bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The ‘Social Imaginary’ of Liberal Legalism
Authors: O'Brien Nick
Published: October 2024

Liberal legalism imposes restrictions on the ability of administrative justice institutions to achieve their full potential. Liberal legalism is more than a set of techniques and is instead an outlook, or mentality, that can best be described as a ‘social imaginary’. The key characteristics of that social imaginary emerge in legalism’s manifestation as a form of autonomous legality, rooted in rights-based adversarialism, the common law mind and modern constitutionalism. The image of the judge represents a recurrent cultural motif, which expresses the ethos of both repressive and autonomous legality respectively. Sculptor Siegfried Charoux’s sculpture of The Judge offers representative illustration, especially when set in the context of Ian McEwan’s reflections on the judicial function in his novel The Children Act.
Conclusion
Authors: O'Brien Nick
Published: October 2024

The concluding chapter provides an overview of the main themes of the book. It offers a postliberal interpretation of the democratic character of public authorities and street-level bureaucracy; it rehearses the main characteristics of a postliberalism that is distinguished by responsive legality in its orchestration of the response to citizen grievance; and it contends that for postliberalism the justice inherent in public administration is the micropolitical and everyday justice of the common good. Administrative justice is to that extent something more than ‘administrative justice’ as normally conceived. Recognition of that prospect of intellectual emancipation is pregnant with inherently political possibility. In a postliberal world, administrative justice is a form of justice that is unavoidably post-legalist.
The UK’s Ten-Year Drug Strategy
Authors: Stevens Alex
Published: October 2024

This chapter provides an explanatory critique of the UK ten-year drugs strategy, published in December 2021 under the leadership of Boris Johnson. It examines the moral posturing of the strategy, especially in Johnson’s foreword. It explains how the contradictory and surprising strategy arose from a policy “zoo” of actors within the medico-penal constellation. The surprising part of the strategy was its allocation of over half a billion pounds to drug treatment after years of cuts. The chapter explains how this was achieved by Dame Carol Black’s use of savvy social power and her deployment of the old narrative that drug treatment cuts crime and so saves money. The chapter also shows how challenging constellations, which may have created a more radical strategy, were excluded from the process of making it.
A Retroductive Conclusion
Authors: Stevens Alex
Published: October 2024

This chapter summarises the underlying mechanisms and causal conditions of drug policy making in the UK. It provides ten propositions that are drawn from analysis of this field. They are tendencies that may be useful in explaining policy in other places and other policy fields. The chapter also contextualises the policy constellations approach by comparing it to the advocacy coalition framework, emphasising the critical realist advantage of a focus on loosely concerted actions generated by underlying social and cultural structures over long periods, rather than on centrally coordinated, individual actions in shorter policy cycles. Some limitations and trade-offs of the book’s analysis are discussed, and a suggestion is made to amplify the power of policy constellations by network rewiring. The book concludes with a discussion of the practical adequacy of the policy constellations approach and an invitation to apply it to other countries and policies.
Neglect of Central America and the Latin Caribbean
Authors: Edwards D. Brent , Moschetti Mauro C. , Martin Pauline , Morales-Ulloa Ricardo
Published: October 2024

Historically, and despite their centrality to international political economy developments, Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC) have received insufficient attention from scholars. This is true both generally and when it comes to education research. This lack of attention is even more acute with regard to research that approaches education reform as nested within and contributing to larger (that is, national and international) political economic forces. As the introductory chapter to this volume, this chapter begins by addressing not only the scant attention that these regions have received but also their relevance more broadly. It then turns to characterizing the neglect of the CALC region in the available scholarship that understands education as located at the intersection of global-local and dialectical political-economic relationships. The chapter concludes by highlighting the contributions of the present volume to this gap in the literature.
Deconcentration of Education in Honduras: Restriction and Ritualization of a Chimeric Reform
Authors: Morales-Ulloa Ricardo , Moschetti Mauro C.
Published: October 2024

This chapter analyses governance changes in the Honduran education system during the 1990s, while also closely examining the global discourses that oriented the content and local agendas of the educational reforms in this period. In so doing, it addresses the complexity of the global-local interface by: (a) analysing the economic conditions under which educational reforms were prompted in the period; and (b) paying special attention to how the recontextualization of such reforms gave rise to singular, highly idiosyncratic enactments of global education policy prescriptions. Taking as a starting point the economic circumstances of the Structural Adjustment Program, the chapter analyses the role of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the production of a new, neoliberal economic order in the country, and shows how this order provided the basis for the educational reforms that were subsequently promoted. In this regard, it focuses on the flagship policy of educational decentralization and analyses how recontextualization gave way to a mild form of decentralization – that is, deconcentration – that was integral to maintaining centralized control of education.
When Schools Become Gang Turf: Schools and Government-Sponsored Prevention Programmes in El Salvador
Authors: Savenije Wim
Published: October 2024

Gangs have a strong presence in underprivileged neighbourhoods in Central America’s Northern Triangle. In El Salvador, their presence not only limits the sociability of ordinary youth but also affects the teaching and learning processes in public schools. This chapter looks at how government-sponsored programmes, following international models, aim to prevent violence and gang influence in public schools, and how the schools cope with educating gang-related students. To comprehend the relevance of these programmes for the challenges faced by local public schools, it examines the underlying concepts of prevention and their pertinence in the local context. It concludes that by employing a public security perspective that emphasizes individual decisions and responsibilities, these programmes typically disregard the social dynamics of the school, the families, and the nearby community. Although they can create the sensation that things are more or less under control, they can do little to prevent students from getting closer to gangs or to diminish gang influence in schools.
Bridging the Curricular Divide: Open Educational Resources and the Digitization of Guatemala’s National Basic Curriculum
Authors: Aruch Matthew , Alvarado Felix , Dyl Rachel , Joanna Mok Shue-kei , Summers Katharine , Williams Kate Maloney , Lisman Michael
Published: October 2024

In 2005, the Guatemalan Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) introduced the National Basic Curriculum (CNB). While innovative in its scope and design, financial constraints limited curriculum distribution and implementation. To facilitate access, a Guatemalan citizen living in the US began digitizing CNB onto cnbGuatemala.org in 2012. The wiki website modularized CNB by grade level and content area, while also including hyperlinks to relevant open educational resources (OERs). Through an analysis of institutional documents, website analytics, survey data, and focus group feedback, this chapter investigates the development, use, and growth of cnbGuatemala.org’s local, national, and international network of developers, allies, and users. This chapter uses four concepts articulated within Actor–Network Theory (ANT) – problematization, interessement, enrolment, and mobilization – to better understand how the network was assembled and reconfigured over time, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, where website traffic grew significantly, suggesting opportunities for replication or scale. Finally, the discussion highlights limitations and opportunities for further OER development and use, particularly through wikis.
Whither Education and Development in Central America and the Latin Caribbean? Dialectical Reflections, Decolonial Options
Authors: Edwards D. Brent
Published: October 2024

This brief concluding chapter has two purposes. The first is to reflect on possible paths forward for education and development in Central America and the Latin Caribbean. Having interpreted each case in the present volume through an international political economy lens, the task at hand is to reflect on the implications for the region. The second purpose is to point to future directions for research and action. The suggestions offered pick up on issues mentioned in this volume about which more can and should be said as stakeholders grapple with how to respond to the tensions that affect the region. As will be seen, this section of the chapter takes a decolonial orientation. The last section of the chapter then offers concluding commentary on contributions of the present volume as well as the new gaps that have become evident in the process of filling old ones.
Laugh Track
Authors: Butler Nick
Published: October 2024

Chapter 2 considers the social and political implications of laughter. The chapter begins by reflecting on Hobbes’ writings on civil war, which depict laughter as a passion that’s rooted in violent emotion and intertwined with political instability. For Hobbes, humour ought to be expunged from our political discourse before it leads to discord and unrest. By contrast, Enlightenment philosophers like Kant and Hutcheson view laughter as a healthy expression of inner sentiment – and it’s this theory of laugher that remains with us today in the form of self-help books and feel-good therapeutics. Twentieth-century philosophers like Bataille and Foucault go even further: laughter is able to radically reorder our ways of thinking, knowing, and acting upon the world. Despite Hobbes’ warnings, laughter has become a philosophical touchstone of optimism and transcendence. Yet, as the chapter argues, laughter is deceptive; it shakes your hand at the same time as it punches you in the gut. This is captured by Bergson, for whom laughter – under the cover of fun and frothiness – punishes deviant behaviour by shaming us into compliance and conformity.
The Internet Left
Authors: Harrison Graham
Published: October 2024

We live in an age of crisis, and politics reflects this. It has become dysfunctional, venal, unpleasant, and social media is a striking example of the decline in politics. Or is it? This book argues that social media is also a seedbed for ambitious political thinking, thinking that contains within it new ideological possibilities. Innovative and attention-grabbing socialist discourses have emerged within social media. They respect the basic conditions upon which political ideas are constructed and have generated discernible projects constructed by groups of authors producing content for their own networks. This book treats these projects as proto-ideologies: intellectual endeavours that assemble concepts to make sense of politics, win arguments, and set out visions of progress against the prevailing dourness at the heart of centrist politics. By analysing socialist conceptual arrangements, the book shows how vital combativeness is to the construction of political ideas. It shows how social media invigorates this and gives ideas a far broader readership than was possible before. Comparing two key socialist proto-ideologies, the book shows how each engages a contentious discussion both against rival ideologies and, more importantly, against each other. It is in the midst of this sibling rivalry that one can identify the limitations of each proto-ideological project.
Chaos, Crisis, Decline, Contention
Authors: Harrison Graham
Published: October 2024

The chapter starts with a brief recent history of political decline. A belief in an end to major political antagonism in the early 1990s is replaced by a state of uncertainty in the early 2000s which is resolved through crisis. Crisis has been the default state of politics since 2008. The chapter reviews some of the major statements of crisis politics in the present day, showing how core political values – democracy, truth, and nation – have been put into a state of existential doubt. Much of this doubt is distilled through anxieties about IT and social media. In response, the chapter defines a virtual realm of political social media (PSM) in which politics thrives and aspires to make a case for progress. PSM contains both the ‘heat’ of social media discourse and an understanding that arguments need to be proven and questioned in roughly deliberative ways. As a result, it can be understood as a politically productive phenomenon. This chapter frames the politics within which social media has evolved. This is a politics of decline in which social media is both cause and symptom. A salient outcome of this framing is that little space is left for any sense of political innovation or progress. Introducing the term PSM, we argue that this dour predisposition precludes too much.
‘A Largeness of Vision and Imagination’: Marxism and Socialism
Authors: Harrison Graham
Published: October 2024

Socialism remains the tradition that both aims to treat crisis seriously and set out ways not only to manage crisis but surpass it. Socialism has also sustained a culture of progressive adversarialism: it believes in progress but remains dissatisfied with dominant ways to achieve it. It is an ideal political tradition through which to explore ideational responses to declinist visions of politics. The chapter sets out some historical and definitional coordinates. Socialism contains Marxist and non-Marxist approaches. It has changed significantly as the political histories within which it has been embedded have changed. It has been strongly theoretical and also ideological. It has often misleadingly been glossed as ‘the Left’. As an ideology, socialism has aspired to socio-economic progress, modernity, and mass representative government. It has been defined by a sense of frustrated expectation regarding the ability of capitalist elites to fulfil this promise.
Proto-Ideologies
Authors: Harrison Graham
Published: October 2024

Political ideologies are the foundation of broad public political discourse. They serve as the scaffolding within which politics becomes shared and legible. The chapter identifies political ideologies as contesting traditions of political contention. Terry Eagleton emphasises how political ideologies are a form of practice more than an abstract theoretical framework, and this chapter adapts a version of his approach. In order to analyse the socialist ideological traditions that have emerged in political social media (PSM), we start with Michael Freeden’s morphological approach. This offers a usefully pragmatic way to analyse conceptual construction and location. We innovate on this basis a proto-ideological approach in which we assume that ideologies are in construction and aspirant rather than ‘canonical’. The features of a proto-ideology are well suited to a study of PSM: ambitious, malleable, incomplete. The chapter finishes by setting out how the proto-ideology approach allows us to transpose material from PSM into an academic analysis.
Democratic Marxist Nationalism
Authors: Harrison Graham
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the proto-ideology of Democratic Marxist Nationalism (DMN). It identifies three core concepts – Marxism, democracy, and nationalism – and demonstrates how they hold a foundational decontested position within this proto-ideology. Adjacent concepts are then set out. Two of these are class-based and are conceptual devices to feed a deeper Marxism into zones of contention. The working class is articulated as the principal concern with democracy. The middle class is defined mainly in adversarial fashion. Two other adjacent concepts – common sense and liberty – further anchor the association of democracy with the working class. Peripheral concepts are means for DMN more readily to engage in contentious topics of the day: education, resilience, hypocrisy, and progress. Each speak to matters concerning the shaping of public ideas and political prospects.
Smart Borders, Digital Identity and Big Data
Authors: Korkmaz Emre Eren
Published: October 2024

This book sheds light on the social and political impacts of technological innovation with a focus on surveillance technologies in migration management, border security and humanitarianism. This dynamic field canvases debates on topics including digital identity, smart borders, big data, financial inclusion and cash transfer.
The use of surveillance technologies in migration and border management is a crucial topic because of many speculative projects recently conducted, such as AI-based lie detectors, ‘high-tech’ refugee-camp ‘labs’ for facial recognition and emotional AI tools, and biometrics, blockchain and AI used to predict, track, stop and manage migration. Because this is one of the most unregulated and secretive fields, with anti-migrant discourses and security concerns, it paves the way for an alliance between tech firms and military-intelligence bureaucracy. When it comes to migration and border management, it is a challenge to come up with alternative solutions and identify or prevent discrimination or errors with potentially lethal consequences.
This book points out the dystopian direction that the current capitalist system is heading in, and notes that technologies used in migration and border management are not limited to this specific field, and can very well spread to other fields and affect society as a whole.
Smart Borders
Authors: Korkmaz Emre Eren
Published: October 2024

Many technological solutions that stand out within migration and border management fall within the scope of the tech product package known as ‘smart borders’. These ‘solutions’ make it possible to control activities beyond physical borders and to detect and prevent migration, through such tools as AI algorithms, drones, facial recognition, biometrics, satellite images, sensors and mobile phone and social media data analyses.
Both the USA and EU have hired private companies to militarize their borders with advanced surveillance technologies. Public funding is not being used to ensure the rights of migrants or to resolve economic and political problems, but to support companies in the development of new and deadly technologies.
The most significant producers of smart border applications are military companies. Those who produce the weapons and bombs that force refugees to flee their countries are the same companies that produce the tools for detecting those people in border areas.
Digital Identity and Surveillance Capitalism
Authors: Korkmaz Emre Eren
Published: October 2024

Digital identity projects are related to supporting migrants and refugees and contributing to their financial and social integration. Despite mostly positive approaches (with or without reservations), when digital identity initiatives are evaluated from the perspective of the manifestation of surveillance capitalism in migration management, many examples demonstrate corporate agenda-setting and new hegemonic discourses.
Smart border and digital identity applications do not contradict but complement one another. If the main issue in the use of surveillance technologies in border and migration management is data collection and extraction, smart border applications function, through data analysis, to decide who is allowed to cross the border and, after crossing the border, how far they are allowed to go. A digital identity, on the other hand, is where such data is stored, and thus very valuable for both states and private companies for financial inclusion and tracking purposes.
Collaboration, Competition and Conflict
Authors: Roth Silke , Saunders Clare
Published: October 2024

Chapter 6 examines the relations between SCOs in more depth by discussing the collaboration, coalitions, conflict, and competition among SCOs and the circumstances under which they occur. It focuses on the core idea of our book, that we cannot understand the emergence, activity and impact of SCOs in isolation. Interactions among SCOs have important ramifications as they influence each other to a greater or lesser extent when they come into, or purposefully avoid, contact, or if they compete, with one another. This chapter illustrates the dynamism of contact between SCOs, as actions and reactions that come to shape whether trust-benefit relations can be built. Debates about intersectionality, coalition-building, and counter-movements inform the examination of relationships among SCOs. Competition can result in institutional isomorphism as well as differentiation. The emphasis on SCOs more broadly allows us to examine the circumstances under which organisations collaborate or compete. Collaboration between SCOs is important because it might cancel out the risks of NGOisation. Not all organisations become tame because it is the synergy of SCOs that results in social change. Roth and Saunders acknowledge the importance of radical uncompromising critique as well as pragmatic – and diplomatic – compromise. Lastly, the chapter examines conflict between SCOs in the context of counter-movements.
Conclusions: Organising for Change
Authors: Roth Silke , Saunders Clare
Published: October 2024

The conclusion returns to the core argument that a focus of SCOs contributes to a theory of social change that acknowledges both structure and agency. The authors once more stress the central argument of the volume: that analysing different types of SCOs synergistically and historically allows us to recognise their important role in generating social change. The holistic understanding of SCOs presented in the book is made possible through, and contributes to, the integration of social movement studies, third sector studies, and the study of NGOs. The examination of SCMs’ biographies and the coalition-building between different types of SCOs requires an integrative view of literatures, while integration of literature enhances analysis of SCOs. The importance of temporality, varieties of change making and holism are stressed. Implications for activists and future directions for research are suggested.
The False Bay Coast of Cape Town: A Critical Zone
Authors: Green Lesley , Farr Vanessa
Published: October 2024

Focusing on the southern regions of Cape Town, South Africa, we focus on the landscape around our city’s major waste dump, Capricorn, named for the Sea Goat of astrologers, that is alongside shack settlements, ganglands, a businesspark, a nature reserve and a sewage works. Using images from Google Earth we show how Cape Town’s policies for water and waste management are designed for solid, liquid, and gas, yet the chemical and pharmaceutical industries of our time leach, flow, aggregate, metabolize, sediment and bioaccumulate in bodies and soils, from the dump site and the sewage plant.Inventorying the material flows in a zone that inscribes both sacred and sacrificial zones in the environmental cosmology of modernity makes it possible to understand how and why the environmental governance paradigm of social ecological systems mediated by dollar values is failing Cape Town. A transformative environmental governance modality would embrace not economic value, but the material and multi-species entanglements with wealth and poverty. Attempting what anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls an ‘anthropocenography’, we propose that reshaping environmental governance scholarship around ‘biogeosocial chemistry’ rather than ‘ecosystem services’, will make possible a reparative ecology based on urban metabolism.
The Cosmoecological Workshop: Or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer
Authors: Savransky Martin
Published: October 2024

How to think the ecological work of reparation when it is the very arts of living that are in question? Focusing on the devastation brought about by the tsunami that hit the northeastern coast of Japan in 2011, and on the improvisational practices of spiritual care work that a collective of priests fabricated in its wake to address the sorrows as much of the living as of the dead, this chapter explores the aporetics of ‘reparation’ as the incommensurable space opened up between destruction and redemption, between loss and compensation. In so doing, it makes a proposition for generative, partial, speculative forms of cosmoecological reparation: not the attempt to restore the modern terms of order, to render life resilient to disaster, but that of carefully reweaving modes of living and of dying otherwise from the interstices of the catastrophe, of experimentally recomposing a cosmos on a ravaged earth.
Multispecies Mending from Micro to Macro: Biome Restoration, Carbon Recycling and Ecologies of Participation
Authors: Kershaw Eleanor Hadley
Published: October 2024

Microbes increasingly feature in narratives and practices of ecological repair across contexts and scales, from intimate bodily processes to expansive global systems. This chapter explores two approaches to mending damaged ecologies with microbes. First, therapeutic efforts to ‘rewild’ human microbiomes through the restoration of mutualistic microbes (hookworms and bacteria) to treat diseases of microbial absence and imbalance. Second, synthetic biology endeavours to engineer microbes to assimilate greenhouse gases and produce sustainable chemicals in circular carbon economies. Drawing on scientific, social scientific and popular literatures on helminth and faecal microbiota transplant therapies, and ethnographic engagement with synthetic biology for gas fermentation, the chapter explores what might (and might not) be afforded by ecological, multi-scalar thinking, fixing and caring in these contexts. In concluding, it explores the analytical lens of ‘ecologies of participation’ (Chilvers et al, 2018) to account – and perhaps also make space – for diverse modes of engagement with ecological reparation.
Involvement as an Ethics for More than Human Interdependencies
Authors: Calvillo Nerea
Published: October 2024

This chapter interrogates the capacity of the concept of reparation to intervene in the current complex ecological crisis. Although many projects on the ground are obviously relevant and important contributions, I argue that what it takes to repair and its consequences are hardly discussed. This renders other species, elements or ecologies that are depleted, polluted or let die because they are considered resources to remediate another ecosystem invisible. So, what would ecological repair look like if conceived from an ecological lens and, therefore, recognizing the interdependency between entities? To respond to this question I draw on the construction process of Yellow Dust, an air pollution remediation DIY infrastructure. To detect and unpack how these interdependencies work in practice, I suggest the notion of involvement, and demonstrate its potential as an analytical tool to unpack the interdependencies between elements, compounds and ecologies, and the multiple and specific ways in which, in Yellow Dust, air and water – among others – involved each other. In addition, I suggest that involvement is also a form of ethics for repair/ation, because it puts at the centre the ethical decisions involved in every intervention with/in ecologies.
From Museum to MoB
Authors: Choy Timothy
Published: October 2024

This comic figures potentials for a speculative ethics and politics of drawing breath together. It introduces ‘the Museum of Breathers’, a concept space that gathers human and non-human entities as they reside and respire in their breathing conditions. The curatorial effect is a kind of social statement and prompt to inhabit the simultaneous sharedness and irreducible differences of co-breathing as an ongoing condition of complicity and conspiracy for earth-bound living in the segregating present. Things go smoothly until the Museum’s curator, an autonomous robot, identifies a potential new resident for the collection, a rat employed as a test subject in an unspecified exposure experiment. Their eventual encounter stages a meditation on power and assent, the ends and efficacies of the Museum as method for ecopolitical thought, and what other forms of reparative and disruptive collectivity might transpire when what was gathered as a Museum of Breathers evades its discipline to become a MoB. Put another way, the arc of the narrative is a movement from the Museum of Breathers as a reflective thought space to a query into a potential for a conspiring collective practice.
Land in Our Names : Building an Anti-Racist Food Movement
Authors: Siva Sam
Published: October 2024

In this chapter and interview Sam Siva presents the work of the British Black and People of Colour collective Land in Our Names (LIONs), unpacking the centrality of land reparations to any project of ecological reparation. LIONs work supports Black and People of Colour in reconnecting with land through food growing and claiming access to nature. Putting access to land at the centre of ecological justice is also about affirming the interconnectedness between ecological repair, healing and concrete reparations for damages done to people and non-humans through imperialism, colonialism and extractivism, as well as about understanding the centrality of racism to these enterprises and their persistent inheritances in the present. Together, this text and a follow-up conversation connecting the personal and the political, struggles and hopes, demonstrate the deep connection of exclusionary dynamics to contemporary concerns of justice at the heart of ecological reparation – such as climate change, the whiteness of the countryside, the rise of malnutrition and poor mental health.
Commons-Based Mending Ecologies
Authors: Petrescu Doina , Petcou Constantin
Published: October 2024

How can a strategic design project enable ecological reparation in deprived suburban neighbourhoods? Repairing broken social relations, altered subjectivities, depleted imaginaries, unjust politics and uneven economics as well as repairing neighbourhood assets, poor architectures, damaged environments and ultimately participating in repairing the planet, doing all this together with concerned communities – this is the ambitious goal of the R-Urban project initiated by atelier d’architecture autogérée. R-Urban creates possibilities for a commons-based mending ecology through a network of civic hubs in which inhabitants of suburban neighbourhoods can develop resilience practices and create locally closed ecological circuits. Five such hubs have been built since 2011 in Paris and London. The chapter gives a critical account on the successes and failures of this undertaking, trying to demonstrate that commons can be a valid pathway for cities mending ecologies and that architects can facilitate this process.
Chilean Streets: An Archive against the Grain of History
Authors: Bonelli Cristobal , de la Cadena Marisol
Published: October 2024

With the 2019 Chilean estallido social we write-think-feel the myriad images that actors of the outburst covered the walls of Santiago streets. We read those images as an archive written from the wounds that colonialism-capitalism inflicted on bodies and territories that are together. Albeit ephemeral (authorities can delete them), the images expose mutilations of bodies-territories that are never to be erased, always to be cared for. Composed of presences both unimaginable (the dead, walls, dogs) and imaginable (music, people, images), the outbursts are those wounds. Their presence haunts usual politics: without teleology or leadership – let alone representation – outbursts do not disappear for their mission is to pursue life against destruction. Pursuing life, they roam the streets like mutts, and very specifically like the Chilean kiltro dogs – their decision to negotiate independence and accompaniment as way of life may be an inspiration of another politics: a kiltro politics.
Ordinary Hope
Authors: Jackson Steven J.
Published: October 2024

This chapter thinks from care and repair towards a worldly form of hope. Reclaiming the concept from its salvationist roots, it offers instead a deflationary account in which hope functions as an ordinary feature of being in the world – and one which deepens rather than reduces our entanglements with the nature-cultures around us. It advances several propositions. Hope is not predictive (and therefore cannot be falsified or disproved). The measure of hope is not accuracy, but efficacy: its ability to hold more meaningful forms of action in the world. Hope may be expressed in change and transformation, but also more modest forms of patience and enduring. While often called to the fore in moments of crisis and transition, hope is above all a property of ordinary work, from whence comes it depth and power. Finally, hope is a collective accomplishment – something we do together in the world, in concert with others and with things.
Gothic Mycology and Posthuman Ethics in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"
Authors: Kniss Ashley
Published: October 2024

ABSTRACT: In light of the recent popularity of fungi in ecohorror literature and film, this essay coins the term "Gothic mycology" to describe instances of human-fungal hybridity that suggest posthuman entanglement and symbiosis, using Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" as an early and exemplary illustration. Gothic mycology is frightening due to the very nature of fungi themselves: they resist categories, being more closely related to animals than plant life; they proliferate at seemingly unnatural rates; they grow in darkness; they are agents of decomposition; they are mysterious, chthonic, and Other. However, Gothic mycology is also inherently hopeful, offering a glimpse of how we might reimagine our entanglement with the nonhuman that goes beyond mere posthuman hybridity and embraces instead a novel becoming. Poe's tale undermines anthropocentric individualism and prioritizes human entanglement through the fungal colonization of both house and human. In doing so, Poe's tale transgresses the boundary of what defines the human and suggests the necessity, or, perhaps more accurately, the current reality of our hybrid, dependent, and symbiotic relationship with the more-than-human.
"A Somewhat Remarkable Letter": Chambers, Poe, Whitman, Thoreau, and the Invention of the Prose Poem in Antebellum America
Authors: Scholnick Robert J.
Published: October 2024

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the far-reaching influence on antebellum American literature of the January 1845 publication of Robert Chambers's anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation , the first fully articulated exposition of evolutionary theory to appear in English. In Explanations , published in New York in 1846, Chambers replied forcefully to his scientific and theological critics and then correctly claimed that his work represented nothing less than a complete conceptual revolution, not only in science but in our understanding of the nature and purpose of existence itself. Focusing on Poe, Whitman, and Thoreau, this essay argues that Vestiges provided not only essential subject matter for these writers, but also provoked each to develop a productive set of heuristics, or open-ended methods of problem-solving. The revolutionary moment sparked by Vestiges led each to engage in a rethinking of the nature and purpose of literature and to develop stylistic innovations that came to change the direction of American literature itself.
The Power of Greenness: Poe in the Age of the Anthropocene
Authors: Studniarz Sławomir
Published: October 2024

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on Poe's short stories that, I argue, are relevant for the ecological concerns of the first decades of the twenty-first century: "The Colloquy of Monos and Una," "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion," "The Island of the Fay," and "The Domain of Arnheim." As the "greenness" in the title suggests, my purpose here is to reexamine selected stories by Poe from the perspective of ecocriticism, especially the latest developments in ecological thought that fully acknowledge the formidable threshold of the last phase of the Anthropocene called the Great Acceleration. I test the applicability of the interpretative frameworks of "dark ecology" and "ecological posthumanism" as well as the notions of "hyperobjects" and "scale effects" to these stories. I hope to demonstrate that "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" and "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" carry a clear ecological message that has become topical in the contemporary era of the global ecological crisis; "The Island of the Fay" prefigures the modern Gaia hypothesis; and "The Domain of Arnheim" subverts the utilitarian and exploitative approach to the natural environment, stemming from one of the foundational American myths: the errand into the wilderness.
Toward the Germ Theory: Edgar Allan Poe and Disease
Authors: Yoshii Chiyo
Published: October 2024

ABSTRACT: In the first half of the nineteenth century, when Edgar Allan Poe repeatedly wrote about disease, the theory that disease was caused by "miasma," i.e., some poisonous, foul-smelling vapor, was overwhelmingly influential, while the germ theory, which held that disease was the result of infection by pathogens, though largely ignored, underwent a drastic transformation from a mere hypothesis to evidence-based science. This essay considers how Poe's authorial handling of disease connects with these conflicting pathological doctrines at his time. It clarifies how Poe questions miasma theory and approaches germ theory in "King Pest," "Shadow—A Parable," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Sphinx," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Furthermore, the essay shows that even though Poe, like the proponents of germ theory, suggested that microorganisms were the cause of disease, this did not erase his fear of disease, but rather intensified it, leading him to hold a dark vision—that we are destined to coexist with other species that threaten our lives—a vision that has frightened people since the late nineteenth century, when the existence of disease germs became widely recognized.
Hans Pfaall's Breath: Edgar Allan Poe and Antebellum Atmospheres
Authors: Sy Lloyd Alimboyao
Published: October 2024

ABSTRACT: This essay examines the connections between Edgar Allan Poe's "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" and the scientific and political discourse of antebellum America, particularly insofar as it centered on atmospheric science. This essay argues that Poe's story should be read within an antebellum comprehension of atmospheric science that used the atmosphere as a metaphor to comment on freedom, revolution, and slavery. I read Hans's journey through the atmosphere as a thought experiment addressing the contemporary scientific challenge of measuring the upper atmosphere, while also engaging with the era's scientific literature, notably the work of the French astronomer Benjamin Valz. Furthermore, the essay examines the story's engagement with racial determinism and its commentary on human liberty. I suggest that Hans's interaction with the atmosphere both figuratively and literally reflects upon contemporaneous ruminations about race and bondage. By placing "Hans Pfaall" amidst the scientific discourse on atmospheric and astronomical sciences and examining its political and intellectual underpinnings, the essay contributes to the understanding of Poe's work within the broader context of nineteenth-century science and its metaphorical use in literature to address questions of human liberty and knowledge.
"The State of Their Stomachs": The Politics of Consumption in Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Authors: Elrod F. Tyler
Published: October 2024

ABSTRACT: From gorging gulls to masticated men, appetitive concerns litter Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . And yet, critics have infrequently attended to the metaphors of eating at play in Poe's only novel. This article takes its place at the critical table through a literary and theoretical analysis of consumption in Pym , a work composed against the backdrop of early nineteenth-century dietary reform movements that sought to advance nationalist ideologies. Using critical eating studies as a framework, I contend that acts of ingestion in Poe's only novel often destabilize nationalist rhetoric linked to imperial expansion and subject-making. Beginning with a brief examination of Poe's testy relationship with literary nationalism and its correlation with Pym's ironic embodiment of emerging US nationalist attitudes, this article then closely reads instances of cannibalistic, spatial, and animalistic consumption. In so doing, it parses the differences between an impersonal hunger often ascribed to animals and "appetite"—defined herein as a culturally encoded desire often concretized through imperious, extractive behaviors. In locating these differences, I identify how various modes of eating within Pym disturb that nationalism which Poe found so unpalatable.
UA-DIP: Unsupervised Image Deblurring via ADMM and Deep Image Prior
Authors: Chang Jiahao , Xu Shuo , Fu Jintao , Wang Zhentao , Wu Zhifang , Sun Yuewen
Published: October 2024

Non-blind image deblurring is a classical ill-posed problem and a significant research area in computer vision. In recent years, deep image prior (DIP) based image restoration methods have shown great potential for image deblurring. However, this type of methods suffers from a serious overfitting problem. To address this issue, we extend the Deep Image Prior (DIP) framework by integrating the deep image prior with total variational regularization, proposing UA-DIP, a dataset-free non-blind deblurring method. The optimization problem arising from this method is solved by adopting the flexible alternating direction multiplication method (ADMM) to optimally confine the solution space through step-by-step iterations. Experimental results demonstrate that our UA-DIP can achieve significant quantitative gains, as well as visually more convincing deblurring results on the benchmark datasets, compared to the state-of-the-art non-blind deconvolution methods.
Incidence and persistence of asymptomatic Leishmania infection among HIV-infected patients in Trang province, Southern Thailand: A cohort study
Authors: Bualert Lertwut , Ruang-areerate Toon , Mungthin Mathirut , Leelayoova Saovanee , Siripattanapipong Suradej , Naaglor Tawee , Hongsimakul Nattapong , Sroythong Supicha , Rattanalertpaiboon Phakhajee , Tulpeng Preeyaporn , Piyaraj Phunlerd
Published: October 2024

Leishmaniasis poses a significant health burden, particularly among immunocompromised patients. In Thailand, Leishmania infection caused by Leishmania martiniquensis and Leishmania orientalis lacks information about the incidence and risk factors among HIV-infected populations. This longitudinal cohort study aimed to investigate the incidence and persistence of Leishmania infection among HIV-infected individuals in an affected area, Trang Province, Southern Thailand. The study also identified risk factors associated with the incidence of Leishmania infection. The study enrolled 373 participants in the HIV clinic, Trang Hospital, who initially tested negative for Leishmania infection during 2015–2016, and 133 individuals initially tested positive for Leishmania infection. Thus, follow-up visits of 506 participants occurred during 2018–2019. Direct Agglutination Test (DAT) and nested PCR (nPCR) identified incidents and persistent cases of Leishmania infection. Cox proportional-hazards regression analyses were performed to assess risk factors for the incidence of Leishmania infection. Among the initially negative group, 12 incident cases comprised one L. orientalis infection and 11 seropositive cases using DAT, resulting in a cumulative incidence of 3.2% and an incidence density of 10.38 per 1000 person-years. Increasing age was a significant predictor of the incidence of Leishmania infection. Five persistent cases comprised one Leishmania donovani complex and four seropositive cases using DAT in the initially positive group, with a cumulative persistence rate of 3.7% and a persistence density of 12.85 per 1000 person-years. All patients were asymptomatic. This study sheds light on the incidence and persistence of Leishmania infection among HIV-infected individuals in Trang Province, Southern Thailand, underscoring the importance of continued monitoring and tailored interventions to mitigate the impact of this co-infection.
Hepatitis B infection: Evaluation of demographics and treatment of chronic hepatitis B infection in Northern-western Tanzania
Authors: Mlewa Mathias , Nyawale Helmut A. , Henerico Shimba , Mangowi Ivon , Shangali Aminiel Robert , Manisha Anselmo Mathias , Kisanga Felix , Kidenya Benson R. , Jaka Hyasinta , Kilonzo Semvua B. , Mirambo Mariam M. , Mshana Stephen E.
Published: October 2024

Background

Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is still a major public health problem. In response to the World Health Organization (WHO), Tanzania implemented immunization and treatment to achieve the eradication of HBV infection by 2030. To achieve this goal, frequent updates of demographic data, antiviral therapy eligibility, and uptake are essential. We therefore evaluated demographic data, antiviral therapy eligibility, and uptake among chronically HBV-infected patients attending at Bugando Medical Centre (BMC), Tanzania.

Methods

A cross-sectional study enrolled 196 chronic HBV patients from April 23, 2023, to October 10, 2023, at BMC, where 100 and 96 patients were retrospectively and prospectively enrolled, respectively. Study’s ethical clearance and permission were observed by the Catholic University of Health and Allied Sciences/Bugando Medical Centre research ethics and review committee and the Bugando Medical Centre management respectively. For all patients, socio-demographic data and whole blood samples were obtained. Full blood picture, alanine and aspartate amino transferases, and HBV viral load parameters were determined. Aspartate-Platelet Ratio Index (APRI) and Fibrosis Four (FIB-4) scores were calculated according to their respective formulas. Therapy eligibility and uptake were evaluated according to the 2015 WHO HBV prevention, treatment, and care guidelines. The data were summarized and analysed using STATA version 15.

Results

The median age for all patients was 39 [IQR: 32–47.5] years. Nearly all study patients, 99% (194/196), were older than 20 years old, with significant male dominance (73.5% [144/196] versus 26.5% [52/196]; p<0.0001). Anti-HBV antiviral therapy eligibility was 22.4%, while uptake was 6.8% (3/4), which was significantly lower than the WHO expectation of 80% (p <0.0001).

Conclusion

Almost all chronically HBV-infected patients attending at BMC were older than 20 years old and were significantly dominated by males. Antiviral therapy uptake was remarkably lower than expected by the WHO towards combating HBV infection by 2030.