’s strategic self-positionings are always successful.
Senses of Morality and Morality of the Senses
Authors: Hillewaert Sarah
Published: May 2020

Non-verbal communication, while never separate from verbal communication, has a distinct signifying value in the context of Lamu. Because the exchange of verbal greetings carries implications for an individual’s respectability, individuals frequently rely on non-verbal language to communicate while in public. Chapter Five therefore looks at how material practices and the moving body are implicated in the negotiation of social change and the emergence of new social positionings. It examines how young men and women in Lamu differently use material and bodily practices—e.g. stride, walking route, hand greetings, gaze, clothing—to gradually redefine norms of proper conduct and social status. A closer look at young women’s use of handshakes, the ethnographic vignette of a young female professional accused of immoral conduct, and the story of a beach boy who becomes a local politician illustrate the different means through which young people negotiate a respectful positions within the Lamu community. The theoretical discussion in this chapter focuses on gender, material practice, and the moving body in relation to ideologies of moral personhood and notions of modernity.
Epilogue
Authors: Hillewaert Sarah
Published: May 2020

The conclusion returns to debates about globalization, global Islam, and global terror, but links these overall concerns to the everyday lives of young Muslims in Lamu. This book challenges portrayals that concentrate on young Muslims’ supposed conflicting engagements with Western modernity. The conclusion therefore does not reflect upon “Islam and the West” and its transpiration in young people’s lives, but rather considers the moral urgency that underlies discussions of self-fashioning and embodiment in contexts of rapid change. The detailed discussion of language and self-fashioning that formed the focus of the book sought to provoke broader discussions of ethical living in contexts of change. The conclusion reflects upon how self-fashioning is always also a political project, whereby young people position themselves locally but also translocally in relation to a range of “others.” The ambiguity of social evaluations, and the uncertainity as to how “others” evaluate young people’s everyday practices, forms a central focus of this discussion.
The Doctor and Mrs. A.
Authors: Pinto Sarah
Published: May 2020

In the years leading up to India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman known to us only as Mrs. A., ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new and “Oriental” method of dream analysis. Her analysis, which appeared in a case self-published by Satya Nand, included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. She turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements. The stories of Draupadi and Shakuntala, from the Mahabharata, and Ahalya, from the Ramayana, helped her envision a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. This book is an exploration of Mrs. A.’s case, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways her case put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ethical ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a concept of “counter-ethics” and from a position that sees ethics as plural in both content and form. Following Mrs. A. in pursuing mythic narratives and turning in its conclusion to art as a guide for theorizing, this book asks what perspectives on gender, power, meaning, and imagination are possible from the position of the counter-ethic and its orientation toward movement and change.
Unconsciousness and Voice
Authors: Pinto Sarah
Published: May 2020

There are blind spots in Mrs. A.’s musings. One of these concerns her maid, who endured traumas Mrs. A. witnessed as a child. Sexual treachery and violence are undercurrents in the case, rising to the surface as matters of judgment and dismissal. While there is little that can be known definitively about the maid’s experience, there is ample material from medicine and law to situate her story. This material connects sexual violation to ruptured consciousness in the form of symptoms—fainting, catatonia, and muteness. It connects with Hindu mythic resources that appear in Mrs. A.’s case as a different kind of testimony than memory, in which women speak righteously about violation and fall unconscious in its wake. These suggest a counter-ethic at the limits of the ways consciousness might be a ground for ethical practice, in the limitations of Mrs. A.’s class consciousness and in the figuring of consciousness in medical histories beyond the case. Ahalya, an ambiguous heroine from epic and folk narrative who was cursed for being violated, is a quiet presence in Mrs. A.’s case. But alongside the maid and contemporary cases, she adds the counter-ethical possibility of unconsciousness as a state of ethical repair.
Introduction
Authors: Ford James Edward
Published: May 2020

The introduction offers several vignettes to mark the limits of Marx’s conceptualization of the slave, Agamben’s concept of the decision in states of emergency, and Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman’s unacknowledged connection to “European Man” as the image of thought producing their idea of trauma. Each vignette looks beyond these limits by turning to a different canonical work of Black thought. By staging these encounters between different theoretical traditions, the terms and presuppositions for a different understanding of trauma can commence. This introduction concludes with a call to return to the idea of the proletariat in Marxian and Marxist thought, precisely because it offers a more expansive approach for grappling with class exploitation and political disfranchisement than the concept of the working class, as the following notebooks will demonstrate.
Down by the Riverside
Authors: Ford James Edward
Published: May 2020

Notebook 1 argues for the centrality of movement to Richard Wright’s lesser-known novella “Down by the Riverside,” which is inspired by the labor conflicts of the Delta and the 1927 flood. An analysis of Wright’s fiction and historical documents reveals how labor conditions limited economic solidarity among the indebted. However, the flood also reveals the critical consciousness that evolved among the indebted who eventually became refugees in the relief camps. Despite the tragic story Wright tells, he offers readers a glimpse of the Event, wherein fear and guilt are broken and no longer paralyze the oppressed into inaction. Notebook 1 not only attends to the brilliance of Wright’s fiction before Native Son. It also goes beyond Wright’s story to show the debates that developed in Black newspapers over the proper objectives and strategies for reconstructing the Delta after the flood, which echoes the sabotaged need for Reconstruction decades after the Civil War.
Conclusion
Authors: Ford James Edward
Published: May 2020

Thinking Through Crisis argues for the 1930s as a crucial instance of black writing that rethinks the agency irrupting from traumatization. Ford seeks to recalibrate cultural theory’s relation to the practical, exploring the relation between theory and practice by focusing on the work of Barbara Christian and Hortense Spillers.
A Desire Called America
Authors: Haines Christian P.
Published: May 2020

A Desire Called America examines the relationship between American exceptionalism and U.S. literature. It focuses on how literary works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William S. Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon draw on the utopian energies of American exceptionalism only to overturn exceptionalism’s investments in capitalism and the nation-state. The book analyzes what it terms the excluded middle between American exceptionalism and its critique, or the conceptual and libidinal space in which critique and complicity mutually determine one another. The book also offers a theory of the relationship between biopolitics and utopia, arguing that in the context of American literature, bodies become figures for alternative forms of social life. It pays particular attention to how these figures contribute to a literary commons, or the imagination of non-capitalist forms of cooperation and non-sovereign forms of democratic self-governance. In doing so, it articulates a model of literary history linking nineteenth-century literature to contemporary literature by way of the rise and decline of American hegemony. The book draws on and contributes to the fields of American Studies, American literary history, Marxist criticism, queer theory, political theory, continental philosophy, and utopian studies.
Jesus’s Dazzling Garments
Authors: Urbano Arthur P.
Published: May 2020

In his exegesis of the Transfiguration account in the Commentary on Matthew, Origen of Alexandria presents Jesus’s transfigured robes as a medium of revelation: to the disciples who witnessed the event and to the Christian interpreter. By contemplating Jesus’s garments, the latter will discover revealed knowledge on the nature of Christ and of the scriptures. This chapter examines Origen’s exegesis through the lens of what Roland Barthes called “written-clothing,” an infusion of garments with definitive value through descriptions and associations that make them signifiers of cultural values. Utilizing a “poetics of clothing” that highlights the color and fabric of Jesus’s robes while associating them with significant temporal, spatial, and historical markers rooted in Scripture and philosophy, Origen enhances the textual spectacle of Jesus’s garments. Moreover he constructs a cognitive model of written-clothing that at once verbalizes Jesus’s garments and “garmentizes” the Scriptures. In the end Origen creates an understanding of Jesus’s robes that transports the reader into contemplation of the incarnate Christ.
Conversing with Clothes
Authors: Arentzen Thomas
Published: May 2020

How should one address a piece of fabric? And what can holy clothes do? The Constantinopolitan patriarch Germanos I (ca. 650–742) wrote a homily, which he probably delivered next to the relic of the Virgin’s belt in Chalkoprateia. This chapter explores his verbal interaction with the holy cloth, what actions he expected it to preform, and the way he envisioned it to act and react. Clothes are not just any kind of matter; by virtue of their proximity to the human body, garments form a border category between human and non-human. Thus the study relates to the wider question of how the Byzantines understood non-human matter—not least holy matter—to behave, and in what way things were granted some kind of agency.
A School for the Soul
Authors: Falcasantos Rebecca Stephens
Published: May 2020

According to John Chrysostom, a proper Christian life both limits exposure to dangerous stimuli and redirects the natural impulses of mimēsis (imitation) toward the rituals of the Church. This chapter examines the importance of mimēsis within Chrysostom’s thought for properly educating the soul and developing Christian habits. Because, for Chrysostom, the soul as a malleable substance is subject to the impressions of the body’s external environment, it must be carefully guarded against all corrupting influences, particularly the wrong types of bodily practices that threaten the person’s salvation. In his homiletic activity, Chrysostom offers to provide just this type of protection by relying heavily on a rhetoric of disgust and pleasure in order to draw his audience away from the dangers of the world and entice them toward a virtuous life, present first and foremost in the Church and its scriptures.
A Question of Character
Authors: Krawiec Rebecca
Published: May 2020

The similarity of the accounts of monk’s lives, and the function of this homogeneity, in Theodoret of Cyrrus’s Religious History has been the focus of much scholarship on this work. This chapter applies the concept of character from literary theory to these accounts to add an analysis of how, even within the generic elements of the texts, each monk also has a particular individuality. Since Theodoret presents his text as “preventive medicine,” these monks can also be compared to figures in Galen’s medical case studies, such that monasticism provides a means to a new health. Finally, paying attention to the role of character draws attention to other non-human characters, animals and even God, that Theodoret uses to teach monasticism. Altogether, the History shows the many ways to attain holiness even as all monks share the same human soul.
“I Want to Be Alone”
Authors: Jacobs Andrew S.
Published: May 2020

How do we resolve the paradox of ascetic withdrawal with the extravagant and highly public fame of certain ascetic holy men and women? This essay applies current celebrity cultural studies to explore the construction, dissemination, and commodification of early Christian saints, taking the signal case of Simeon the Elder (also known as the Stylite), whose three vitae demonstrate the paradoxical sources and effects of saintly celebrification in late antiquity.
Crowds and Collective Affect in Romanos’s Biblical Retellings
Authors: Frank Georgia
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the role of internal groupings within the biblical episodes retold in Romanos the Melodist’s (ca. 555) hymns (or, kontakia). Performed for liturgical festivals, these sung sermons allowed congregations to sing along with various biblical groups, whether the three youths in the furnace, the magi, Herod’s army, the Ninevites, or Jesus’s disciples. Shaped by recent work on the collective voices in Greek tragedy, this essay considers how groups allowed congregations to share in the emotional world of the biblical characters, sing for those silenced by ignorance or cowardice, and sing to repent with sinners and repudiate villains.
Christian Legend in Medieval Iraq
Authors: Saint-Laurent Jeanne-Nicole Mellon
Published: May 2020

This essay analyzes a medieval Persian martyrdom text Mar Behnam and Sarah and shows how this story used themes of kinship and sacrifice to add prestige to the lineage of the Syrian Orthodox community of northern Iraq.
Gregory of Nazianzus’s Poetic Ascetic Aesthetic
Authors: Rebillard Suzanne Abrams
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that the texts of Gregory of Nazianzus’s ascetic poetry can be read as active transformers of the audience rather than as “bodies” transformed by interpretation. An examination of poemata 2.1.34, 45, and 39 reveals that poetic structures demonstrate the resolution of paradox, thereby recognizing and reconciling the paradox of human mixis––unifying the corporeal instrument and leading men by example toward a wholly spiritual life. The text offers readers patterns like chiasm, leading them to experience poetry both physically and spiritually like ascetics living the metaphor of paradise. Thus, the active poetic text, words captured in measured time just like men, performs a purificatory rite and offers a homeopathic cure for the paradox of human multiplicity.
“And Yet the Books”
Authors: Holman Susan R.
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers how scholars from three different contexts footnoted early Christian sermons to advance practical health care in poverty relief efforts at the margins between formal academic scholarship and social action. In the first example, The Rev. Dr. Daniel Price (1578–1631) appeals to nearly 250 source texts and 127 authors in his 1616 Easter Monday “Spital Sermon” on the Gospel story of the anointing woman for a London charity hospital. The second example profiles Margaret Sherwood (1892–1961) and her 1917 translation of a John Chrysostom sermon about the Pauline “collection for the poor” for social workers in Manhattan. The third example explores the context and possible motives behind a Communist-era Romanian translation of Basil of Caesarea’s famine sermon by Fr. Teodor Bodogae (1911–1994). Such accounts continue to shape ethical practices in the use of religious sources about the needy body and to invite modern readers to new innovate cross-disciplinary connections.
Assessment of nursing students’ attitudes and stigma towards mental illness: A cross-sectional study
Authors: Shammari Mohamamd , Waggas Dania S. , Hasan Abd Al-Hadi
Published: May 2020

This study aimed to assess nursing students’ attitudes toward mental illness in Saudi Arabia. The research design was cross sectional survey. A convenience sample of 315 nursing students. The attitudes towards patients with mental illness questionnaire (AMI) was employed. The results of analysis found that nursing students had favorable attitudes (social relationships) toward people affected by mental illness. Their AMI1 score was slightly higher than the neutral score 20.82. In addition, the findings suggested that students showed slightly affirmative attitudes of tendency to inform others in case oneself or a close relative being mentally ill. 10.50 was the score of AMI2. Nursing students had favorable attitudes towards mental illness despite having negative stereotyped attitudes toward mental illness.
From Local Academic Spin-Off to International Firm: The Case of VisLab
Authors: Arcuri Maria Cristina , Bocchialini Elisa , Gandolfi Gino
Published: May 2020

Universities play an important role in developing and transferring technology. In Italy, much innovation takes place where universities are located outside large towns, as in the case of VisLab.

VisLab, the Vision and Intelligent Systems Laboratory, founded by Prof. Alberto Broggi of Parma University, is a pioneer in perception systems and autonomous vehicle research. It is also the spin-off of the University of Parma acquired by Silicon Valley company Ambarella Inc., in July 2015 for $30 million. After the deal, VisLab remained in Italy and all the staff, about thirty researchers, were hired by VisLab for the Parma location.

This paper examines the university-industry interaction and, in particular, academic spin-off, as a source of economic growth, pointing out the importance of the context. The study describes the main characteristics of the VisLab case, including the possible alternative strategies, the structure of the final M&A deal and the advantages deriving from Parma and surrounding area.

Despite, or perhaps because of its originality, the VisLab case seems to confirm the rule. It suggests that universities can play a key role in technology transfer: universities provide knowledge and trained personnel to firms, facilitating interaction between research and industry. Thus, policy makers should promote the commercialisation of research outcomes.
2020/1 EELC’s review of the year 2019
Authors: Houweling Ruben , Petrylaitė Daiva , Schöffmann Peter , Kun Attila , Maffei Francesca , Lhernould Jean-Philippe , Bruun Niklas , Vos Jan-Pieter , Ratti Luca , Kerr Anthony , Hůrka Petr , Vrajík Michal
Published: May 2020

2020/1 EELC’s review of the year 2019

Various of our academic board analysed employment law cases from last year. However, first, we start with some general remarks.
2020/6 Supreme Court judgment on the concept of comparable permanent employees (DK)
Authors: Clasen Christian K.
Published: May 2020

2020/6 Supreme Court judgment on the concept of comparable permanent employees (DK)

In a recent case on fixed-term employment, the Danish Supreme Court addressed the question of what constitutes a comparable permanent employee. The Supreme Court ruled that four employees, who worked in a government agency, were not comparable with the agency’s permanent employees and for this reason they had not been discriminated against on the grounds of their fixed-term contracts.
2020/7 Successive fixed-term employment contracts (RO)
Authors: Suciu Andreea , Manaila Teodora
Published: May 2020

2020/7 Successive fixed-term employment contracts (RO)

The Craiova Court of Appeal has ruled that the continuous extensions of a fixed-term employment based on national provisions is not in accordance with the European jurisprudence. Relying on the findings of ECJ case C-614/15, the Craiova Court of Appeal made an exhaustive analysis of the relying arguments for subsequent extensions of fixed-term employments agreements for long periods of time and the objective reasons behind such use of contracts.
2020/8 Right of temporary workers to the same pay for the same work (LT)
Authors: Petrylaitė Vida
Published: May 2020

2020/8 Right of temporary workers to the same pay for the same work (LT)

On 20 June 2019, Vilnius Regional Court in Lithuania (instance of appeal) delivered a decision in a case where the applicants claimed that a temporary employment agency, UAB Manpower Lit (the ‘Agency’), which recruited temporary workers (‘claimants’) for the European Institute for Gender Equality (‘EIGE’), paid them lower salaries than permanent staff. It was ruled that the Agency had discriminated against these workers by paying them lower salaries than they would have received if they had been recruited directly by EIGE. The Court also ordered the payment of pay arrears for a certain period to the temporary staff.
2020/9 Employment Tribunal finds that ‘workers’ transfer under TUPE (UK)
Authors: Leckey Colin
Published: May 2020

2020/9 Employment Tribunal finds that ‘workers’ transfer under TUPE (UK)

In a surprise decision, with potentially wide-ranging ramifications, an Employment Tribunal (ET) has found that ‘workers’ as well as traditional ‘employees’ are covered by the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 (TUPE).
Closing the Tabernacle European Madonna Tabernacles c. 1150 – c. 1350
Authors: Andersen Elisabeth
Published: May 2020

There are at least twenty-nine Madonna tabernacles from 1150–1350 with one or more wings preserved, most of them in Scandinavia and Spain. These tabernacles housed a sculpture of the Virgin and Child. In the open position, the central sculpture would be revealed, surrounded by scenes from the Incarnation story, depicted in relief, paint, or a combination of both. The aim of this paper is to explore these Madonna tabernacle in its closed position; What decoration and motifs are found on the exteriors? Can a closer examination of the exteriors of these works provide a greater understanding of their function and later development? And, finally, is there a difference between a closed Madonna tabernacle and a closed tabernacle that houses other saints? Most of the surviving tabernacles have wings with monochrome exteriors, often red, but also green and black or a combination of red and green. There are also examples of tabernacles with patterns or foliage. Only six tabernacles have traces of figural decoration on the exterior. Here we find St. Peter and St. Paul, sometimes together with St. John. One tabernacle has the Passion of Christ on the exterior wings. Tabernacles housing saints other than a Madonna figure have also had monochrome exteriors, often red, although several of them, at least in Scandinavia, have lost most of their original color. Only two examples have figural decorations on the exterior and they would probably have had depictions of St. Paul and St. Peter.[1] This leads us to the conclusion that in a closed position there was little that distinguished a Madonna tabernacle from tabernacles housing other saints.   [1] Both of the tabernacles only have one of the two half- wings preserved with a depiction of St. Paul on the exterior.  St.Peter would probably be on the other (lost) half-wings. See Paragraph “TABERNACLES HOUSING OTHER SAINTS”.
Marian Tabernacles on Main Altars. Norwegian Thirteenth-Century Altar Decorations in Their European Context
Authors: Kuhn Stephan
Published: May 2020

Art historical research often assumes that sculptures of the Virgin Mary originally stood on the northern nave altar in Scandinavian parish churches. However, evidence suggests that several enshrined Marian sculptures actually had their place on the main altar in the chancel. This claim can be reconstructed with regard to the surviving tabernacle shrines in (and from) the small Norwegian parish churches of Hedalen, Reinli, and Hove. In addition to the shrines, a number of altar frontals with Marian imagery also probably belonged to main altars. Seen in their wider European context, these Norwegian altar decorations follow a homogenous pattern, common to large parts of Western Europe, that may be explained by the rise of a unified religious culture in aspects such as liturgy and theology. On the main altar, the Virgin and Child constituted the focal point of the church interior. This prominent position reflects the central role of the Mother of God in the history of salvation as an instrument of the Incarnation. On the main altar, Mary refers to this Christian mystery, through her image as well as in the narrative scenes shown on the inside of the wings that surrounded the sculpture.
El tabernáculo de la Virgen de los Reyes y la memoria documental de otros tabernáculos góticos de la catedral de Sevilla
Authors: Laguna Paúl Teresa
Published: May 2020

Estudio del tabernáculo de la Virgen de los Reyes (h. 1278) y su instalación en la capilla Real renacentista (1579). Revisión y noticias documentales del tabernáculo encargado al orfebre Sancho Martínez (1366), aportaciones al conocimiento del tabernáculo de la Virgen de la Sede y al tardogótico de la Virgen de la Antigua (1497-1499) de la catedral de Sevilla.
Central Italian “Tabernacula”: A Survey
Authors: Pasqualetti Cristiana
Published: May 2020

This paper aims to provide an in-depth survey of grand-scale medieval Italian tabernacles and other types of closing altarpieces with all of their wings – or substantial parts thereof – still preserved (1200-1435). Most such altarpieces, enclosing a statue of the Virgin Mary or a Saint, come from the culturally homogeneous and generally conservative regions of the Central Apennines, in particular from Abruzzo. Structure, provenance, original location, function, patronage, iconography are only a few of the many questions raised by the surviving examples here discussed within a broader European frame.Notwithstanding the great variety and composite character of medieval altar furnishings, three major types of medieval Italian closing retables will be here described – according to Claude Lapaire’s formal classification (1969 and 1972): the tabernacle-altarpiece in the strict sense of the word, i.e. an open ciborium with the pedestal, rear wall, and canopy, equipped with carved or painted bi-fold wings; the polygonal tabernacle-altarpiece (“le retable à tabernacle polygonal”); and the cupboard-altarpiece (“le retable en forme d’armoire”). In Central Apennine regions all of these types coexisted throughout the fourteenth century at least, resisting the spread of Tuscan polyptychs.
The role of hexokinase in cancer
Authors: Stachyra-Strawa Paulina , Cisek Paweł , Janiszewski Michał , Grzybowska-Szatkowska Ludmiła
Published: May 2020

A thorough understanding of the processes occurring in cancer cells is necessary to make cancer treatment as effective as possible. Changes in cellular metabolism in relation to normal cells are considered particularly important. One of the most interesting and promising areas is glucose metabolism and the factors affecting this process, with special emphasis on the potential role of hexokinases, especially the isoform II of this enzyme. Hexokinases (HK) are transferase enzymes involved in the process of glycolysis. Hexokinase II (HK II) plays an important role in initiating and maintaining the glycolysis process at a high level of efficiency, which is crucial for the growth and proliferation of cancer cells. An increase in the number of copies of the HK II gene and increased transcription of this enzyme resulting in the suppression of apoptosis and the enhancement of cell proliferation have been found in tumor cells. Hexokinase II also participates in the Crabtree effect by affecting the amount of ATP and thus the efficiency of the Ca2+ removal process outside the cell membrane by Ca2+ ATPase. Overexpression of HK II has thus far been found in pancreatic cancer, gastric cancer, breast cancer, squamous cell carcinoma of the larynx, glioblastoma multiforme, ovarian cancer and biliary tract cancer, indicating the possible key role of this enzyme in their formation and progression and providing the basis for seeking potential benefits of cancer treatment using HK II as a target of new drugs.
Staging Stories
Authors: Nagar Richa , Sangathan Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor , Theatre Parakh
Published: May 2020

Through four 'learning moments' with SKMS, Nagar outlines the book's inspirations, sites, and contours. She discusses how those who are pushed to social margins create politics and knowledge by refusing imposed frameworks. Learning from such refusals requires hungry translations that are open and flowing and that are embedded in embodied solidarities that require radical vulnerability. Such translations strive to converse across incommensurable landscapes of struggles in order to co-agitate against universalized languages that erase the vocabularies and visions of those reduced to hungry bodies. In reconceptualizing politics as a shared labor on an uneven terrain that makes perfect retelling impossible, hungry translation becomes continuous collective labor of troubling inherited meanings of the social and of making our knowledges more alive to the creativity of socio-political struggle.