bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘Connected to Time’: Ali Smith’s Anachronistic Scottish Cosmopolitanism
Authors: McCulloch Fiona
Published: January 2023

Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), described as the first Brexit novel and an important exemplar of ‘BrexLit’, offers a powerful counter discourse that exemplifies Scotland’s desire to remain in the EU despite the dominant rhetoric of British nationalism. Fiona McCulloch’s geopolitical reading of Autumn (2016), Winter (2017) and There but for the (2011) places Scotland within a (problematic) British, European, global context, with particular emphasis on the growing discrepancy between the two definitions of cosmopolitanism – Zygmunt Bauman’s, which sees cosmopolitanism as an elitist beneficiary of globalization, and emphasises the privileged citizen’s capacity to live in space, and travel, and Ulrich Beck’s, in which cosmopolitans are described as ‘spatiotemporal victims’. In Smith’s novels, those are characters marginalised or isolated by neoliberalism and neo-conservatism, who challenge that state of affairs and produce a counter-voice to British hegemony. McCulloch describes what she identifies as Smith’s new ethics, which offers a new, alternative trajectory that can counter globalisation’s temporality and, in the process, resist global disempowerment. The chapter also shows how Scotland offers an alternative to Conservatisms, and to Brexit-style return to colonial expansion, describing the novels’ focus on a sense of ‘geogendered otherness’, and their production of a wounded cosmopolitanism, an ‘ethical glocalism’.
‘Whom do you Belong to, Loch?’ Ownership, Belonging and Transience in the Writings of Kathleen Jamie
Authors: Player Amy
Published: January 2023

Amy Player’s chapter on Kathleen Jamie draws mostly on the writer’s prose writing, and discusses the broadening of Jamie’s spatial, but also temporal horizons, her engagement with our necessary connectedness to the land in a non-anthropocentric way, and with deep time. Land ownership, one of the issues at the core of Jamie’s writing, is to be seen in a relative framework, which emphasises humans’ transience and belonging. Player shows that Jamie’s wish to move away from centred or singular perspectives turns her into a mediator, and enables her to produce a wider narrative and a broader temporal spectrum. The notion of ‘shared values’, which is central to Jamie’s writing, is discussed, along with the connection between nature writing, environmental concerns and nationalism, and Jamie’s engagement, which is situated in opposition to nationalist politics. Jamie’s concerns, by moving away from Scotland and by encompassing an ever-broader range of topics, by also shifting to new hybrid forms such as the film-poem, lead her to produce an in-depth examination of notions such as here and elsewhere, near and far, local and global, giving new depths to the concept of home.
Misty Islands and Hidden Bridges
Authors: MacNeil Kevin
Published: January 2023

Kevin MacNeil addresses the complex notion of home, by examining the way in which the Scottish islands are presented in literature, when they are presented at all. In a chapter which, in its conclusion, reminds its readers that ‘place is character’, he contrasts insiders’ and outsiders’ perspectives on islands and island lives, and shows that although both approaches are valuable, the former has a responsibility not just to the island itself, especially in case of isolated and overlooked communities, but to something larger which he sees as disconnected from the burden of representing one’s community. The dual perspective offered by the insider-outsider dialectics is related to issues of cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. MacNeil examines crime fiction by ‘outsiders’ set on Scottish islands, wondering about its relevance to the actuality of island life and islanders’ identity. This examination brings him to offer a careful, thoughtful investigation of the intersections of narrative and meaning, what he calls its ‘real life impact’, and of the pitfalls of false cognition and cultural reinforcement. MacNeil values fiction ultimately for its capacity to reveal truth, a truth that goes beyond the accuracy of representation of place.
Scottish Audio- And Film-Poetry: Writing, Sounding, Imaging Twenty-First-Century Scotland
Authors: Manfredi Camille
Published: January 2023

Camille Manfredi reflects on the explosion in sound and video recordings of poetic works and the proliferation of cross-media practices in Scotland since the turn of the century. She examines how contemporary Scottish film-poets Alastair Cook, Roseanne Watt, Callum Rice and Susan Kemp cement their practice within the disjunction between visual and sonorous dimensions, and play out the contrapuntal relationship between moving image and poetry to elicit new forms of cooperation between the audience, the text and its performance. She argues that twenty-first-century Scottish film-poetry contributes to inventing another sense of locale grounded on the evocative power of the Scottish voice, accents and languages, as well as on their ability to break open the canon. Manfredi’s chapter approaches some of the many possibilities offered by text-sound and moving word-moving image relationships to imagine, re-imagine and behold contemporary Scotland’s cultural soundscapes, at the same time as these new aesthetic possibilities partake in the reconfiguration of both traditional and non-traditional, local and global paradigms of identity.
Transforming Cultural Memory: The Shifting Boundaries of Post-Devolutionary Scottish Literature
Authors: Sassi Carla
Published: January 2023

Carla Sassi offers a rich overall commentary on the role of the literary and ways of rethinking and remediating nationalism. Her contribution assesses how post-devolutionary texts engage with and reconfigure – possibly dissolve – conventional ideas of the nation, with reference to recent re-conceptualisations of the notion of cultural memory. Sassi turns her attention to a number of Scottish contemporary literary texts that signal a meaningful new paradigmatic shift in their relation to Scotland’s cultural memory, and indeed to ideas of Scottish national identity – a shift that, she argues, may be seen equal in its importance to that marked in 1981 by the publication of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. Through an analysis of works ranging from James Robertson’s historical novels, David Greig’s stage adaptation of Lanark and Kathleen Jamie’s nonfiction to the recent publications of Malachy Tallack, Amy Liptrot and Ian Stephen, Sassi focuses on what she presents as two specific trends of twenty-first-century Scottish writing: the shift from a memory-as-history paradigm to a markedly literary one, and a new commitment to the materiality of the local – a celebration of ecological immanence – both of which may have important repercussions on ideas of Scottishness.
Conclusions
Authors: Dickinson Colby
Published: January 2023

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Resource Access and the Political Salience of Kinship
Authors: Weiner Scott J
Published: January 2023

Introduces the book’s theory that pre-state conditions affect kinship salience at the end of state building. Before state building, kinship groups accessed vital limited resources. Per the book’s model, access to vital limited resources can be either competitive or cooperative.Whether kinship groups had competitive or cooperative access to vital limited resources shaped the state building process. Where resource access was competitive, the state was forced to engage individual kinship groups during each of these three stages of state building to bring them under the purview of the bureaucratic state. As such, the importance of kinship authority was reified and at the end of state building, kinship authority had governing salience, meaning that it determined access to power (cabinet membership, elected office) and resources (monthly payouts, housing, healthcare). In contrast, where resource access was cooperative, the state could subsume proto-bureaucracies within its governing apparatus. Proto-bureaucracies remained staffed by kinship group members, but their authority was bureaucratic in that it was based on knowledge of how to administer and maintain resources. As such, at the end of state building, kinship authority had instrumentalized salience, meaning that it was used by governments for bureaucratic ends.
Introduction
Authors: Brogan Una
Published: January 2023

Provides a brief history of the development of bicycle technology. The chronological and geographical focus of the study is outlined and justified. A state of the art of current research is provided, including an overview of previous studies on bicycles and literature, and more broadly, forms of transport and their interaction with literature and culture. Theorists who have influenced the research are recognised. A summary of each of the chapters is provided.
1 The Politics of Culture in ‘New Turkey’
Authors: Hecker Pierre , Furman Ivo , Akyıldız Kaya
Published: January 2023

This chapter addresses the relationship between culture, politics and power in President Erdoğan’s ‘New Turkey’. It touches upon aspects such as the ascendance of authoritarian populism and the decline of democracy, the role of neo-Ottomanism in Turkish popular culture, and culture as a site of political struggle in contemporary Turkey. This chapter introduces the key concepts of this book (culture, cultural hegemony, myth, etc.) and outlines its general structure. The theoretical foundations and terminology of The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Turkey build on the British tradition of Cultural Studies. It thus makes use of the classic works of Antonio Gramsci, Roland Barthes, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige and others.
Never Walk Alone: The Politics Of Unveiling In ‘New Turkey’
Authors: Çavdar Ayʂe
Published: January 2023

As the madness of the #10yearschallenge neared its peak, a group of women in Turkey shared photos of themselves with and without the Islamic headscarf. They declared their decision to abandon it and briefly expressed their feelings about this choice. Their statements were apparently formulated with great care, bearing little resemblance to the usual anti-Islamic, anti-headscarf sentiment. They revealed that they had worn headscarves as a result of encouragement or pressure from their families or schools. Consequently, they considered their abandonment of the headscarf to be a matter of emancipation, motivated by the desire to uncover their authentic selves. This chapter does not aim at a comparison of the secular and religious reactions to these Tweets, or the hegemonic imaginations regarding the public sphere and contemporary politics in Turkey that they are based on. Instead, it seeks to analyse the responses of Islamist men in order to examine the meaning that the headscarf of religious women has for them. It also seeks to explain how the decision of religious women to abandon their headscarves feels like a rupture in the masculine hegemonic project of Islamism.
The Politics Of Nostalgia: The New Urban Culture In Ankara’S Historic Neighbourhoods
Authors: Onur Petek
Published: January 2023

In recent years, the historical centre of Ankara has undergone remarkable processes of restoration and renovation. New shops, cafés, restaurants, hotels and museums have been opened, while the city’s historic neighbourhoods are being (re)discovered by tourists and local residents alike. These new tourist sites are characterised by neo-Ottomanist cultural practices, neoliberal economic activities and Turco-Islamic connotations. The restoration and transformation of Ankara’s historic neighbourhoods constitutes a spatial embodiment of the ruling elite’s cultural politics. The representations of Ottoman heritage are intended to signify the ruling elite’s power, as well as a new notion of public memory. They are profoundly influenced by Turkish popular culture, and especially by popular TV series on different periods of Ottoman history. In this way, however, the authenticity of these new historic sites is implicitly called into question. Ankara’s new urban culture appears as the perfect example of restorative nostalgia, which Svetlana Boym has defined as a nostalgia that promises to rebuild a lost past and fill gaps in the popular memory with new constructions. This chapter is based on field research which investigates the (re)created nostalgia culture of Ankara’s historic Hamamönü and Hamamarkası neighbourhoods.
The Affirmation Of Sunni Supremacism In Erdoğan’S ‘New Turkey’
Authors: Akyıldız Kaya
Published: January 2023

By (re)affirming Turkish nationalism and the country’s Ottoman past as well as championing the country’s pious majority, President Erdoğan and the ruling AKP claim to have put an end to the degeneration of the nation. A relentless discourse of unity, religious and national purity, authenticity, resoluteness and irredentist dreams of a revived (Ottoman) empire through the creation of a new pious community represents the cornerstone of today’s ‘New Turkey’. One may argue that more than mere rhetoric, ‘New Turkey’ is a hegemonic project insofar as it aims to create a ‘new’ Turkish citizen and establish the views of the ruling elite as the commonly accepted norm. In their attempt to operationalise the hegemonic project of ‘New Turkey’, Erdoğan and the AKP have created an atmosphere of social polarisation, effectively mobilising a siege mentality of ‘us versus them’ within the electorate. As part of this strategy, the ruling elite consistently utilises (and exploits) secular–religious, sectarian (Sunni–Alevi), as well as ethnic (Turkish–Kurdish) tensions in Turkish society. This chapter critically engages with the logic of Sunni supremacism. The author argues that Sunniness is one realm wherein the hegemonic project of ‘New Turkey’ has succeeded.
The Making of The Post-Conflict
Authors: Furtado Henrique Tavares
Published: January 2023

This chapter investigates the historical rupture that constituted the field of transitional justice, moving away from concerns with the conditions of implementations of best practices that dominates the literature towards a deep investigation of the conditions of possibility of the field itself. Inspired by the works of Foucault and Žižek, this chapter begins to sketch out a critical genealogy of transitional justice as a historical discipline: a body of knowledge that possesses a disciplinary function, in other words, that exercises a form of power over individuals, moulding their conduct and behaviour. The chapter identifies the emergence of this new discipline of justice around the end of the Cold War (1989) and the end of ‘Dirty Wars’ in the Global South (1980s–1990s), the so-called ‘end of history’ defined by claims that alternatives to liberal capitalist development had disappeared. The analysis focuses on the productive facet of this new discipline, arguing that criminal trials, truth commissions and reparation programmes are not merely reactive responses to the end of conflict and authoritarianism, but active instruments that produce a post-conflictual reality where violence has either ended or can end.
The Value of Resistance
Authors: Furtado Henrique Tavares
Published: January 2023

This chapter investigates this ‘prehistory’ of official truth-seeking in Brazil, focusing on the relationship between transitional justice practices and processes of memorialisation. The chapter is written from the perspective of the RM-SP, an institution whose history was shaped by the different turns that the question of historical accountability took from the early 1990s until the 2010s. The central objective here is to analyse how the memory of political violence in the past, and the narratives of transitional justice, are affected by the (neo)liberal times; how they express the concern of a society in crisis, torn between the liberal defence of democratic principles and the reorganisation of social relations according to the neoliberal market. Against the usual narrative that transitional justice overlooks the economic sphere, the chapter reveals the similarities between the field’s ‘common language of justice’ and what it defines as the language of (neo)liberalism: the set of equivalences and differences between concepts, practices and experiences that constitutes the frame through which the past is represented and communicated to present audiences. Drawing insights from the works of Baudrillard, Žižek and Rancière, the chapter analyses the effects of this language on the representational practices of the permanent exhibition of the RM-SP.
The Enclosure of Blame
Authors: Furtado Henrique Tavares
Published: January 2023

This chapter advances the second part of the manuscript’s analysis of the CNV, focusing on the final report, published on 10 December 2014. It looks at the twenty-nine policy recommendations dividing them into five interrelated themes of punishment, demilitarisation, re-education, restitution and protection. Inspired by Foucault’s analytics of power and Rancière’s critique of political philosophy, the analysis shows how these themes are centred on a certain symbolic economy of anti-impunity: a set of assumptions about power and policies of redress that grossly simplify the question of responsibility in post-authoritarian scenarios. The chapter argues that the themes convey a market model of accountability, assuming that power is a commodity, that political violence equals a misuse of power, and that policies of redress must simply redistribute rights across society. It links this model of accountability to a certain fetishism of responsibility: the excessive focus on perpetrators of GVHRs in the reports of truth commissions in detriments of wider social relations that constituted officers as state terrorists. The chapter argues that the attribution of responsibility for wrongdoing in the final report is akin to a process of enclosure of blame: the fencing off of responsibility around an individual and indivisible source of blame for the violent past (the military and the military dictatorship).
The Art of Defiance
Authors: Vahabzadeh Peyman
Published: January 2023

At a time of growing state control, censorship and wholesale crackdown on opposition in post-1953 Iran, intellectuals and artists began to produce works that defied the Shah's dictatorship and the regime's "Great Civilisation" propaganda. With the emergence of urban guerrilla warfare in 1971 - spearheaded by Marxist People's Fadai Guerrillas (PFG) - dissident artists created symbolic works that popularised the militants' ideas through artistic depictions and tropes, while portraying the militants as immortal freedom-fighters. The arts of defiance thus swayed young educated Iranians, as well as certain layers of the public, to perceive the state through the eyes of its most radical critiques: militant dissidents. The Art of Defiance narrates the fascinating convergence of dissident poetry, song-writing, short fiction, and films with the idea of resistance and liberation in the 1970s Iran.
Chapter 1 Merleau-Ponty, Descartes and the Unreflected Life of the Body
Authors: Morin Marie-Eve
Published: January 2023

This chapter is focused on Merleau-Ponty’s undermining of Cartesian dualism in his study of lived body and his attempt at tying reflection back to the unreflected life of the body. To get acquainted with the lived body, the author focuses on the description of the experience of sensing and self-sensing in the Phenomenology of Perception, paying special attention to the kind of unity formed by the body schema and the system body schema–world. Finally, the author appeals to the immediate reception of Merleau-Ponty’s project to show the limitations of the phenomenological approach to reflection in its relation to the unreflected. It is in light of this critical reception that Merleau-Ponty will be led to refine his method as well as his reading of Descartes.
Chapter 5 Things after the Phenomenology : Merleau‑Ponty’s Cautious Anthropomorphism
Authors: Morin Marie-Eve
Published: January 2023

Chapter 5 focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Sartre’s essay ‘Man and Things’ and their respective readings of Francis Ponge’s Le parti pris des choses. In his engagement with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty speaks of things in strong anthropomorphic terms, yet the author shows that these anthropomorphic statements must be read in the context of the polemic against the Cartesian-Sartrian ontology of the object and anticipate the works of recent thinkers, such as Steven Shaviro and Jeffrey Cohen, who have adopted ‘a cautious anthropomorphism’ as a strategy to dislodge the human from the centre of the universe and give things their inhuman vitality and agency back.
Shakespeare's Golden Ages
Authors: Johanson Kristine
Published: January 2023

This book examines acts of nostalgia as rhetorical moves designed to precipitate future action. Diverging from critical paths that have focused on nostalgia as a memorializing practice or on Stuart nostalgia for Elizabeth, this monograph argues that Shakespeare’s Elizabethan history plays stage nostalgia as a future-focused political rhetoric. In doing so, the book suggests new directions for studying nostalgia. Case studies including Richard II and Julius Caesar demonstrate how Shakespeare creates a dramatic argument for nostalgia’s power and possibility, even as he represents the fruitlessness of trying to reclaim the past and the fiction of that past's ideal nature. In his dramaturgy, nostalgia functions as a persuasive call for (short-lived) political change. The book provides new interpretations of Shakespeare’s contemporaries to illustrate how his use of nostalgia depends on, innovates from and influences fellow playwrights Marlowe, Jonson, and the Queen’s Men. By reading literary, religious and political texts alongside Shakespeare's histories, this book attends additionally to the extra-dramatic valences nostalgic rhetoric obtains in Elizabethan England.
What Merry World in England? Nostalgic Paroemia and The Second Part of Henry VI
Authors: Johanson Kristine
Published: January 2023

Chapter Two examines a fantasy of the past central to the late-Tudor idea of nostalgia: the topos of a ‘merry world’, or ‘merry England’. This chapter analyses the diverse articulations of the ubiquitous ‘merry world/England’ proverb that circulated in Tudor culture, in post-Reformation critiques of Catholicism as well as influential sixteenth-century plays and interludes (e.g. Hick Scorner, Lusty Juventus), whose ideas still circulated in late- Elizabethan England. This context informs Shakespeare’s own use of the topos in The Second Part of Henry VI, in which he employs a contested religious discourse to craft an ambivalent political rhetoric. The chapter demonstrates the cultural currency of the play’s nostalgic proverbial discourse through an examination of Protestant writers who mocked the idea of a preferable Catholic past. 2 Henry VI employs the culturally familiar language of proverbs to introduce political instability and radicalism into Shakespeare’s play, as representatives of the crown and its opposition use nostalgic rhetoric to secure or to gain power. In the play, the ‘merry world’ discourse communicates a longing that is revealed to be impotent in its desire to reclaim a place and time that never existed.
The Lessons of Nostalgia in Julius Caesar and Sejanus
Authors: Johanson Kristine
Published: January 2023

This chapter re-examines the relationship between Julius Caesar and Ben Jonson’s Sejanus and shows how Shakespeare and Jonson employ nostalgia to different political ends. In Julius Caesar, nostalgia’s initial persuasive force exemplifies how language becomes the source of and means to political power. Sejanus—in many ways a response to Caesar—formulates nostalgia as a strictly radical discourse which becomes side-lined and impotent in the play’s politics. Shakespeare and Jonson re-create Roman histories at a time when Tacitus’s impact on history-writing was steadily rising, and this chapter first considers his influence on late-Elizabethan concerns with historiography and the intentions and purposes of writing history. Both playwrights illustrate Tacitus’s dramatic appeal as they stage his lament for a degenerate present and a longing for the republican past alongside his idea of the individual’s role in shaping history. In Julius Caesar the republican past appears tantalizingly close, and the chapter shows how nostalgic rhetoric once again seeds political action. Discussing Justus Lipsius, this chapter then shows how in Sejanus, Neostoicism is the only just response to imperial power and nostalgic longing. In both plays, the language that articulates a perfect past becomes evidence of the present’s fallen nature.
Introduction: Main(Land) Melody Films and Hong Kong Directors
Authors: Yiu-Wai Chu
Published: January 2023

The rise of China, its soft power and hence changes in related government policies have resulted in Chinese main melody films acquiring new meanings. This chapter provides the theoretical backdrop against which the significance of Hong Kong filmmaker’s participation in these films is critically assessed. It outlines the transformation of main melody films from political propaganda to commercial blockbusters that attempt to win legitimacy based on quite similar values and styles of filmmaking to those used in the West. In the light of the rise of Mainland-Hong Kong co-productions after the signing of the Closer Economic Partnership Agreement in 2003, the northern ventures of Hong Kong directors are investigated in relation to the age of Chinese cinema.
Following the Animal-To-Come …
Authors: Briggs Robert
Published: January 2023

This chapter lays the foundation of the overall investigation by developing the conceptual possibility of ‘the animal-to-come’ as a means for reflecting on and further developing ‘the question of the animal’ in contemporary humanities inquiry. Through engagements with Jacques Derrida’s work not only on the question of the animal, but also on the structure of writing and on the motif of ‘to-come’ (à-venir), the chapter reflects on what’s at stake in approaching the question of animality as a matter less of ontology or ethics than of history, institutionality and power, a move which brings out the ‘hauntological’ and ‘zoopolitical’ — as distinct, in a sense, from ethical — register of ‘the animal-to-come’. Central to this approach is a theorisation of ‘the’ human-animal distinction not as an ontological divide but as an institutional field, an effect of an ‘in-human’ process in which a propensity for human exceptionalism gets iteratively reinscribed. In elaborating this point, the chapter introduces the ‘constructivist’ thought of French philosopher Dominique Lestel, before speculating — via Derrida’s reading of Thomas Hobbes — on a concept (hence a politics) of the ‘animal-machine’ that radically diverges from the Cartesian model.
Thomas Hobbes: Reforming Nature, Profaning Politics
Authors: Kennedy Simon P.
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on Thomas Hobbes’ theory of natural law. Fundamental to this is his conception of ‘nature’, which was very different from the Aristotelian and scholastic conceptions evidenced in Calvin, Hooker and Althusius. This means Hobbes deviated from the earlier natural law theories propounded by Reformed thinkers. In Hobbes’s political writings, natural law became focused on the protection and promotion of pre-political natural rights. These rights are threatened by the radical anti-sociability of humanity, and therefore humans must establish a political society to protect those rights. The central intention of political society is, for Hobbes, the protection of natural rights that are perpetually under threat because of human nature and its natural propensity towards social discord. With Hobbes, natural law becomes anthropocentric and politics becomes secularised.
Time-Space: Spatialising Film
Authors: Bal Mieke , Mitchell W. J. T.
Published: January 2023

The chapter lays out both the difficulty and the need to bring literature and film into each other's orbit. It takes up the aspect of video installation that makes it different from both literature and film in their traditional ways of functioning. The spatialisation of videos in installation and exhibition makes for a very different process, with a more active role for the viewer-participant. The linearity traditionally presupposed to regulate reading novels and watching films is suspended, if not entirely undermined. That linearity cannot be cancelled, since all acts of viewing also involve time. But the order in which these acts are performed is not pre-determined by the artwork; it is left to the visitor-participant. A walking tour through the exhibition “Landscapes of Madness” held in the museum Aboa Vetus/Ars Nova in Turku, Finland, in 2011, will demonstrate this spatialising works, and how it matters for the affective effectivity of the video work. This video work integrates historical and fictional instances of madness, folly, and carnival, with reports of case notes from the psychoanalyst of psychosis who wrote the book.
The Division of Disciplinary Spaces
Authors: Pugsley Peter C.
Published: January 2023

This chapter presents an analysis of the iconic physical sites that provide visual cues to the audience through recognition and familiarity. Through application of theories posited by Foucault and Durkheim, this chapter shows how the built environment and architecture of the school has adapted to Japanese culture while its ties to Western institutionalisation are still visible. The chapter explores the use of separate spaces within the school for location shooting that link to character development and particular narrative and plot structures.
Dissent in the Sciences
Authors: Sim Stuart
Published: January 2023

Although science has been prone to dogmatism historically, that is far less the case nowadays. As currently practised, scientific method insists on careful testing and on critical experiments proving the claims made for any theory. It also emphasises the need for any such critical experiment to be replicable by others. Scientific knowledge is taken to be provisional only, always open to change; an approach that has been described as 'organised scepticism'. Science does, however, have an awkward relationship with politics. Politicians do not always agree with what scientists say about climate change, for example, being ideologically committed to economic growth and thus continued heavy use of ecologically-damaging fossil fuels. The pressure that scientists come under to yield profits for the commercial sector is also discussed.
Introduction:The Matter of Form
Authors: Roth Zoë
Published: January 2023

The discursive body of postmodernism exploded essentialist ideologies about race, gender, and sexuality. But at what cost? In asserting that bodily materiality can only be grasped through representation, postmodernism placed embodied experience beyond expression. To repair postmodernism’s fragmented, unrepresentable body, Formal Matters turns to an unexpected source: early and mid-century formalisms. Bringing together formalism’s endeavour to give form to the ineffable with postmodernism’s discursive body, Formal Matters argues that embodiment-or the experience of the lived, corporeal body-is not what resists representation but what constitutes form. Working at the intersection of formalist criticism, phenomenology, and body studies, Zoë Roth reassesses the relationship between embodiment and form in a range of modern European authors, including Primo Levi, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Anne F. Garréta, and Hannah Arendt. Through close textual analysis, Formal Matters provides a new method for grasping embodied experience where it appears most attenuated and fragmented. It provides an original account of the body’s relationship to language and representation, while also reinvigorating formalist methods with political potential.
Colonialism: The Hand of Man
Authors: Munro Lachlan
Published: January 2023

Attacks on the exploitation of resources and populations overseas and at home. Graham’s reports on conditions and attitudes in foreign countries develop into exotic evocations of lifestyles, which form the basis of his future literary output.
Ireland and Scotland: A Patient Realist
Authors: Munro Lachlan
Published: January 2023

Graham’s support for Irish and Scottish home-rule in and out of parliament. Graham and Hardie’s early membership of the Scottish Home Rule Association. Graham’s support for a Scottish home rule Bill in parliament. The general apathy of the Scottish people.
Scotland: The Familiar Kail-Yard
Authors: Munro Lachlan
Published: January 2023

The difficulty of translating his writing skills to his native Scotland. Attacks on the ‘Kailyard’ school of Scottish writing. A renewed involvement in Scottish home-rule. Graham’s depiction of landscape, local characters, and eccentric relatives in his native Menteith. Atmosphere plays an increasingly important role in Graham’s works, particularly the preponderance of mist.
Axes: Ecstatic Heights and Nightmare Depths
Authors: Angus Bill
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores crossroads practice associated with traditions of gods and spirits both above and below, suggesting a tradition of a vertical axis allowing access to the underworld or the heavens, the realms of the divine and the dead. What lies beneath is of course both conceptual and archaeological, while what is above is both conceptual and cosmological. The crossroad goddess Hecate’s triple form expresses this as it embraces both Proserpine of the underworld and Diana of the Moon. The chapter also explores crossroads as the generative ‘mother of the ways’ and gendered ways of seeing both Y and X intersections. Going on to explain the cosmological crossroads of the ancient world, and the Platonic conception of the signature of creation itself, it shows how the vertical axis concerns the nature of the human subject and its relationship to the divine.
Literature: Liminal Ground in Early Modern Drama
Authors: Angus Bill
Published: January 2023

In Shakespeare’s lifetime and long after, to live as a traitor or to die in suicide meant, in burial, to be treated as refuse. It is probable that Shakespeare knew at least five such people, disposed of in a ceremony whose elements were, as described in the last chapter, the night, the crossroads, and the stake. Although he largely avoids depicting subjects like imprisonment and execution, the question of outcast burial nevertheless emerges in hints and allusions found in the plays, like the shadowy revenants of unquiet thoughts. Contrastingly, George Peele is the one dramatist of the era who depicts a crossroads explicitly onstage, in his The Old Wives Tale. Peele’s treatment of the subject is varied, but comedically light. This chapter argues that the delinquent crossroads are inscribed here in what de Certeau calls a ‘procedure of delimitation’ which has the function of ‘founding and articulating spaces’. The placing of a body at a boundary like a crossroads is to write it into the margins of a story as a part of the defining frame. Refusing this interment may be to refuse this influence of the marginal, but on the dramatic stage this has a way of returning despite its excision from the script.
Wanderers: The Predicament of a Stranger
Authors: Angus Bill
Published: January 2023

For the quantifiably settled populations of humanity, the ambiguity of the wanderer of roads has long been a source of anxiety and an idea which has seeded many a narrative. This uncertainty is made all the more indefinite by death, and for many centuries it was a commonly accepted fact that the spirits of criminals, suicides, and murder victims walked the earth. For de Certeau, ‘to walk is to lack a place’ and so the wanderer may be perceived to embody the very concept of space. Their appearance is an alarming sign that the powers of the status quo are out of joint. In fact their relationship with the more static population is reciprocal, and the god of the roads needs the settled for his travelling to mean much. Besides its long association with the containment of wanderers, including the gods of the roads, the crossroads has other functions too as a popular locus for demonic restlessness and a desire for direction which goes beyond mere metaphor. This chapter looks at early modern texts that place the wanderer on the road and suggests that they share a duality with the nature of crossroads which includes both attraction and repulsion.
Conclusion: The Parting – Intersections
Authors: Angus Bill
Published: January 2023

This brief final chapter draws together the themes and functions around the crossroads which are explored in the book and places them within modern frameworks of similarity or equivalence. It speculates on the nature of such places in the present and on the possible meaningful futures of the crossroads.
The importance of microtubule-dependent tension in accurate chromosome segregation
Authors: Bunning Angela R. , Gupta Jr. Mohan L.
Published: January 2023

Accurate chromosome segregation is vital for cell and organismal viability. The mitotic spindle, a bipolar macromolecular machine composed largely of dynamic microtubules, is responsible for chromosome segregation during each cell replication cycle. Prior to anaphase, a bipolar metaphase spindle must be formed in which each pair of chromatids is attached to microtubules from opposite spindle poles. In this bipolar configuration pulling forces from the dynamic microtubules can generate tension across the sister kinetochores. The tension status acts as a signal that can destabilize aberrant kinetochore-microtubule attachments and reinforces correct, bipolar connections. Historically it has been challenging to isolate the specific role of tension in mitotic processes due to the interdependency of attachment and tension status at kinetochores. Recent technical and experimental advances have revealed new insights into how tension functions during mitosis. Here we summarize the evidence that tension serves as a biophysical signal that unifies multiple aspects of kinetochore and centromere function to ensure accurate chromosome segregation.
Large animal models in the study of gynecological diseases
Authors: Cui Minghua , Liu Yuehui , Men Xiaoping , Li Tao , Liu Da , Deng Yongzhi
Published: January 2023

Gynecological diseases are a series of diseases caused by abnormalities in the female reproductive organs or breast, which endanger women’s fertility and even their lives. Therefore, it is important to investigate the mechanism of occurrence and treatment of gynecological diseases. Animal models are the main objects for people to study the development of diseases and explore treatment options. Large animals, compared to small rodents, have reproductive organs with structural and physiological characteristics closer to those of humans, and are also better suited for long-term serial examinations for gynecological disease studies. This review gives examples of large animal models in gynecological diseases and provides a reference for the selection of animal models for gynecological diseases.
Characteristics of iodine-bearing silver-impregnated alumina sorbents and their direct solidification via hot isostatic pressing
Authors: Sakuragi Tomofumi , Yoshida Satoshi , Kato Osamu
Published: January 2023

Waste management for radioiodine is a key issue for the sustainable nuclear fuel cycle. The iodine adsorption behavior on a bed column of a silver-impregnated alumina sorbent (AgA) under conditions designed to match those of the Rokkasho reprocessing facility dissolver off-gas (DOG) system was investigated using different volatilized iodine concentrations. Cross-sectional observations of iodine-bearing AgA grains revealed that iodine was adsorbed as silver iodide and silver iodate, and gradually distributed from the surface to the inside of the AgA. The iodine distribution throughout the AgA beds allowed us to estimate the length of the mass-transfer zone. This suggests that the iodine load fraction in AgA (adsorbed iodine/total impregnated silver) will be averaged to 50% in the expected facility equipment design. This study also describes the waste form durability after disposal. To reproduce the average iodine loading in the waste form, 100%-loaded AgA grains were mixed with an equal amount of commercially available alumina reagents and consolidated through hot isostatic pressing at 175 MPa and 1,325°C for 3 h. The resultant 50%-loaded solid was used for the static leaching test over 4.5 years, where the leached iodine was less than 0.2% under simple reducing conditions. This suggested that the HIPed solid of AgA from Rokkasho DOG showed preferable water resistance for after disposal safety.
Biofilm and Planktonic Antibiotic Resistance in Patients With Acute Exacerbation of Chronic Rhinosinusitis
Authors: Sabino Henrique Augusto Cantareira , Valera Fabiana Cardoso Pereira , Santos Denise Vieira , Fantucci Marina Zilio , Titoneli Carolina Carneiro , Martinez Roberto , Anselmo-Lima Wilma T. , Tamashiro Edwin
Published: January 2023

Introduction

The recalcitrant nature of patients with acute exacerbation of chronic rhinosinusitis (AECRS) potentially involves persisting colonization of the sinonasal mucosa by bacterial biofilms. Biofilms are known to be highly resistant to antibiotics, which may trigger or maintain chronic inflammation in the sinonasal mucosa. However, little is known about the relationship between the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and antibiofilm concentrations of bacteria obtained from AECRS patients.

Material and Methods

Thirty bacterial strains from 25 patients with AECRS were identified and underwent MIC determination (VITEK® 2). The planktonic isolates were submitted to an in vitro formation of biofilms (Modified Calgary Biofilm Device) and determination of minimum biofilm inhibitory concentration (MBIC) and minimum biofilm eradication concentration (MBEC) for amoxicillin, amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, clarithromycin, and levofloxacin. MIC of the planktonic forms was compared with MBIC and MBEC levels, according to the breakpoints established by the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute guidelines.

Results

The main bacteria retrieved was S. aureus (60%), followed by other Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria in lower frequencies. 76.7% of strains formed biofilm in vitro (n=23/30). The planktonic isolates presented high rates of resistance for amoxicillin (82.6%) and clarithromycin (39.1%), and lower rates for amoxicillin/clavulanic acid (17.4%). The biofilm-forming bacteria counterparts presented higher levels of MBIC and MBEC compared to the MIC levels for amoxicillin, amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, and clarithromycin. Levofloxacin was highly effective against both planktonic and biofilm forms. Planktonic resistant forms were associated with levels of antibiofilm concentrations (MBIC and MBEC).

Conclusions

Biofilm-forming bacteria from AECRS patients are prevalent, and biofilm forms are highly resistant to antibiotics compared to their planktonic counterparts. Antibiotic resistance observed in planktonic forms is a good indicator of biofilm resistance, although near 20% of susceptible planktonic bacteria can produce antibiotic tolerant biofilms.
Colonized patients by Candida auris: Third and largest outbreak in Brazil and impact of biofilm formation
Authors: de Melo Camylla Carvalho , de Sousa Bruna Rodrigues , da Costa Gisela Lara , Oliveira Manoel Marques Evangelista , de Lima-Neto Reginaldo Gonçalves
Published: January 2023

Objective

To describe the clinical–epidemiological features of patients colonized by Candida auris in the largest outbreak in Brazil and to show the biofilm formation capacity of yeast strains.

Methods

Clinical yeasts suspected of C. auris isolated from urine and surveillance samples were seeded on chromogenic media at 30°C and Sabouraud agar at 42°C. matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization–time of flight mass spectometry was used for reliable identification. After proteomic confirmation, the genomic approach and culture on Chromagar Candida Plus media were carried out. Biofilm formation was investigated based on metabolic activity, and the clinical–epidemiological profile of patients was described.

Results

A total of 11 C. auris clinical yeasts from nine patients were identified between the end of December 2021 and March 2022. Two clinical yeasts were isolates from urine and nine clinical yeasts were isolates from axillary and inguinal surveillance swabs. No case is related to previous Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. However, all the yeasts showed a high ability of biofilm formation.

Conclusion

C. auris requires great vigilance as its high capacity to colonize and form biofilms contributes to its dissemination. The rapid and precise identification of this species is essential for the management, control, and prevention of infections.
Children's screentime is associated with reduced brain activation during an inhibitory control task: A pilot EEG study
Authors: Lewin Kaitlin M. , Meshi Dar , Aladé Fashina , Lescht Erica , Herring Caryn , Devaraju Dhatri S. , Hampton Wray Amanda
Published: January 2023

Children's screentime has been linked with a variety of behavioral consequences, including decreased inhibitory control. While children's screentime is associated with distinct functional brain differences, the links between screentime and neural markers of inhibitory control are unknown. Therefore, we examined these relationships in a pilot study using a Go/No-Go task (N = 20). After controlling for age, increased child screentime was significantly correlated with reduced P2 and P3 amplitudes elicited by No-Go trials. No significant relationships were observed with behavioral accuracy or response time. These findings indicate that children with greater screentime exhibit less robust neural processes for inhibitory control. Limitations and future directions are discussed within these preliminary findings.
Quantifying the econometric loss of a cyber-physical attack on a seaport
Authors: Tam Kimberly , Chang Barbara , Hopcraft Rory , Moara-Nkwe Kemedi , Jones Kevin
Published: January 2023

Modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) show increasing levels of automation, intelligence, and optimization capabilities. Both creators and adopters of these technologies emphasize the benefits: safety, cost-savings, and efficiencies. Existing literature under-represents the potential risks associated with the adoption of individually complex systems and interconnected Systems-of-Systems (SoS). Research primarily focuses on the potential benefits, and many recent deployments of new technology have received little rigorous scrutiny. The studies that do explore issues, such as cyber-attacks on CPS, often lack an analysis of the potential impact based on the way cyber-physical risks are communicated. Due to high levels of interaction and inter dependencies in CPS, disruptions in one sector can propagate to other sectors. The initial economic impacts may start locally but will often lead to global effects if response mechanisms prove insufficient. This case study aims to address a research gap in modeling, and quantifies how a cyber-attack, with physical consequences, can affect local and global trade if a single maritime port is affected. Additionally, to further understanding of the public's perception of risk about cyber-attacks and its emergent threat to global supply chains, members of the public were asked to react to the potential econometric losses. This study produced the five-part CyPEM (Cyber Physical Econometric Model) that has the capability to translate a cyber-attack to an econometric loss. Each framework part may also be swapped out to analyze different CPS. With this, we discovered a gap in the perceptions of cyber-physical risk regarding maritime transport.