bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Politics of Art Practice in Contemporary Iran
Authors: Keshmirshekan Hamid
Published: January 2024

It explores the strategies pursued by artists in Iran, and the wider politics of art practice related to localised historical and cultural landscapes. It investigates how individual artists generate their own artistic strategies that are pertinent to the demands of contemporaneity. Concentrating on the period from 2005 onward and the resurgence of conservatism within the political culture of the Islamic Republic, it examines the development of the private art sector and art market regionally and nationally in this period and their roles in the growth of certain trends and genres. The chapter contends that the market system has generated stereotypical ways of thinking among arbiters of taste and value by imposing its own standards. It also considers how artists endorse a politics of resistance to the defined identified cultural signs – that is, to reductive cultural views that tend to perceive their works solely as geopolitical reflections. Within the contemporary art scene in Iran, just as within local social movements, political interventions with aesthetic dimensions have mobilised a range of approaches; experiments that are more open to reflexivity and individual subjective interpretations.
The Crisis of the Sciences, Art History and the Vienna School
Authors: Verstegen Ian
Published: January 2024

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the Vienna School of Art History and its reorientation inspired by Gestalt Psychology. The Vienna School challenged traditional art historical methods and developed a new theoretical and methodological point of view. The emergence of Strukturforschung addressed the ongoing 'crisis of the sciences' – the need to coordinate the advances of the hard sciences with the subjective reality of culture and lived experience – and aimed to understand the structural formation of individual works of art. Through the analysis of Gestalt theory, it is possible to resist a coupling of holistic notions in art history with irrationalism, fascism, and racism. Arguing strongly that Sedlmayr’s dawning notions of a new methodology should be identified as Iconological and no longer represent the aims he promoted alongside Pächt in their earlier work.
The Basics of Strukturforschung
Authors: Verstegen Ian
Published: January 2024

Chapter 2 demonstrated how members of the new Vienna School responded to the loss of the work of art into historical context by stressing its integrity. Historical, one would have to understand the basic structure and nature of a work of art before attempting to understanding its history. Using the work of Erwin Panofsky, the great Hamburg Iconologist as an example, it is possible to see the methodological contrast. How can a visual feature of a painting even be associated with an idea when we don’t have idea of the pictorial reality of that feature? This was answered by distinguishing in a manner derived from Phenomenology and Gestalt theory between the physical and cultural work. The art historian therefore must reproduce the mental set that accompanied the historical work in its time. Only such a self-reflexive approach can avoid relativism in art history.
Otto Pächt and ‘National’ Constants in Late Gothic Painting
Authors: Verstegen Ian
Published: January 2024

Perhaps Otto Pächt’s study of stylistic “formative principles” (Gestaltungsprinzipien) is that scholar’s most characteristic contribution to the new Vienna School platform. Next to Sedlmayr’s goal of exploring the individual work of art, Pächt seeks to outline common elements of style. His approach has also been controversial because stylistic constants have been understood to be racial or nationalistic. However, Pächt carefully explained that a “constant” is neither. It simply describes a formative principle that is tied to practice in a sphere of influence. Contrasting Meyer Schapiro’s friendly criticisms of Pächt’s approach, the latter is seeking to understand nothing less than the role of abstraction in art history. In some senses, Schapiro can be seen as resistant to theory. Pächt’s essay, then, becomes an argument for the need to go beyond common-sense empiricism in art historical investigation.
Johannes Wilde on Michelangelo: The Image in Space
Authors: Verstegen Ian
Published: January 2024

An important interpreter of the legacy of Max Dvorak, Johannes Wilde shared important affinities with Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt, and his methodology is highly compatible with the platform outlined by the two. The way in which Wilde found interest in common themes is the image in space, where the structure included the context as well. Wilde’s greatest achievement was understanding a series of historical spaces in all their ritual and decorative significance, especially the Sistine Chapel. Wilde's approach emphasized understanding the interrelationship of various parts and the overall structure of a work of art. He explored the concept of parts and wholes, the importance of function and spatial placement, and the role of perception in constraining symbolism in art. Comparing Wilde's insights to Edgar Wind’s we see his method as a propadeutic to iconological interpretation.
Gothic Beginnings: 1764–1827
Authors: Camilletti Fabio
Published: January 2024

Critical assumptions about the alleged ‘marginality’ of the Gothic in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Italian culture rely on an optical illusion. The semantic sphere encompassed by the term ‘Gothic’ is expressed by Italian writers through a set of definitions related to incorrect thinking, archaicity, and excess. Seen from this perspective, the ‘Gothic’ appears the Northern, monstrous Other to which Italian culture is supposed to resist. This chapter provides the historical framework for contextualising Italy’s relationship with the Gothic as a field of tensions, arguing that refusal and resistance, rather than being viewed as symptoms of a constitutive incompatibility should be seen as the consequences of specific cultural-historical processes, which had determined complex and oblique forms of incorporation, adaptation and metamorphosis. Italian culture was by no means marginal in the circulation of Gothic themes and motifs, as exemplified by popular novels and the works of, among others, Berchet, Polidori, Manzoni, and Leopardi.
Early Developments: 1861–1914
Authors: Serafini Stefano
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the years between Italy’s unification in 1861 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, a cultural moment characterised by invasive processes of industrialisation and urbanisation that dramatically changed the texture of cities while at the same time being marked by important developments in science, medicine and technology that paradoxically mirrored the resurgence of apparently discarded occult beliefs and practices. The first section looks at the representation of the city as a Gothic place of darkness in various works of post-unification authors such as Mastriani, Serao, and Piccini, while the second explores how the resurgence of mesmerism, which was refashioned as hypnotism, the development of spiritualism and the possibility of communicating with the dead filtered into the literary sphere and allowed writers such as Capuana and D’Annunzio to tap into the fears and anxieties that characterised this period of dramatic socio-political transitions and transformations.
Gothic Music
Authors: Vitolo Eduardo
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the way in which terror and the occult have permeated the evolution of Italian Gothic music from the second half of the twentieth century to the present day. Since the beginning of Italian underground music in the 1960s and 1970s, coherently with the fortune of occulture in Italy, bands have mixed the supernatural, the occult, and mysticism with visionary lyrics and heavy sounds. The chapter provides the first extensive study on the relatively unknown field of Italian Gothic music, tracing its history from pioneers of progressive rock such as Jacula and Antonius Rex in the 1970s, to the diffusion of heavy metal and Goth rock in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s and in the contemporary period. The history, aesthetics, and variety of style of the international Gothic scene are taken into account, thus providing a more comprehensive picture of the genealogy of the Italian Gothic music.
The Gothic Body
Authors: Ramsey-Portolano Catherine
Published: January 2024

The resonance of the Gothic form in Italy can be noted most strongly within the literary production of certain fin-de-siècle writers, particularly those active within the Scapigliatura and Naturalist movements, who were especially receptive to literary influences from beyond national borders. The adoption of Gothic elements such as the supernatural, mystery, decay, madness and death went hand-in-hand with the exploration of female malady and deformities in the works of writerssuch as Igino Ugo Tarchetti, Luigi Capuana, Antonio Fogazzaro and Matilde Serao. These authors’ portrayal of femininity, in a period characterised by derogatory and paradoxical theories about women’s nature,interweaves themes of contaminated beauty, illness and madness with plot structures that combine romance, mystery, suffering, alienation and sometimes death. The focus on the female body and its physical and mental maladies points to the female characters’ struggle to overcome situations which posit them as victims of suffering, persecution and oppression.
Gothic Criminology
Authors: Serafini Stefano
Published: January 2024

This chapter principally focuses on the controversial figure of Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), the founder of the Italian school of criminal anthropology and one of the most influential late nineteenth-century thinkers. Starting from the premise that the fin de siècle was distinguished by the interplay of scientific and Gothic discourses, the chapter explores why and how Lombroso’s criminology is deeply Gothic in its methods, applications and implications. Discussing the literary, visual and occult components of Lombroso’s multifarious and far-reaching work, the chapter seeks to show how Gothic narratives on the construction of deviance affected Lombroso’s criminological thinking and had a major, disturbing influence on the way in which Italians conceptualise the origins of evil.
Conclusion Myths, Militarism and Martial(ed) Peace
Authors: Wegner Nicole
Published: January 2024

Articulates why the peacekeeping myth should matter for scholars concerned about how military power operates and anti-militarist agendas. Revisits contemporary understandings of what constitutes ‘warfare’ and ‘peace’ and connects this discourse to colonial and imperial violence.
The Russian-Israeli Home: A Blend of Cultures
Authors: Yelenevskaya Maria
Published: January 2024

Home is an embodiment of a place where one feels safe, and it often serves as a metaphor for a familiar territory and domain of activities. In the first stages of post-immigration life the role of belongings that serve as components of personal identity and are metonymically associated with family and friends who stayed behind is particularly significant. As immigrants accumulate new experiences their tastes in possessions and attachment to them can change under the influence of natural factors, such as climate, changes in the socio-economic situation, the culture of the receiving society and their own emergent bi- or multilingualism. Some possessions are perceived as important for the stability of self-perception and affiliation. Focusing on objects endowed with symbolic meanings, the chapter discusses how immigrants’ homes reflect the dual frame of reference in everyday practices, cherished possessions and images of an ideal home. Whether consciously or unconsciously, immigrants maintain and deepen their connections to the host culture without abandoning the old one and gradual transformation of their homes testifies to the transformation of values and allegiances, as well as fluidity of identities that are forever in flux.
Naomi Mitchison’s Interwar Short Stories
Authors: Mellor Leo
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines how Naomi Mitchison uses shorter prose forms for her storytelling at the level of the individual story or ‘tale’. It aims to show how and why her short stories, vignettes and episodic scenes counterpoint each other – and moreover coexist with her (much) longer works. The chapter will place her in relation to those of her contemporaries who were also using fiction in the 1920s and 30s for imaginatively investigative and politically charged purposes, especially in connection with the world of classical antiquity. Specific texts discussed in the chapter will include Mitchison’s stories of ancient Rome, gathered together in When the Bough Breaks (1924), and of Greece, gathered in Black Sparta (1928), as well as the novella Beyond this Limit (1935), illustrated by Wyndham Lewis.
Send in the Clones? Naomi Mitchison and the Politics of Reproduction and Motherhood
Authors: Hall Lesley A.
Published: January 2024

Naomi Mitchison was positioned centrally within twentieth century debates about reproduction. She was the sister of Communist geneticist J. B. S. Haldane; the enthusiastic mother of seven children; a birth control activist and a very sceptical member of the Eugenics Society; part of the feminist circle around the journal Time and Tide; and involved in socialist politics. While issues around motherhood were significant in her earlier historical and realist fiction, during the 1960s she turned to science fiction to explore questions of breeding and reproduction further. This essay will incorporate a discussion of her 1930s writings on and activism in birth control and opinions on eugenics into the later developments of these themes in her speculative fictions. In Memoirs of a Spacewoman and Solution Three she addressed intriguing questions about parenthood and reproduction from a possibly unique perspective, elaborating intersections between a wide range of theories, beliefs and ideologies, from Edwardian feminist arguments for free mate choice, via interwar eugenics, to the implications of the discovery of DNA.
Going East: Women Walk the City in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Le Voyage du ballon rouge (2007) and Café Lumière (2003)
Authors: Tsai Beth
Published: January 2024

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s transnationally coproduced films transpose Charles Baudelaire’s archetype of the flâneur into the figure of a woman who walks alone and idly through a city (Tokyo and Paris, respectively). The way Yoko traverses the Tokyo metropolis in Café Lumière – retracing the historical footprint of her research subject, a Taiwanese composer – is allegorical of a woman who seeks to trace the colonial relationship between Taiwan and imperialist Japan. In Le Voyage du ballon rouge, Chinese film student living in Paris is seen casually videotaping red balloons and related murals with her camcorder, almost equivalent to a remake of the 1956 Le Ballon rouge. Both films offer opportunities for reflecting on the rhetoric of self-reflexivity and cross-cultural production and reception that goes beyond the influence of French or Japanese cinema.
Going West: Tsai Ming-liang at the Louvre and Cinema in the Gallery
Authors: Tsai Beth
Published: January 2024

Tsai Ming-liang’s feature-length films (lauded at international film festivals but loathed by domestic audiences) and video installations have been perceived as efforts to return to their pure form as cinematic art. Such was the case with It’s a Dream (2007) and Visage (2009), commissioned by the Cannes Film Festival and the Louvre, respectively. This chapter explores the relation between Tsai’s films and the French New Wave, which demands a reassessment of his thematic continuation and the notion of cinephilia. While Tsai’s slow film aesthetics can be traced in relation to his prior theatre practice, his installation and film in the gallery are grounded in the belief that cinema needs to be resurrected in the museum.
A Southbound Turn: Dreaming Taiwan in Midi Z’s Realist Films
Authors: Tsai Beth
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores how Midi Z, a Myanmar-born director became a representative of Taiwan and why the dominant group rejects his ethnic minority. Working in a guerrilla style of digital filmmaking as a result of censorship in Myanmar as well as frequent exclusion from the Taiwanese government’s fudaojin subsidy policy, he makes films that are largely concerned with the harsh economic and social circumstances in the authoritarian regime. After discussing his southbound Homecoming Trilogy in light of Taiwan’s Southbound Policy, this chapter focuses on Nina Wu (2019), which shifts the thematic concerns of economic exploitation to sexual exploitation and the filmmaking style from risky, covert videography to surrealism, flashbacks, and dreams.
To the Future: Film Festivals as Producers and Sleeping in the Cinema
Authors: Tsai Beth
Published: January 2024

This chapter traces the function of festival funding and assesses what makes a project such as Tsai Ming-liang’s Slow Walk, Long March series (also known as the Walker series) contribute a new meaning to the label ‘festival film’. These short experimental films are commissioned by and distributed across different platforms, from public television to co-production between France and Taiwan. The existence of these funds raises questions about how film festivals shape contemporary art cinema at large and how these projects become part of the global film festival establishment. Springing off from these new practices, this chapter explores the notion of sleep – both onscreen sleep and offscreen spectatorial sleep – and its contribution to an aesthetic practice of the Anthropocene.
Flexible origins and exotic displays
Authors: Paasonen Susanna
Published: January 2024

The ethnic flexibility of Brynner’s star image – his seeming ability to move between, cross and occupy a range of positions without being bound to any single one – revolved around his overall physical look, accented English, as well as his well-acknowledged proclivity for colourful tales of origin that never cohered to a single story. His pan-ethnic star image was fuelled by constantly transforming stories of background, some of which were grounded in fact, and others not. This chapter first charts Brynner’s narratives of origin, from biographical detail to narrations casting his persona in alien and exotic tones. It further offers a concise overview of Brynner’s film roles and, through extensive print sources, maps out his rumoured yet unrealised projects in order to more fully understand the casting policies pertaining to his career. The chapter then concludes with a discussion of his directing and production plans.
Performance style, posturing, and camp
Authors: Paasonen Susanna
Published: January 2024

Over the years, critics recurrently suggested that Brynner’s idiosyncratic look was more interesting, or magnetic, than his professional skill, so that his mere appearance eclipsed his thespian art. Indeed, ‘flamboyance’ was a term frequently associated with his performances: others included ‘strut’ and ‘swagger’. The chapter explores Brynner’s performance style in terms of its recurrent features and poses, and by zooming in on its embrace of artifice and excess. Starting with a discussion of his gestural registers and acting techniques in the context of Hollywood’s transforming notions of dramatic craft, it considers their limitations through his rather unsuccessful early 1960s comedy roles, and explores the presence and meanings of camp in his later film work in particular, culminating in a cameo as a cross-dressing torch singer.
Making an Impression Deeply: Authorising Animals in D. H. Lawrence
Authors: Rohman Carrie
Published: January 2024

My recent work on concepts of the bioaesthetic has led to an interest in the question of animal “authority” in modernist literature. How are animals represented or experienced as authorizing and as “authors” in literature of the modernist period? What qualities of authority are called upon when animals become sources of sanctioning, knowledge, or permission in literary work? Moreover, if we re-frame something like Foucault’s outlining of an “author-function” in discursive practices to accommodate animal authority, the question of the author becomes a much more radically open question than Foucault could have anticipated. What replaces the apotheosis of écriture in an animalized framework? Is it Derrida’s animot? Is it a zoopoetics that bears witness to humans’ entanglement with life, as a repressed or disavowed “given” of writing? How do animal authorities profoundly affect the kinship between writing and death that Foucault (and Barthes) elaborate? This chapter explores moments of animal “authority” in D. H. Lawrence’s work such as the rabbit’s scratch in Women in Love, that can be read in relation to theories of literacy, and the “piercing” beaks of birds in poems from Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, that suggest a blood-conscious animal marking or tracing. The chapter takes excess, surplus, and “overkill” imaginaries, alongside intemperate creatural forces, to be important sites of inquiry in modernism.
Following the Beast Familiar: Djuna Barnes’s Family Dramas
Authors: Adkins Peter
Published: January 2024

Unpublished until 2020, The Biography of Julie von Bartmann (1924) was Djuna Barnes’s first attempt to reshape events from her early life growing up on a dysfunctional farmstead in rural New York state into a literary work. Like Barnes’s better-known work, it is a text in which animal life, and human proximity to animal life, is central. Although unpublished, Barnes recycled sections of the drama when writing Ryder (1928), her autobiographical novel. Many years later, Barnes’s play The Antiphon (1958)would complete what was left unfinished in Julie von Bartmann, a family drama where family members intend to ‘beast’ each other, exacting revenge for earlier transgressions. Adapting its title from a quotation in The Antiphon where “Woman is most beast familiar”, this chapter will show how a beastly idiom can be traced through Barnes’s autobiographical writings. Charting the development of this idiom, this chapter will argue that the “beast familiar” becomes central to Barnes’s reimagining of the family drama, with animality emerging as a vector through which to scrutinise familial transgression. Presenting a new aspect to what Julie Taylor describes as the ‘non-dichotomous relationship’ between ‘auto/biography and fiction’ in Barnes’s writing and building on existing research on her interest in the grotesque and the animal, this chapter will argue that in Barnes’s writing we find a modernism in which beastly figurations contaminate the fiction of the family unit.
The Taxidermic Imaginary in Modernist Literature
Authors: Fagan Paul
Published: January 2024

This chapter, maps the diverse, shifting poetics and politics of taxidermy in modernist literary expression: it begins by arguing that, despite the animal and new materialist turns of modernist studies in recent years, the specific function of taxidermy for modernism’s intersecting engagements with representation, authenticity, the nonhuman, colonialism, race, gender, and class have been critically under-evaluated and under-theorised. While its place as part of the modernist nonhuman imaginary has been side lined owing to its perceived status as kitsch and its association with the genres of eco-horror and body horror, this chapter claims that once reframed under a new materialist focus, we begin to see taxidermy’s significance to modernism as a limitrophic site, in which the discursive borders of the human and the nonhuman, living and dead matter, are undermined and redirected in ways that are directly relevant to the recurrent modernist themes of spectrality, posthumanity, and conversion (becoming other).This chapter will trace a transition from a realist Victorian taxidermal imaginary, in which the stuffed and flayed animal body is conceived in terms of commodity and utility, to an emergent modernist emphasis on the taxidermized animal as a figure of uncanny inauthenticity, a collection of untrustworthy and deceitful signifiers.
Resistant Reindeers: Human–Animal Relations and Cultural Self-Appropriation in Sámi Art and Literature
Authors: Alsen Katharina
Published: January 2024

The narrative embroideries by textile artist Britta Marakatt-Labba (b. 1951), whose work was exhibited at Documenta 14 (2017) as part of the Sámi Artist Group, show motifs of traditional Sámi lifestyle in linear and cyclical arrangements: Above all, she depicts the close relationship between human and animal life, best epitomised by reindeers which co-exist and interact with human figures in different ways. Her subject matter and mode of (re-)presentation date back to modernist traditions of Sámi literature and art: John Savio (1902–1938) was considered the first Sámi artist with a formal arts education and is mainly known for his woodcuts in the style of Edvard Munch. Reindeer wildlife and conflictual human-reindeer interaction are two of his main themes. Prior to that, it was Johan Turi (1854–1936) who published the first secular book in a Sámi language in 1910. His work, combining visual and verbal narrative, has largely been examined from an ethnographic point of view, and often been dismissed as primitive. Aesthetically speaking, Turi’s narratives of symbiotic human-animal life cycles seem to represent a rather counter-modernist style. Such rigid conceptual boundaries, however, are not sufficient for Sámi cultural production from the early twentieth century. The textiles by Marakatt-Labba can help address a set of critical research questions when the works are read as modernist reverberations, more precisely as hyper-affirmative approaches to stereotypical representations of indigenous Sámi culture (which include the nomadic lifestyle, the absence of modern urban influence and a mythologically charged, intimate relation to nature). In the Sámi works considered here, it is both implicit and explicit narratives of resistance that are linked to the representation of reindeers and that counter voice dominant narratives of cultural subordination as well as of avantgarde aesthetics.
Afterword: The Animal in the Mirror
Authors: Weil Kari
Published: January 2024

Mirror recognition has been tested on dozens of species of animals to judge whether a species or individual has a sense of self. The test, however, might just as well be tried on humans since misrecognition, as Lacan has theorised, is the inevitable outcome. Perhaps this is also what Virginia Woolf theorizes when she recounts in ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ an incident (or it may have been a dream) where she was looking in a glass and “a horrible face—the face of an animal—suddenly showed over my shoulder”. Was this animal face truly ‘an other face’ or was it perhaps the shamed face she says that she tries to avoid seeing in mirrors? Who and what is this animal? The question is significant for Woolf and for modernism more generally, because it is related not only to the function and matter of memory (and so Bergson), but to the question of who or what a self is, who or what as Woolf writes, ‘is the person to whom things happened’. How can we know and represent that person, whether in biography or autobiography? Do we indeed, as Woolf says make that self ‘real by putting it into words’, or do we rather contribute to a misrecognition, if one that allows us to put the shock of the past behind us. These are some of the questions that this afterword addresses looking for connections between the remembered or dreamt animal in the mirror, the many animals that appear in modernists texts, including those considered in this volume, and the creaturely senses, agencies and vulnerabilities they evoke and provoke.
Dostoevsky and Bresson: From ‘A Meek Creature’ to Une Femme Douce
Authors: Hasty Olga Peters
Published: January 2024

The chapter discusses Robert Bresson’s 1969 Une femme douce. It pays special attention to Bresson’s insistence that literariness should not have any place in his cinematography. Eschewing visual representations of literary material, Bresson by-passes affect and plot to enter the ideational sphere that informs Dostoevsky’s emotionally charged narratives. He engages most closely with Dostoevsky just when he appears to be farthest from him. Bresson’s approach enlarges cinematography, delves deeply into Dostoevsky’s art, and takes film adaptation into new territory. The chapter considers the social, cultural, and political import of Bresson’s transposition of Dostoevsky’s story into post-1968 France.
‘The Paths I Have Established …’: Chekhov on the Russian and American Screen
Authors: Lapushin Radislav
Published: January 2024

The chapter focuses on three cases of contemporary Russian and American films which engage with Chekhov’s legacy. It analyses Karen Shakhnazarov’s Ward No. 6 (2009) and shows how it offers a vision of Ward No. 6 as a timeless microcosm of Russia shaped by the cultural myth around the story’s reception. It also discusses an American independent movie Three Days of Rain (dir. Michael Meredith, 2002) as an example of a ‘transcultural’ (Linda Hutcheon) adaptation and The Sisters by Arthur Allan Seidelman (2005). While preserving the cast of characters and the dynamics of their relationships from Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Seidelman’s version departs from its source on the level of poetics. The chapter demonstrates the complexity of cinematic adaptation where the filmmaker becomes a co-author and an interpreter of the original source at the same time.
Reinventing Chekhov for the American Screen: Michael Mayer’s The Seagull
Authors: Partan Olga
Published: January 2024

The chapter focuses on Michael Mayer’s The Seagull (2018) which received mixed reviews. The film showcases a spectacular cast with actors who deliver their performances in the best tradition of Stanislavskian psychologically truthful acting. This paper addresses such issues as the complex relationship between the film and theater mediums and discusses the cinematographic choices that contribute to the creation of a truly Chekhovian atmosphere on screen. Special attention is given to the female performers who gave original and fresh interpretations of the Chekhovian heroines’ social and emotional anxiety, helping to render this film more modern and more accessible to American moviegoers.
In Search of the Blue Flower
Authors: Hamilton Alexander
Published: January 2024

The artist formative years in the North of Scotland, immersed in a landscape of plants and fossils. Setting his pathway into the world of the visual arts.
Stroma
Authors: Hamilton Alexander
Published: January 2024

The artist first residency on a remote uninhabited island in the North of Scotland in the Pentland Firth in1973. The use of the cyanotype to record the plant life on the island. Surviving on a diet of mussels, sea bird eggs and rabbits. Returning after 6 months to the mainland with a portfolio of work.
Community Arts
Authors: Hamilton Alexander
Published: January 2024

The artist rejects the gallery opportunities and follows a pathway to work in community arts. Early training in London with InterAction and then returning Edinburgh to take up a range of work opportunities in community arts. Continues to create cyanotypes in response to the urban environment.
NewYork
Authors: Hamilton Alexander
Published: January 2024

The artist moves to New York, holds an important exhibition of cyanotypes and makes work for the New York Botanical Garden. Birth of daughter Marcelina.
The Photographers’ Gallery
Authors: Hamilton Alexander
Published: January 2024

The artist return to the UK/Scotland, starts a collaboration with the Photographers Gallery in London, with exhibitions of cyanotypes. In Scotland, collaborates with FotoFeis, the biannual festival of photography in Scotland. Holds exhibition projects in UK and Europe.
Further Observations on my Career as an Artist
Authors: Hamilton Alexander
Published: January 2024

The artist takes over as Chair of the Scottish Society for the History of Photography and publishes journals and books under Studies in Photography. Launches the Scottish Photographic Artists Series.
Metaphor in Biosemiotics and Deconstruction
Authors: James Ian
Published: January 2024

This article stages a critical-philosophical encounter between Derridean deconstruction and Peircean biosemiotic theory focussing on the role and status of metaphor within each. It argues that the biosemiotic understanding of metaphor as a structuring principle informing the sign-activity of living organisms and processes offers an alternative understanding of a generalised metaphoricity of life as such and an account of what might be called biological text, textuality or even, biosemiotic intertextuality. The article argues that biological textuality obeys a logic of semiotic immanence that is distinct from the logic of différance and of the quasi-transcendental as thought by Derrida. On this basis it elaborates the way in which metaphor in biosemiotic theory, and also the generalised biological metaphoricity informing the text of life, function as radically non-representational, inferential, and hermeneutic operators which model the semiotic processes of life and thereby enable an epistemologically weak or, in a certain sense, non-philosophical realism.
A new record of bony fish prey for the genus Isistius (Chondrichthyes: Dalatiidae) in a coastal zone of southeastern Mexico
Authors: Wakida-Kusunoki Armando T , Anislado-Tolentino Vicente , Rosales-Vásquez Jorge I , Castro-Barbosa Rodolfo , Del Moral-Flores Luis Fernando
Published: January 2024

The first report of bite wounds from cookiecutter shark in a specimen of cobia in the Southern Gulf of Mexico is described. The specimen was captured by artisanal fishery in the coastal zone of Tabasco, Mexico. It presented three bite wounds with 25 to 26 teeth marks per wound, major axis interval between 3.7 and 4.7 cm and all areas of less than 10 cm2. This is new record of a bony fish as prey of genus Isistius maybe of I. brasiliensis in coastal waters over the continental shelf, in the Southern Gulf of Mexico.
Robert Byron: An Iconoclast on the Road to Appreciation of Islamic Architecture
Authors:  Gholi Ahmad , Alsulami Issa
Published: January 2024

England in 1933 was a claustrophobic, desolate, and enervating country generating a generation of discontents like Robert Byron. Unsatisfied with the received ideas of Western aestheticism, he aligned himself with Islamic aestheticism and departed for Oxiana to study Islamic architecture resulting in his The Road to Oxiana, a masterpiece in travel writing. This study contends that Byron is an iconoclast who undermines the rhetoric of colonialism and imperialism in his travel book. To elaborate its analysis, the study employs Holland’s and Huggan’s idea of countertravel writing along with psychoanalysis. It argues that Byron’s countertravel writing in his narrative manifests in two ways. Firstly, when he critiques the reductive picture of Islamic architecture by exalting and appreciating its beauty, especially its Kufic inscriptions. Secondly, when he extols Gohar Shad, a renowned patroness of architecture by acquitting her of the orientalist charge and acknowledging her contributions to Islamic architecture. In doing so, he reveals that she is his ‘anima’ and archetypal mother.
Unraveling the Multifaceted Narratives of Mixed-Race Identity in Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq’s Ophelia and Thrall
Authors: Kuraiem Nehal Ali Abdulghaffar M.
Published: January 2024

Trethewey's poetry is an intervention into a worldwide debate about defining and socially restricting mixed-race identities; therefore, this research addresses these issues. In Gulfport, Mississippi, Trethewey was raised by relatives whose mixed-race marriage was unlawful. Her poetry has several allusions to both her dad, a writer, academic, and Canadian immigrant, and her mom, a caseworker. Trethewey's poetry intertwines the tale of her personal mixed ancestors with the racial history of America, even while combining this story with lyricism. "I'm capable of getting closer to the inner reality of a poem when the poetry leans towards the poetic," Trethewey remarked in her address. She used a poem entitled "Incident" from her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Native Guard as an instance. Her grandma sponsored a voting registration campaign for disadvantaged African Americans in the 1960s, and the Ku Klux Klan burned a symbol in her family's yard as a result. Trethewey reconstructed an early form of the poem to encapsulate the complete tale of the occurrence in the first four lines. This allowed her to utilize the rest of the poem to emphasize additional psychological realities. Unraveling the Multifaceted Narratives of Mixed-Race Identity in Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq’s Ophelia and Thrall is the ground upon which this study stands.
Integrating STEM Approach in K-12 Science Education Teaching Practice: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: KHUT SOKHA , Shimizu KINYA
Published: January 2024

The integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in K-12 education is widely recognized as a critical means to ensure future prosperity, security, and a skilled workforce in these fields. This integrated STEM approach entails teaching these four STEM disciplines in a cohesive manner. However, several barriers have arisen, including the lack of a clear consensus on the key features of implementing integrated STEM education effectively. There remains uncertainty about which science subjects should be integrated with the other three disciplines and at what level within K-12 science education this integration should occur. Therefore, this study aims to establish a well-defined framework for teaching science through an integrated STEM approach (ISTEMA) and identify the types of integrated STEM disciplines employed in various educational settings through a systematic literature review. Secondary data, including scholarly journal articles and book chapters, were collected through searches in databases such as the Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC) and Web of Science. Data analysis was conducted using within-case and cross-case analysis methods. The findings of the study revealed that the framework of teaching science ISTEMA generally consists of six elements: inquiry-based, engineering-based, technology-based, problem-based, teamwork-based, and robotic-based learning. This approach primarily focuses on primary and lower secondary education. Engineering and technology content is predominantly integrated into the science subject. In primary education, science and engineering and science and technology are extensively used, while in lower and upper secondary education, science, engineering, and mathematics, science, technology, and engineering, or STEM are commonly employed.
Advancements in cardiac structures segmentation: a comprehensive systematic review of deep learning in CT imaging
Authors: Alnasser Turki Nasser , Abdulaal Lojain , Maiter Ahmed , Sharkey Michael , Dwivedi Krit , Salehi Mahan , Garg Pankaj , Swift Andrew James , Alabed Samer
Published: January 2024

Background

Segmentation of cardiac structures is an important step in evaluation of the heart on imaging. There has been growing interest in how artificial intelligence (AI) methods—particularly deep learning (DL)—can be used to automate this process. Existing AI approaches to cardiac segmentation have mostly focused on cardiac MRI. This systematic review aimed to appraise the performance and quality of supervised DL tools for the segmentation of cardiac structures on CT.

Methods

Embase and Medline databases were searched to identify related studies from January 1, 2013 to December 4, 2023. Original research studies published in peer-reviewed journals after January 1, 2013 were eligible for inclusion if they presented supervised DL-based tools for the segmentation of cardiac structures and non-coronary great vessels on CT. The data extracted from eligible studies included information about cardiac structure(s) being segmented, study location, DL architectures and reported performance metrics such as the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC). The quality of the included studies was assessed using the Checklist for Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging (CLAIM).

Results

18 studies published after 2020 were included. The DSC scores median achieved for the most commonly segmented structures were left atrium (0.88, IQR 0.83–0.91), left ventricle (0.91, IQR 0.89–0.94), left ventricle myocardium (0.83, IQR 0.82–0.92), right atrium (0.88, IQR 0.83–0.90), right ventricle (0.91, IQR 0.85–0.92), and pulmonary artery (0.92, IQR 0.87–0.93). Compliance of studies with CLAIM was variable. In particular, only 58% of studies showed compliance with dataset description criteria and most of the studies did not test or validate their models on external data (81%).

Conclusion

Supervised DL has been applied to the segmentation of various cardiac structures on CT. Most showed similar performance as measured by DSC values. Existing studies have been limited by the size and nature of the training datasets, inconsistent descriptions of ground truth annotations and lack of testing in external data or clinical settings.

Systematic Review Registration

[www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/], PROSPERO [CRD42023431113].
A polyphenol-rich plant extract prevents hypercholesterolemia and modulates gut microbiota in western diet-fed mice
Authors: Langhi Cédric , Vallier Marie , Bron Auriane , Otero Yolanda F. , Maura Maheva , Le Joubioux Florian , Blomberg Niek , Giera Martin , Guigas Bruno , Maugard Thierry , Chassaing Benoit , Peltier Sébastien , Blanquet-Diot Stéphanie , Bard Jean-Marie , Sirvent Pascal
Published: January 2024

Introduction

Totum-070 is a combination of five plant extracts enriched in polyphenols to target hypercholesterolemia, one of the main risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of Totum-070 on cholesterol levels in an animal model of diet-induced hypercholesterolemia.

Methods

C57BL/6JOlaHsd male mice were fed a Western diet and received Totum-070, or not, by daily gavage (1g/kg and 3g/kg body weight) for 6 weeks.

Results

The Western diet induced obesity, fat accumulation, hepatic steatosis and increased plasma cholesterol compared with the control group. All these metabolic perturbations were alleviated by Totum-070 supplementation in a dose-dependent manner. Lipid excretion in feces was higher in mice supplemented with Totum-070, suggesting inhibition of intestinal lipid absorption. Totum-070 also increased the fecal concentration of short chain fatty acids, demonstrating a direct effect on intestinal microbiota.

Discussion

The characterization of fecal microbiota by 16S amplicon sequencing showed that Totum-070 supplementation modulated the dysbiosis associated with metabolic disorders. Specifically, Totum-070 increased the relative abundance of Muribaculum (a beneficial bacterium) and reduced that of Lactococcus (a genus positively correlated with increased plasma cholesterol level). Together, these findings indicate that the cholesterol-lowering effect of Totum-070 bioactive molecules could be mediated through multiple actions on the intestine and gut microbiota.
Integration and learning: a case study of the international higher physical education talent-cultivation model
Authors: Song Bruce , Xi Jun , Li Shichen , Zhou Yuan , Zhang Qiangfeng , Zhou Huixuan , Feng Chen , Grecic David , Peng Xiyang
Published: January 2024

Introduction

This study delves into the multifaceted components of talent-training models within China’s physical education domain through Sino-foreign cooperative initiatives. Employing a mixed-methods approach, it systematically evaluates the innovative systems developed by pilot units and outlines their experiential insights.

Methods

Using a mixed-methods approach, this research extensively evaluates the situation of pilot units by collecting and analyzing data from closed-ended and open-ended questionnaires as well as interview responses. The study categorizes and analyzes the data to comprehensively understand cooperative talent-training models.

Results

The findings are classified into three main themes: Learning, Integration, and Binary Evaluation and Practice Reform. Under the Learning theme, the study observed a selective integration of foreign educational paradigms into the local context, respecting the distinctiveness of Chinese education and aligning with national policies promoting unique educational systems. Additionally, the Integration theme underscores the necessity of meticulously assimilating introduced educational resources into China’s educational fabric, highlighting the need for adaptability when integrating foreign educational elements. Furthermore, the Binary Evaluation and Practice Reform theme reveal the establishment of a dualistic evaluation and reform system tailored to cooperative education specifics, outlining challenges associated with ideological and cultural disparities when integrating certain foreign education aspects into the Chinese context.

Discussion

This research provides insightful exploration into the complexities of collaborative talent-training models in Physical Education. It not only elucidates the assimilation of foreign paradigms but also highlights nuanced challenges and prospects for developing tailored educational systems within specific regional and national contexts.
Virtually prepared: designing remote environmental health practicum experiences
Authors: Ndoh Christina E. , Bortey-Sam Nesta , Moore Maggie , Ufelle Alexander
Published: January 2024

The push for virtual education modes continues to grow and develop following unprecedented acceleration during the COVID-19 pandemic. Environmental and occupational health education echoes that demand, where programs are seeing the focus expand from lab-based bench work to include greater practice emphasis in areas such as environmental health equity, environmental justice, environmental policy, and environmental health literacy. Part of the educational foundation for Environmental and Occupational Health MPH programs includes a practicum designed to provide students with “real-world” experience beyond classroom applications. Given the expected increased demand for virtual educational models from students and virtual employees from the professional sector, higher education programs that require practicum experiences must seek innovative approaches that meet both student and employer needs. The University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health is a practicum host site for local universities. Recently, faculty have sought to co-create virtual environmental health practicums in response to requests for these types of opportunities. This article expands upon work on “virtual” or “remote” practicum placements and builds upon best practices to contribute to continuing research in this area. The article also shares insight into creating additional virtual opportunities in the environmental health field. This work presents a case study of the development of a virtual student practicum, documents the processes and procedures followed to develop work grounded in best practices, and shares lessons learned and recommendations for developing future virtual practicums for public health students. The student and practicum host provide reflections on the practicum design and experience.