bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Beautiful, Horrible Desolation: Landscape in Post-Horror Cinema
Authors: Church David
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how post-horror films often use sublime wilderness settings to emphasize a sparseness that operates in conjunction with the films’ own stylistic minimalism. Calling these films “spaced out” describes not only their literal locations, but also the films’ generic distance from the larger horror genre and the contemplative mood that each one encourages. Whereas Under the Skin uses landscape to chart the evolution of a predatory female character, witchcraft-themed films like The Witch, Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse, and Gretel & Hansel depict forests as spaces where young women’s reproductive generativity threatens patriarchal power. Meanwhile, It Comes at Night and A Quiet Place depict men’s paranoid “bunker mentality” against perceived or actual threats, and The Lighthouse uses repressed queer desire to explore post-horror’s larger relationship to non-reproductive realms of nature.
Queer Ethics and the Urban Ruin-Porn Landscape: The Horrors of Monogamy in It Follows
Authors: Church David
Published: September 2021

Building off the previous chapter’s focus on wild natural spaces, this chapter offers an extended case study of one of the earliest and most influential post-horror films, It Follows, whose overall aesthetic is rooted in its specifically urban, postindustrial setting. Through the film’s ironic critique of monogamy as a monstrous force, the chapter argues that the film advances, by way of negative example, a queer ethics of open, responsible sexuality—albeit an ethics constrained by the film’s class-based setting in a neoliberal Detroit increasingly stripped of public services. By examining the film’s ambivalent nostalgia for both a generic and urban past, this chapter argues that It Follows’s queer aesthetic achieves its affective tenor through imaging Detroit’s decrepit (sub)urban spaces as “ruin porn” haunted by polyvalent sexualities and socioeconomic inequalities.
Frances Brown and the ‘Modern’ Market for Print
Authors: Easley Alexis
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, I focus on a writer who got her start writing poetry and prose for the cheap popular press: Frances Brown. Like Cook, Brown was working class, but her impoverished upbringing as the daughter of a postmaster in a remote Ulster village placed her on a lower rung of the social ladder than Cook with fewer resources at her disposal. She lost her sight to smallpox when she was eighteen months old and learned about the world by listening to her siblings’ lessons and having family members read aloud to her. Once she began writing, her sister Rebecca served as her amanuensis. She began her career contributing poetry to the Irish Penny Journal, later published her work in the Penny Magazine, and developed an extensive career contributing poetry and prose to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Her careful navigation of the market for popular literature reveals the importance of cheap media formats (with differing levels of copyright protection) in a fashioning a writing career. Even though Brown’s work was often repurposed by scissors-and-paste journalists as if it were free content within the public domain, she was successful in establishing a celebrity identity and publishing her work in book form.
‘Author’s Ghosts’: Manifestations of the Supernatural in Spark’s Early Fiction
Authors: Bailey James
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the treatment of spectrality in Spark’s debut novel, The Comforters, as well as in a selection of early (and otherwise realistic) short stories. It discuss some of Spark’s earliest attempts to realise – to quote from her preceding study of John Masefield – ‘how sharp and lucid fantasy can be when it is deliberately intagliated on the surface of realism.’ The first half of the chapter concerns what is classified as the textual haunting, whereby the supernatural encounter is treated as an instance of metalepsis – a violation, that is, of the text’s diegetic boundaries, which is in some ways analogous to the ghost’s traversal of ontological ones. The chapter’s second section examines the significance of the ghost story as a vital means of critiquing forms of patriarchal power, along with conventional gender roles and their attendant expectations.
‘The role in which you’ve cast me’: Reassessing the Myth of Spark
Authors: Bailey James
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how the self-reflexive techniques employed in her writing work to facilitate instances of gendered social critique, while also interrogating the wider functioning of power and personal identity in the increasingly mediatised postmodern consumer culture in which they were written. The chapter focuses predominantly on three of Spark’s most formally and thematically experimental works: 1962’s seldom-discussed stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, 1968’s slight and sparsely detailed The Public Image, and the elaborately metafictional satire of celebrity and press sensationalism, Not to Disturb, published in 1971. Also discussed here is ‘A Dangerous Situation on the Stairs’ (c.1960), an unpublished short story that encountered in the author’s archive in the McFarlin Library in Tulsa. In each case, Spark’s literary innovations are read alongside her longstanding preoccupation with the tensions that exist between private selves and public performances – with bodies nearly inscribed within oppressive cultural narratives (and those deemed to be deviant for daring to exist outside of them), and with the sinister, violent negation of female subjectivity.
‘A study, in a way, of self-destruction’: The Driver’s Seat and the Impotent Gaze
Authors: Bailey James
Published: September 2021

This chapter extends the preceding chapter’s discussion of The Driver’s Seat to offer a thorough reassessment of its largely one-sided critical reception, as well as its nuanced approach to the inextricable relationship between gender, narrative perspective and epistemological power. It argues that the novel – which has been read predominantly as Spark’s most starkly drawn parable of human fallibility versus divine omniscience – is concerned instead with that which escapes and thus destabilises the exacting, investigative and emphatically male gaze of its narrator.
Through a critical framework which combines critical commentary on the nouveau roman, previously unexamined archival material, studies of metaphysical detective fiction, and theory related to narrative point of view, the chapter shifts focus from existing readings of the protagonist, Lise, as the hopeless object of a godlike narrative viewpoint, and considers her instead as a captivating figure who, even after death, confronts and commands the epistemologically limited perspective of her hopelessly fascinated narrator-voyeur. Spark’s description of The Driver’s Seat as ‘a study, in a way, of self-destruction’ can thus be seen to relate not only to Lise’s determined drive to death, but to the subversive unravelling of the narrating ‘self,’ tormented and undone by the novel’s perennially unknowable subject.
‘Drunk on the dead’: Intoxication, Perfume and Mummy Dust
Authors: Dobson Eleanor
Published: September 2021

This chapter considers the ‘internal visions’ conjured up during reading in tandem with hallucinatory effects brought on by intoxication, particularly in the context of fin-de-siècle culture. Its sources range from the high art of the Aesthetes, Symbolists and the early work of the canonical modernist writers through to advertising and literary potboilers, and in the archives of the Egyptologist Amelia Edwards. These visualisations come about through the reading of stimulating passages, the smoking of opium-tainted cigarettes, and the inhalation of perfume or mummy dust; in each case such practices conjure up tantalising images of an exotic East. The longevity of these tantalising tropes – particularly of seductive dreams that verge between Orientalist fantasy and nightmare – are such that in the early twentieth century, when movie theatres were often constructed in an Egyptianized style in a bid to emphasise the dreamlike and otherworldly, the films projected between gilded lotus columns were retellings of tales penned by nineteenth-century novelists. Combining the visual with the textual through costumes, props and intertitles, Egyptian things and the texts that defined them were represented via the most modern artistic media of the age, rendered in light projected through translucent film, the technological counterpart to drug-induced hallucination.
Nature
Authors: Taylor Dan
Published: September 2021

Chapter 2 approaches on the problem of ‘nature’ and natural right, exploring what human beings are according to nature, and how conflicting views of nature impede or inspire human power. It begins with an exposition on the Dutch “Golden Age” and slavery, with an excursus on the colony of Brazil. Natural law and contextual justifications of slavery are introduced as a backdrop to Spinoza’s approach. It discusses the hitherto-underappreciated significance of the three political laws of TTP’s Chapter 16, before raising wider questions of the status of the free man and the slave, and Spinoza’s various formulations of freedom and slavery, before relating these back to the contested areas of nature and naturalism, the historical context of slavery in the Dutch colony of “New Holland” in Brazil, and the broader avenues of conflict and cooperation between individuals.
Power
Authors: Taylor Dan
Published: September 2021

Chapter 3 assesses how we can become free, or rather freer, given that as modes of nature we are necessarily subject to causes and forces in a certain and determinate way. Why is the conatus so important? What is its relation to human power and finitude? What is the difference between a nonhuman and human conatus? Or the conatus of a body and of a mind guided by reason? The analysis will focus on the Ethics, and over a sustained and systematic investigation into power, the chapter presents and resolves some interpretive issues around the conatus. It distinguishes freedom from power, and within this, alights on the well-known potentia/potestas distinction, re-presenting these as two facets in the individual’s becoming freer. It argues for a more inclusive model of empowerment, one that is relative and interdependent rather than individualistic, and measurable in degrees.
We Imagine
Authors: Taylor Dan
Published: September 2021

Chapter 6 explores the role of the imagination as an individual and communal phenomena, in enabling individuals to recognise who is of a common nature, the basis by which they are useful to each other, a faculty called commonality. The relation of imagination and intellect, crucial to Maimonides and preoccupying parts of the TTP’s discussion of philosophy and theology, will be first grounded in the epistemology of the Ethics. Then, focused on the TTP, explores the socially beneficial effects that can follow from the use of the imagination in bringing communities together, through Spinoza’s account of the prophet. What does it mean then that, in Spinoza’s irony-laden remark, ‘today, so far as I know, we have no prophets’ (TTP 1.7)? The figure of Jesus Christ, presented as both a prophet and a philosopher in the TTP, is one way of thinking through some of the possibilities and ambivalences of the philosopher’s use of reason and imagination. Then, through a late assessment of the relation between the individual and the collective in Benjamin, Lukács and Spinoza, it concludes on the pre-eminence of shared imaginings to communal identity, and the underlying difficulty for group identities in also producing capable, self-determining individuals.
Revolution
Authors: Taylor Dan
Published: September 2021

Can Spinoza’s politics allow for a coherent theory of rebellion? The final chapter addresses this difficult but fundamental question for instigating political change, like the kind suggested in the Tractatus Politicus. On the face of it, no, though some intractable difficulties in the text are contrasted against the historical context. The chapter explores one opportunity raised by Matheron through ‘indignation’, then turns to the imitative affect of emulation as a powerful political affect for collective power and political transformation. The discussion of an ethics of care and solidarity then utilises the Cadenza’s politics of commonality, exploring how movements can organise around a powerful signifier, e.g. the People, at the centre of current debates around populism, while avoiding the foundation of a community being on a sad (and inherently disempowering) affect like fear or hatred for others. Through drawing on a range of contemporary political theorists like Rancière, Laclau and Mouffe and others, it concludes with an argument for making as many as capable as they can to think for themselves, recognise their common good, and organise together in effective political movements that can realise this, politically. A freedom for one and all.
Conclusion: For One and All
Authors: Taylor Dan
Published: September 2021

Freedom is often conceived as something within autonomous individuals. The conclusion sets out to restore significance to another feature, that of freedom among individuals – a freedom that is something conditional and realised through our relations with others. This is not the sole freedom Spinoza had in mind, but the conclusion argues that it is the most important. A freedom not merely of conviviality and friendship, joy, fortitude or acquiescentia in se ipso multiplied, but of collectively becoming the best that we can be. A becoming that is dynamic and open-ended, but which supplies enough information to ascertain and realise the good life, collectively.
The Last Muslim Intellectual
Authors: Dabashi Hamid
Published: September 2021

The first comprehensive social and intellectual biography of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, this book explores the life and legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923-69), arguably the most prominent Iranian public intellectual of his time and contends that he was the last Muslim intellectual to have articulated a vision of Muslim worldly cosmopolitanism, before the militant Islamism of the last half a century degenerated into sectarian politics and intellectual alienation from the world at large. This unprecedented engagement with Al-e Ahmad’s life and legacy is a prelude to what Dabashi calls a post-Islamist Liberation Theology. The Last Muslim Intellectual is about expanding the wide spectrum of anticolonial thinking beyond its established canonicity and adding a critical Muslim thinker to it is an urgent task, if the future of Muslim critical thinking is to be considered in liberated terms beyond the dead-end of its current sectarian predicament. A full social and intellectual biography of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a seminal Muslim public intellectual of the mid-20th century, this book places Al-e Ahmad’s writing and activities alongside other influential anticolonial thinkers of his time, including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Edward Said. Chapters cover Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s intellectual and political life; his relationship with his wife, the novelist Simin Daneshvar; his essays; his fiction; his travel writing; his translations; and his legacy.
Introduction: ‘The Last Muslim Intellectual’
Authors: Dabashi Hamid
Published: September 2021

I thought if I were to deliver a paper in this conference, I’d say that the first anthropologists were following Alexander the Great, then following Christianity and then Islam. In other words, anthropologists have always camped with world conquerors. Alexander was the best among them, and [the age of] machine the worst. In other words, what is called ‘anthropology’ or ‘ethnography’ etc. have all been there because world conquerors needed to know the people they were going to rule....
Remembrance of Things Past
Authors: Dabashi Hamid
Published: September 2021

In this chapter I wish to map out the historical and theoretical landscape upon which I intend to construct this book on Jalal Al-e Ahmad, whom I am proposing be read as ‘the last Muslim intellectual’. To do so I would like to begin with the last time I had an urgent occasion to write on Al-e Ahmad. Detailing the particular time of that occasion and why I then turned to Al-e Ahmad is the best means of describing why I have now returned to this seminal figure in the history of the Iranian encounter with colonial modernity.
Travelling In and Out of a Homeland
Authors: Dabashi Hamid
Published: September 2021

This chapters covers the writings of Al-e Ahamad on his travels around the world as well as inside Iran. He was famous for his ethnographic writings on small Iranian villages, and he carried his observations around the world to Russia, Europe, US, and most perhaps pointedly to his famous Hajj pilgrimage. What did he see what did he think and what did he write?
Conclusion
Authors: Kadıoğlu İ. Aytaç
Published: September 2021

The closing chapter concludes the book by summarising the findings of the analysis into forty years of peacemaking and war experience in Northern Ireland and Turkey, and how these might be applied to other ethno-nationalist conflicts in which similar peace processes have been instituted. This chapter discusses the implications of the policies applied in the two specified conflicts for conflict resolution theory more broadly and lays out a framework for further research in the field. It argues that there is a complementarity between three major aspects of conflict resolution processes: backchannel communications, as the unofficial aspect; peace organisations, as the informal and semi-official aspect; and official negotiations, as the official aspect. The conflict resolution processes in these two cases encouraged the conflicting sides to consider talks and to enter into a negotiation process at the pre-negotiation stage. The processes then intended to reach a peace agreement during the negotiation stage. This book has suggested that a peace agreement requires mediation by an independent third party: between the British government and their adversaries, the IRA and the republican movement, in one case, and the Turkish government and their adversaries, the PKK and pro-Kurdish movement in the other.
Multidimensional Unity: ‘A Dozen Features of Propriety’
Authors: White Robert
Published: September 2021

This chapter considers the collection as a whole, suggesting some stylistic and thematic links and similitudes which establish the volume as one which has a considered unity. These facets are summarized as (1) enchantment and disenchantment (Fraistat), (2) dreams and visions, (3) the theme of loss, (4) a word, ‘adieu’, (5) bringing back the past, (6) antithetical states and contrast (7), the concept behind Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, (8) dialectic and debate, (9) beauty and truth (10) associational logic (11) ‘stitching’ imagery (12) the theme of melancholy, which the rest of this book will explore. These aspects are analysed by moving across the collection as a whole, while the reasons behind the ordering of the poems will be considered in the final chapter.
Keats as a Reader of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy
Authors: White Robert
Published: September 2021

Despite being full of weighty analysis of serious medical, emotional and psychological concerns, and wearying in its copious classical quotations and references, yet Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is also by turns light-hearted, enlightened, and witty. And despite its claim to be based on a methodical analytical system indicated in the taxonomically arranged table of contents, it is nothing if not digressive, anecdotal, opinionated and far from systematic, proceeding instead in a subjectively driven stream of consciousness. Burton’s style reflects the Anatomy of Melancholy’s multi-faceted and eccentric aspects which appealed to Keats. His own unique and irrepressible sense of humour, often reframing grim situations with word-play, puns and droll mockery, finds a ‘greeting of the Spirit’ in Burton, and by following his markings on his copy of The
Anatomy we can see what he appreciated in a writer who in some ways was a kindred spirit. Findings from this chapter inform the next, covering style and substance which influenced Keats’s poetry.
‘Moods of My Own Mind’: Keats’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The Poems
Authors: White Robert
Published: September 2021

This chapter provides close analysis of each poem in turn, focusing on the order in which Keats chose to present the poems as an interrelated and evolving set of statements on different kinds of melancholy, building upon the previous chapters. Each poem exhibits a particular kind of melancholy from the history of the affliction. As a result of the thematic perspectives adopted in the book the chapter presents fresh, integrated readings of each of Keats’s poems in his wonderful 1820 anthology:
Lamia
Isabella
The Eve of St Agnes
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode to Psyche
Fancy
Ode
Lines on the Mermaid Tavern Robin Hood
To Autumn
Ode on Melancholy
Hyperion, A Fragment (this requires a different approach since evidence suggests Keats did not wish to include it; however, it still contributes to the ‘melancholy’ theme.)
Sexuality
Authors: Coulson Victoria
Published: September 2021

This chapter, focusing on The Last September (1929), extends the discussion of Bowen’s symbolic correlation of political and psychic life to the image of the Big House, in Bowen’s imagination a prototypical object of desire. The first section explores Bowen’s analysis of the Irish War of Independence as a struggle between mature sexual rivals. The second section focuses on Bowen’s interest in forms of sexuality that evoke immature states of development and offer imaginative access to early stages of life.
Reproduction; or, Legacy
Authors: Coulson Victoria
Published: September 2021

Focusing on The Heat of the Day (1948), A World of Love (1955) and Eva Trout (1969), the chapter argues that, under a specific combination of personal and historical pressures, Bowen’s sanguine analysis of mature sexuality is overborne by a constellation of anxieties about reproductive capacity in her own family and in the Anglo-Irish as a class. The chapter shows how Bowen’s imagination at mid-century takes shape from its historical context, referencing in particular the decline of British global power and the consolidation of a new American world order in the decades after the Second World War.
Hans Kelsen's Political Realism
Authors: Schuett Robert
Published: September 2021

What does it mean to be a foreign-policy realist? Why is it important to get Hans Kelsen right? How can open society ideals be reconciled with the tragedies of world politics? It is widely acknowledged that the rules-based international order is under assault by visions of illiberal democracy at home and powerful autocracies abroad. The Schmittians old and new are making a comeback, and neorealists in particular continue to pit realism against liberalism: where there is only power or nothing, all else is scorned as naïve, including Kelsen. The book challenges the neorealist myth of power politics and conventional views of the Austrian-American jurist in international relations theory. Revisiting Kelsen’s life and thought through the prism of classical realism, the supposed Kantian idealist is presented as a calm yet bold, progressive political realist who has continued analytical and normative relevance in the study of politics and world order. The case is made that a synthesis of political realism and progressive policies is possible. No matter what the Schmittians say or do, what is in a liberal democracy’s so-called national interest is not a function of causality, necessity, or any other natural laws of impersonal forces or anarchical structures. Rather, what is willed, or not willed, on any given day in politics and international relations is the product of political imputation, moral choice, and individual and collective human agency.
Kelsen’s Foreign-Policy Realism
Authors: Schuett Robert
Published: September 2021

What is the basis for the Schmittian claim that Kelsen’s theory of law, state, and international legal order is quintessentially idealistic? Why are we lured into believing that an ever more centralised legal mechanism at the global level is just another liberal international lawyer’s dream? Against the backdrop of Kelsen’s Freudian moment (first image), the chapter tests the jurist’s international relations thinking against Kenneth Waltz’s second and third images. It is shown that Kelsen is a hard-edged political realist who doesn’t believe in the democratic peace thesis; nor is he convinced that the fact of nationalism can be wished away when thinking about what might lead the way for global governance or a world state. The ‘other’ Kelsen is as realistic about the dynamics of international anarchy as about the dynamics of life, society, and politics in general: there’s no escaping the fact that, as long as there is no centralised force monopoly with teeth sitting on top of nations, there will be war.
Venice: The Converted City
Authors: Fenlon Iain
Published: September 2021

By focusing on the Piazza San Marco, the chapter draws attention to the transformation of civic and religious spaces that took place in Venice between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It argues that the rise of urban culture and the reconfiguration of urban space sought not only to accommodate a growing population, but also to facilitate the emerging conversional theatrics of Church and State, which made use of urban spaces for the purpose of political and religious indoctrination.
Turnings: Motion and Emotion in the Labyrinths of Early Modern Amsterdam
Authors: Vanhaelen Angela
Published: September 2021

Amsterdam’s Doolhoven, or labyrinths, constituted recreational spaces that also forged a strong connection between theatricality and a secular conversional experience by drawing on the idea of the labyrinth as an allegory for progression toward spiritual transformation. The chapter explores both the performative and philosophical components of these early modern labyrinths and the deeper meaning of their many ludic tricks.
Theatre and Conversion in Early Modern Zürich, Berne and Lucerne
Authors: Huwiler Elke
Published: September 2021

The limits of theatre as a medium for religious indoctrination became an object of exploration, debate, and censorship in the Swiss cities of Zürich, Berne and Lucerne. This chapter addresses how the civil and religious authorities of these cities struggled to control not just the content, but the audience’s interpretations of religious plays in the context of the Reformation.
Conversional Economies: Thomas Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside
Authors: Yachnin Paul
Published: September 2021

In an analysis of Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, this chapter argues that theatre made it possible for people to see that conversion was as much a process of introspection and self-discovery as a series of material transactions that allowed—or forced—human beings into different social, economic, and spiritual states. These transactions were not simply the result of a cynical attempt to turn the tide in pursuit of an unscrupulous benefit (be it social or economic). They were also a way to navigate the processes of conversion itself—the many passageways and alleys that linked the City of God and the Earthly City.
Qur'anic Stories
Authors: Ozgur Alhassen Leyla
Published: September 2021

This book approaches the Qur’ān as a literary, religious and oral text that affects its audience, drawing on narratology, rhetoric and Qur’ānic studies to develop a new methodology to analyze stories that represent some of the variety of Qur’ānic narrative, stories that are repeated and one that is not: Sūrat Yūsuf, SūratĀl ‘Imrān, SūratMaryam, SūratṬaha and Sūratal-Qaṣaṣ. It looks at how Qur’ānic stories function as narrative: how characters and dialogues are portrayed, what themes are repeated, what verbal echoes and conceptual links are present, what structure is established, and what beliefs these narrative choices strengthen. The book argues that in the Qur’ān, some narrative features that are otherwise puzzling can be seen as instances in which God, as the narrator, centers himself while putting the audience in its place, making the act of reading an interaction between God and the readers. This book examines the themes of: knowledge, control, and consonance, while examining the interaction of the text, the audience, characters and the narrator. This book utilizes and analyzes Qur’ānic commentary: classical and modern, Sunnī, Sufi and Shī‘ī, and demonstrates that a narratological and rhetorical approach to the canonized text can contribute new insights to our understanding of the Qur’ān and its worldview.
Knowledge, Control and Consonance in Sūrat Āl ‘Imrān 3:33–62
Authors: Ozgur Alhassen Leyla
Published: September 2021

Examining the entire story in verses 3:33–62, this chapter shows that the Qur’ānic narrative style serves to embody the image of God the narrator as being omnipotent and omniscient. In this chapter, the focus is on the literary themes of knowledge, control and consonance, as a means to look at the relationship that the narrator develops between God, the audience and the text. The first section of this chapter focuses on God’s withholding of knowledge, the second section on God’s withholding of control, and finally, God’s creating consonance. All of the parts of the story in Sūrat Āl ‘Imrān work towards putting the readers and even the characters in their place by emphasizing God’s knowledge and control and the readers’ and characters’ deficiency in both. At the same time, the story comforts people by developing consonance between the reader and the characters and even the reader and God, while also providing echoes that signal to the audience that they can understand more of the story if they read more of it in other places in the Qur’ān, thus developing consonance between the reader and the story.
Conclusion: Reading the Qur’ān as God’s Narrative
Authors: Ozgur Alhassen Leyla
Published: September 2021

This chapter summarizes the book’s approach to Qur’ānic stories in Sūrat Āl ‘Imrān, Sūrat Maryam, Sūrat Yūsuf, SūratṬaha and Sūrat al-Qaṣaṣ. It discusses the development of a sustained analysis of the Qur’ān as an intertextual scripture that rewards the audience member who reads and listens carefully, notices echoing words or phrases and then follows them to other parts of the text, compares them with each other and reflects on them. It discusses the book’s analysis focusing on the overarching questions of how the Qur’ānic stories withhold knowledge, create consonance and make connections. The audience learns about the nature of knowledge, one’s proper place in relation to God and God’s message, and how to read the Qur’ān. The text imprints on the audience beliefs about God: God is omniscient and people are not and cannot ever be. People learn what God wills when they turn to God and to the Qur’ān. The narrator of the Qur’ān makes its reading an active process, and we see this through the alternate giving and withholding of information, causing readers to question, ponder and fill in details.
Professional, Social, Geographical, Religious and Economic Aspects of Jewish Medical Practitioners
Authors: Lev Efraim
Published: September 2021

The fourth chapter is a discussion based on the total number of biographies, and the medieval as well as the contemporary literature available. It discusses professional, social, geographical, religious and economic aspects of the Jewish medical practitioners (mainly physicians); places of medical practice, the practitioners’ professional education, intellectual workshops (i.e. libraries), and their professional roles, mainly that of ‘Head of the Physicians’. It also deals with everyday life and activity of Jewish practitioners, moral aspects, fees and the ‘Geniza’ patients, as well as religious and inter-religious aspects of Jewish practitioners, the high-ranking positions Jewish practitioners held, conversion to Islam, and famous Jewish scholars, authors, poets and diplomats who were simultaneously practitioners. A few more insights are related to community affairs, socio-economic position of Jewish practitioners, their role in the leadership, their share in charity activities, and the inter-community posts they held. The last section of this chapter endorses aspects such as: Karaite and Samaritan practitioners and geographical aspects (Jewish practitioners in Andalusia, north Africa, Sicily, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Azerbaijan).
The Journey of a Culturally Responsive Teacher Educator
Authors: Cataldo Kevin
Published: September 2021

This interview explores what it means to be a culturally responsive teacher educator in today's world and why it is crucial to advocate for a culturally responsive and sustaining education for all students. It shares how one exceptional individual became a culturally responsive elementary teacher, and how she has become a culturally responsive teacher educator and educational consultant.
I am more than just a box: Latinidades for a pluralistic vision of culturally sustaining education
Authors: D'Andrea Martínez Pamela , Diaz Johnson Ashantie , Padía Lilly , Ghiso María Paula
Published: September 2021

This article explores what culturally sustaining education means for Latinx students. Drawing on the concept of Latinidades, the authors suggest that culturally sustaining education for Latinx students necessitates problematizing the boundaries of this term altogether and making visible the tensions and multiple axes of oppression around what it means to be Latinx. They take inspiration from Latinx students—including one of the authors of this article—who are challenging bounded notions of culture (such as "affinity groups") and instead foregrounding questions about equitable practices in the day-to-day context of schools.
The Ethnic Dilemma in Balochistan with More Focusing Upon Intra-Provincial Conflicts under CPEC Scenario
Authors: Zaheer Muhammad Akram , Asim Muhammad
Published: September 2021

Balochistan exists in a state of conflict since the partition but, initially, the nature of the conflict was based upon the future of princely states that led to the insurgency against the federation of Pakistan in 1948, 1958, and 1963. After the emergence of Balochistan as a full province, the nature of conflict shifted towards Baloch ethnic nationalism that directed insurgencies during 1973 and 2004. The government of Pakistan claims that all the waves of insurgencies have huge foreign funding by rival states. While the concerns of major powers on re-constructing Kasghar-Gwadar Road plan 2004 (renamed as China-Pakistan Economic Corridor [CPEC] in 2013) triggered Baloch ethnic nationalism and already existed intra-provincial conflicts once again that led Pashtun-Brahui, Brahui-Baloch, and Baloch-Pashtun differences. However, a detailed briefing by Chinese Ambassador Zhao Lijian has undermined all the concerns of ethnic communities in entire Pakistan including Balochistan. However, there are still some voices for insecurity and predicted economic deprivation in the province. This study tries to describe the history of ethnic dilemma in Balochistan along with demographic structure, CPEC related projects in the province, and the rival states’ nexus for triggering ethnonational separatism and intra-provincial conflicts against Pakistan. While the issue is rising by Baloch nationalists regarding preferring the eastern, western, or central route of CPEC is being discussed in the last.
EVALUATION OF ENGINEERING PROPERTIES OF THERMAL POWER PLANT WASTE FOR SUBGRADE TREATMENT
Authors: Hossain Md. Belal , Roknuzzaman Md. , Biswas Md. Asib , Islam Motaharul
Published: September 2021

Soft cohesive soils have low strength, high plasticity, and a large expansion ratio making them unsuitable as a road subgrade. This study aims to evaluate the potential of power plant waste (fly ash) from the Barapukuria Thermal Power Plant, Dinajpur, Bangladesh to improve the characteristics of such soft cohesive soil. X-ray fluorescence test conducted to classify the power plant fly ash and the type was identified as “Class F” according to “American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials” and "American Society for Testing and Materials". Laboratory tests were conducted on clay soil obtained from Dinajpur region modified by the collected power plant waste. As the Class F fly ash has low cementing property, 3% cement was added with it. Cement mixed soil was modified with 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20% fly ash respectively. Specific Gravity, Atterberg limits, Modified Proctor Compaction, Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) and California Bearing Ratio (CBR) tests were conducted. The study reveals that there is a decrease in specific gravity, dry density, and plasticity index with the addition of power plant waste. On the other hand, there is an increase in optimum moisture content, UCS, and CBR value. UCS and CBR values were found to be improved remarkably. Soaked CBR value of soil is found to be improved from 2.79% to 92.59% when treated with 5% fly ash and 3% cement. The UCS value of this modified soil was 560.36 kPa. The stabilized soil thus obtained meets the requirements for subgrade as specified by the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED)’s design manual (2005), Bangladesh. Since there is a possibility of leaching by dumping a large quantity of fly ash in the pond, the use of fly ash from the power plants to improve soft cohesive soils for road subgrade may be an environment-friendly alternative to its disposal in the ponds.
Pesquisa em educação: temas em debate, reflexões em destaque
Authors: Fraquetta Flávio , Sbardelotto Denise Kloeckner , Rodrigues Adriana Aparecida
Published: September 2021

Esta obra apresenta algumas pesquisas realizadas em 2019, decorrentes do desenvolvimento no Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (TCC), no curso de Licenciatura Plena em Pedagogia, do Centro Universitário UniFatecie. Com o intuito de propiciar reflexões acerca do contexto educacional em diferentes áreas do conhecimento, o livro se encontra divido em três temáticas, sendo elas: História da Educação e as Instituições Escolares; Educação Inclusiva, Escola e Família; Pedagogia e Prática Educacional. Nesse contexto, de acordo com as temáticas mencionadas, as discussões estão subdividas em treze capítulos, tendo como objeto central a Educação. O material ora publicado contribui para formação inicial e continuada de indivíduos cujo campo de estudo esteja direta ou indiretamente relacionados ao da Educação. Dessa maneira, os organizadores convidam os leitores a imergirem no apresentado desse livro, bem como, se apropriarem dos conhecimentos compartilhados no mesmo.
A Risk Score Model Incorporating Three m6A RNA Methylation Regulators and a Related Network of miRNAs-m6A Regulators-m6A Target Genes to Predict the Prognosis of Patients With Ovarian Cancer
Authors: Li Qian , Ren Chen-Chen , Chen Yan-Nan , Yang Li , Zhang Feng , Wang Bao-Jin , Zhu Yuan-Hang , Li Fei-Yan , Yang Jun , Zhang Zhen-An
Published: September 2021

Ovarian cancer (OC) is the leading cause of cancer-related death among all gynecological tumors. N6-methyladenosine (m6A)-related regulators play essential roles in various tumors, including OC. However, the expression of m6A RNA methylation regulators and the related regulatory network in OC and their correlations with prognosis remain largely unknown. In the current study, we obtained the genome datasets of OC from GDC and GTEx database and analyzed the mRNA levels of 21 key m6A regulators in OC and normal human ovarian tissues. The expression levels of 7 m6A regulators were lower in both the OC tissues and the high-stage group. Notably, the 5-year survival rate of patients with OC presenting low VIRMA expression or high HNRNPA2B1 expression was higher than that of the controls. Next, a risk score model based on the three selected m6A regulators (VIRMA, IGF2BP1, and HNRNPA2B1) was built by performing a LASSO regression analysis, and the moderate accuracy of the risk score model to predict the prognosis of patients with OC was examined by performing ROC curve, nomogram, and univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses. In addition, a regulatory network of miRNAs-m6A regulators-m6A target genes, including 2 miRNAs, 3 m6A regulators, and 47 mRNAs, was constructed, and one of the pathways, namely, miR-196b-5p-IGF2BP1-PTEN, was initially validated based on bioinformatic analysis and assay verification. These results demonstrated that the risk score model composed of three m6A RNA methylation regulators and the related network of miRNAs-m6A regulators-m6A target genes is valuable for predicting the prognosis of patients with OC, and these molecules may serve as potential biomarkers or therapeutic targets in the future.
Phenotypic and Functional Diversity in Regulatory T Cells
Authors: Sjaastad Louisa E. , Owen David L. , Tracy Sean I. , Farrar Michael A.
Published: September 2021

The concept that a subset of T cells exists that specifically suppresses immune responses was originally proposed over 50 years ago. It then took the next 30 years to solidify the concept of regulatory T cells (Tregs) into the paradigm we understand today – namely a subset of CD4+ FOXP3+ T-cells that are critical for controlling immune responses to self and commensal or environmental antigens that also play key roles in promoting tissue homeostasis and repair. Expression of the transcription factor FOXP3 is a defining feature of Tregs, while the cytokine IL2 is necessary for robust Treg development and function. While our initial conception of Tregs was as a monomorphic lineage required to suppress all types of immune responses, recent work has demonstrated extensive phenotypic and functional diversity within the Treg population. In this review we address the ontogeny, phenotype, and function of the large number of distinct effector Treg subsets that have been defined over the last 15 years.
Folding Mitochondrial-Mediated Cytosolic Proteostasis Into the Mitochondrial Unfolded Protein Response
Authors: Jenkins Edmund Charles , Chattopadhyay Mrittika , Germain Doris
Published: September 2021

Several studies reported that mitochondrial stress induces cytosolic proteostasis. How mitochondrial stress activates proteostasis in the cytosol remains unclear. However, the cross-talk between the mitochondria and cytosolic proteostasis has far reaching implications for treatment of proteopathies including neurodegenerative diseases. This possibility appears within reach since selected drugs have begun to emerge as being able to stimulate mitochondrial-mediated cytosolic proteostasis. In this review, we focus on studies describing how mitochondrial stress activates proteostasis in the cytosol across multiple model organisms. A model is proposed linking mitochondrial-mediated regulation of cytosolic translation, folding capacity, ubiquitination, and proteasome degradation and autophagy as a multi layered control of cytosolic proteostasis that overlaps with the integrated stress response (ISR) and the mitochondrial unfolded protein response (UPRmt). By analogy to the conductor in an orchestra managing multiple instrumental sections into a dynamically integrated musical piece, the cross-talk between these signaling cascades places the mitochondria as a major conductor of cellular integrity.
Dermatan-4-O-Sulfotransferase-1 Contributes to the Undifferentiated State of Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells
Authors: Ogura Chika , Nishihara Shoko
Published: September 2021

Mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) have the properties of self-renewal and pluripotency. Various signals and growth factors maintain their undifferentiated state and also regulate their differentiation. Glycosaminoglycans are present on the cell surface and in the cell matrix as proteoglycans. Previously, we and other groups reported that the glycosaminoglycan heparan sulfate contributes to both maintenance of undifferentiated state and regulation of mESC differentiation. It has been shown that chondroitin sulfate is needed for pluripotency and differentiation of mESCs, while keratan sulfate is a known marker of human ESCs or induced pluripotent stem cells. We also found that DS promotes neuronal differentiation from mESCs and human neural stem cells; however, the function of DS in the maintenance of mESCs has not yet been revealed. Here, we investigated the role of DS in mESCs by knockdown (KD) or overexpression (O/E) of the dermatan-4-O-sulfotransferase-1 (D4ST1) gene. We found that the activity of the ESC self-renewal marker alkaline phosphatase was reduced in D4ST1 KD mESCs, but, in contrast, increased in D4ST1 O/E mESCs. D4ST1 KD promoted endodermal differentiation, as indicated by an increase in Cdx2 expression. Conversely, Cdx2 expression was decreased by D4ST1 O/E. Wnt signaling, which is also involved in endodermal differentiation, was activated by D4ST1 KD and suppressed by D4ST1 O/E. Collectively, these results demonstrate that D4ST1 contributes to the undifferentiated state of mESCs. Our findings provide new insights into the function of DS in mESCs.
The RNA N6-Methyladenosine Methyltransferase METTL3 Promotes the Progression of Kidney Cancer via N6-Methyladenosine-Dependent Translational Enhancement of ABCD1
Authors: Shi Yue , Dou Yanliang , Zhang Jianye , Qi Jie , Xin Zijuan , Zhang Mingxin , Xiao Yu , Ci Weimin
Published: September 2021

The role of N6-methyladenosine (m6A)-modifying proteins in cancer progression depends on the cell type and mRNA affected. However, the biological role and underlying mechanism of m6A in kidney cancer is limited. Here, we discovered the variability in m6A methyltransferase METTL3 expression was significantly increased in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) the most common subtype of renal cell carcinoma (RCC), and high METTL3 expression predicts poor prognosis in ccRCC patients using a dataset from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Importantly, knockdown of METTL3 in ccRCC cell line impaired both cell migration capacity and tumor spheroid formation in soft fibrin gel, a mechanical method for selecting stem-cell-like tumorigenic cells. Consistently, overexpression of METTL3 but not methyltransferase activity mutant METTL3 can promote cell migration, spheroid formation in cell line and tumor growth in xenograft model. Transcriptional profiling of m6A in ccRCC tissues identified the aberrant m6A transcripts were enriched in cancer-related pathways. Further m6A-sequencing of METTL3 knockdown cells and functional studies confirmed that translation of ABCD1, an ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter of fatty acids, was inhibited by METTL3 in m6A-dependent manner. Moreover, knockdown of ABCD1 in ccRCC cells decreased cancer cell migration and spheroid formation, and upregulation of ABCD1 acts as an adverse prognosis factor of kidney cancer patients. In summary, our study identifies that METTL3 promotes ccRCC progression through m6A modification-mediated translation of ABCD1, providing an epitranscriptional insight into the molecular mechanism in kidney cancer.