bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bollywood Nights: Indian Youth and the Creation of Diasporic Identity in South Africa
Authors: Boshoff Priscilla
Published: April 2018

Bollywood’s popularity as a global cultural form has occurred at the same time as the valorization of difference in the South African political landscape. As the youngest members of the 19th-century labour diaspora, South African Indian youths are the inheritors of a conservative—yet adaptable—home culture amidst the marginalized identities of (post-)apartheid South Africa. Their desire to create an identity for themselves that encompasses their self-perception both as modern South African subjects and as guardians of their traditional home cultures is achieved through Bollywood, which speaks to its diasporic audiences through images of an idealized traditional yet modern India. While India is not a place of return for these youth, their reactivation of a diasporic identity through Bollywood’s representations of a successful Indian diasporic culture and their participation in South African Bollywood concerts and award ceremonies has provided an opportunity for young South African Indians to reimagine their diasporic Indian identity in ways that (re-)connect them to India and to an imagined global diaspora.
Meanings of Bhangra and Bollywood Dancing in India and the Diaspora
Authors: Roy Anjali Gera
Published: April 2018

The mid-1980s witnessed the invention of a new musical genre in Britain consisting largely of remixes of Punjabi folk music and Bollywood music. Dubbed the new Asian dance music, it emerged as an important site for the production of South Asian diasporic identities. From the beginning, these hybridized bhangra and Hindi film remixes attracted considerable media and academic attention in Britain and, over the last two decades, they have become a global cultural phenomenon, with South Asian youth from Amsterdam to Singapore dancing to these beats in clubs, at parties, at college functions and at community gatherings. While Asian dance music returned to India through its popularization in clubs and at weddings and other events, its emblematic status in the diaspora has elided other significatory functions of dance and music in popular, social and political life in the homeland. This essay examines the meanings of bhangra and Bollywood dance in India and the diaspora by drawing on fieldwork conducted among male and female youth aged eighteen to thirty-five at bhangra and Bollywood nights, clubs, community festivals and gatherings in Bangalore, Chandigarh, Delhi, Kharagpur, Kolkata, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, Stuttgart, Heidelberg, New York, Toronto and Vancouver between 2004 and 2011.
Negotiating Palestine through the Familial Gaze: A Photographic (Post)memory Project
Authors: Musleh-Motut Nawal
Published: April 2018

This paper addresses a familial (post)memory project in which I interrogate my investment in a photograph of my father as a young boy in Jerusalem, Palestine. Taken in approximately 1947, during the British Mandate and the inter-communal wars that led to the creation of Israel in 1948, the photograph has fascinated me since childhood. But why has this been? What does the photograph demand of me, and what do I desire from it? As this paper illustrates, answering these questions becomes an exercise in intergenerational understanding and dialogue, as I am forced to negotiate both the burdensome Palestinian identity conferred on me by my parents and my ill-fitting Canadian identity. Ultimately, I realize that this photograph mediates my current reality. While it does not provide photographic evidence of the traumatic historical moments my father experienced in Palestine, it does strike me with conflicting familial gazes: one of loss and absence, the other of mirroring and self-recognition. By applying the theoretical concepts presented by Roland Barthes and Marianne Hirsch, I show that this photograph functions both as an object of my father’s memory and as a mnemonic device of my postmemory.
The Importance of Remembering in Relation: Juxtaposing the Air India and Komagata Maru Disasters
Authors: Dean Amber
Published: April 2018

In 1914, a ship named the Komagata Maru arrived off the coast of British Columbia carrying 376 would-be immigrants, mostly Sikh men from India desiring to settle permanently in the burgeoning colony of Canada. A public sentiment of concern about “Hindoo Invaders” and a discriminatory immigration policy caused the ship to be anchored for two months in the Vancouver harbour, during which time passengers were occasionally denied food and water. The ship was finally forced back to sea under threat from the weaponry of a Canadian navy vessel. At a first glance, this event seems to have little in common with the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, a terrorist act commonly believed to have been committed by Sikh separatists fighting for an independent Khalistan, or Sikh homeland, in India. Yet in Anita Rau Badami’s novel Can You Hear The Nightbird Call? and Uma Parameswaran’s poem “On the Shores of the Irish Sea,” the Komagata Maru and Air India disasters are explicitly linked. In this paper, I explore the reasons these authors might want to encourage a wider public to remember these two events in relation. How might remembrance of one refract and reframe memories of the other? Ultimately, I turn to recent state-sponsored efforts to memorialize and offer reconciliation for the Air India and Komagata Maru atrocities to demonstrate how failing to remember these events in relation makes it is easier to cloak the overt racism underpinning both and to thus maintain the veneer of “Canada” as a haven for racial diversity. By contrast, if public memorials of one event were designed in such a way as to explicitly make links to the other, I argue, a wider public might come to recognize how the unresolved injustice of the Maru incident is deeply implicated in the cascading torrent of violent atrocities that contributed to the bombing of Air India Flight 182, a connection virtually impossible to draw from current state-sponsored efforts to memorialize either event.
“War-on-Terror” Frames of Remembrance: The 1985 Air India Bombings After 9/11
Authors: Failler Angela
Published: April 2018

This paper critically analyzes Canadian filmmaker Sturla Gunnarsson’s documentary Air India 182 in light of recent official efforts to remember and redress the 1985 Air India bombings. The author argues that the film, in line with official efforts, constructs a narrative of the bombings through a “war on terror” framing of remembrance that is at once specific to the recircuitries of race produced in the anxious aftermath of 9/11, and consistent with historically rooted operations of xenophobia and colonial power. The significance of such a framing is that it works not only to shape memory of the bombings as a certain kind of event (one with unambiguous perpetrators, victims and damages), it narrows the field of what are imagined as possible actions toward redressing or compensating for its losses. In other words, a war-on-terror framing of remembrance, as a discursive strategy or approach to “remembering” the bombings, limits the potential for a complex understanding of the politics out of which this event arose, restricting public debate over the kinds of responses that continue to be generated in its aftermath. Moreover, a war-on-terror framing of remembrance is understood here to employ neoliberal and settler-colonialist discourses of productive futurity and multicultural tolerance to make remembrance of the bombings concomitant with the construction of turbaned Sikhs and other racially and religiously minoritized citizens as “dangerous internal foreigners.” As such, this paper bears implications beyond the documentary film, including the consequences of neoliberalism for the formation of public memory and for the making of race and nation in Canada.
Is Canada Postcolonial? Re-Asking through “The Forgotten” Project
Authors: Moss Laura
Published: April 2018

A dozen years after I first asked the question “is Canada postcolonial?,” I have returned to consider it again. Of more concern now than the original question itself, however, is the productive set of questions it raises. These questions form the heart of this paper and are, I argue, at the core of contemporary postcolonial discourse in Canada: (1) What is the triangulated relationship between art, politics and place?; (2) What responsibility does an artist have to her subject matter?; (3)What are the ethics of representation?; (4) Who speaks for whom?; (5) Who profits?; and (6) How then to remember? To engage these serious questions, I turn to the controversy surrounding the cancellation of an art exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. In early 2011, Pamela Masik was set to launch “The Forgotten” project, an exhibition of the portraits of sixty-nine women who were missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Citing “serious concerns” raised by the victims’ families and community groups, the museum cancelled the show (Museum of Anthropology 2011). This was a controversy over the public role of art and the role of art in public spaces. It was also a pivotal case for considering cultural memory and victims’ rights in the process of memorializing. This paper examines the exhibition and its cancellation and, by extension, art and public memory in a postcolonial framework.
Knowledge Mediators and Lubricating Channels: On the Temporal Politics of Remissioning the University
Authors: Vostal Filip , Roberston Susan
Published: April 2018

Engaging with the work of Hartmut Rosa, this article offers an account of the politics of time in the contemporary corporatizing and enterprising university. It examines the emerging third mission for the university, and the ways in which this has enabled an array of new actors and their projects and practices to operate in, and on, university spaces that in turn are aimed at reworking the socialities, spatialities and temporalities of university life. Drawing on empirical work, we focus particularly on a new kind of knowledge worker in the academy—the knowledge mediators/broker—whose task it is to create the spaces and channels that move ideas between the university and the wider economy and back again, to negotiate and help navigate ideas from the world of business into the university, and to accelerate the development of ideas into marketable, scalable and profitable goods and services. Yet, we also show that these processes of acceleration are accompanied by a paradoxical set of counter-flows, undercurrents and backflows, which feed processes of deceleration. We conclude by thinking through what a counter-hegemonic project might look like that critiques and recreates a new politics of time to underpin the conditions for new forms of knowledge creation in the academy.
University Branding Via Securitization
Authors: Gregory Julie
Published: April 2018

This article represents a call to understand school safety audits as central to processes of institutional branding. It argues that reading safety audits through a branding optic helps to draw out their uses in providing support for the augmentation of techno-security apparatuses on campuses and to contextualize them vis-à-vis increasing tendencies to govern universities in accordance with business models of management. While safety audits are generally endorsed as necessary for helping university administrators ensure the safety of students, faculty and staff, the more critical reading provided here draws attention to their entanglement with administrative efforts to construct commoditized university narratives. This paper substantiates and extends research by scholars who make note of the ongoing configurations of educational institutions in accordance with intertwining military and corporate logics. The discussion begins with a review of research by scholars who are highly critical of this trend. Next, the paper offers an exploratory case analysis of links between documents produced by one Canadian university’s administration regarding a sexual assault on that campus in 2007, the undertaking of a universitywide safety audit, and institutional investments in increased security measures. The article concludes with reflections on the importance of counter-rationalizations to this relatively new model of university governance.
Allyson Mitchell’s Lesbian Cultural Activism in Politicized Urban Space
Authors: Veitch Michelle
Published: April 2018

This article examines Allyson Mitchell’s activist art projects at the Gladstone Hotel in the district of Queen Street West in Toronto, Ontario. Whereas current writings focus on the lesbian feminist aesthetics underlying Mitchell’s installations and performances, I provide a geopolitical analysis of her critical cultural practices. I suggest that her collaboration with creative communities at the Gladstone Hotel contributes to urban regeneration in the neighbourhood of Queen Street West. These city-renewal schemes result in the eviction of people living in poverty who cannot afford the rental increases in gentrified districts. In analyzing the socio-spatial processes surrounding Mitchell’s art, I argue that she disrupts gender and sexual ideologies through transgressive feminist politics. While she coordinates cultural-activist projects in politicized urban space, she re-articulates practices of marginalization and disenfranchisement in ways that both enable and disenable geographies of power and resistance.
The Refugee’s Body of Knowledge: Storytelling and Silence in the work of Francisco-Fernando Granados
Authors: Dawson Carrie
Published: April 2018

This paper begins by considering the negative implications of recent amendments to the refugee certification process in Canada. It foregrounds the waning importance of narrative in that process and then asks what is lost when refugees are denied the opportunity to tell their stories in meaningful and politically expedient forums. The second half of the article attempts to answer that question by drawing on the scholarship and artistic practice of Francisco-Fernando Granados, a Guatemalan-Canadian performance artist and refugee whose work seeks to expand the kinds of stories refugees are invited to tell, whether in the courtroom, on the stage, or on the page.
Finance Capital and the Time of the Novel or, Money Without Narrative Qualities
Authors: Nilges Mathias
Published: April 2018

Amplified by recent economic crises, the engagement with the logic of finance capital has in the past few years frequently been carried out on the plane of time. Works such as Franco Berardi’s The Soul at Work and After the Future, Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times, Christian Marazzi’s Capital and Language, Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy, and of course the recent work of Paul Virilio are but a few of many examples of a wider theoretical interest in the relation between finance capital and the modalities of thinking time it requires (and abolishes) that directly mirror a distinct formal and narratological shift in recent novelistic production. Yet, the essay shows, the contemporary novel has for about fifteen years been able to generate precisely those answers other forms of thought have as of yet failed to produce, illustrating rather surprisingly that, in contrast to the novel, theory and criticism has added little to our analysis of the actual structural and epistemological foundations of a crisis often merely described and taxonomized, yet not more rigorously understood than that which Fredric Jameson already cursorily diagnosed in 1994 as a “weakness in imagination,” existing “for whatever reason.” Recent changes in novelistic form, in particular since the novel’s artistic function and ontology consists precisely in being a form of questioning time, allow us to illustrate the precise relation between structural and epistemological form that undergo a distinct change as we move into full finance capital and to understand the resulting epistemological crisis that is often mischaracterized as a crisis of time (hence falsely universalizing and ontologizing time and ultimately exempting time from time).
Debt: The Sublimated Object of Capital
Authors: Flisfeder Matthew
Published: April 2018

In psychoanalysis, a sublime object’ is one that signifies the transformation of a condition of impossibility into one of possibility. On the one hand, it represents a moment of internalized prohibition that transforms an impossibility into something possible: the sublime object turns the impossible sexual object, for example, into something that is prohibited, and therefore possible. On the other hand, a sublime object represents the objectification of a lack. Or, in other words, it is lack in object form; it is the objective correlative of nothingness itself. What better definition might we have for the role played by debt in capital, particularly in its financial stage?

Debt is the sublimated object of capital in the sense that it is, itself, a pure nothing that attains object form. It is in its object form that this pure nothing makes possible the global expansion of capital and the class interests that pertain to the latter. Debt operates similarly to the Lacanian the sublime object as the objectcause of desire’. If we subtract this object from capitalist system we lose the system itself. Debt is in this sense the object that, on the other side of its normal’, everyday operation contains both a nugget of the truth of the system itself and the mechanism by which the capitalist system may be overthrown. Debt is the lack in the capitalist system that overlaps with the lack that is the exploited subject.

In my paper, I use the Lacanian concept of the sublime object to demonstrate how debt represents the sublimated object of capital; and, as such, it is the central, universal cause that has the potential to open up a space for the interpellation of radical revolutionary subjectivity.
Fictitious Capital: London and the Financial Imagination
Authors: Calcutt Andrew
Published: April 2018

The financial services sector enables capital to expand as it circulates. Accordingly, though it is highly profitable, the sector hardly contributes to the production of capital via the manufacture of commodities. Given that the circulation of capital can only be circuitous, activity undertaken by the financial services sector tends to perform likewise. The circles and spirals that characterize its activities are quite different, then, from the typical shape of the production process—the line. Furthermore, in places where financial services now dominate the local economy, this kind of circularity may also prevail over other areas of activity that are not primarily economic, for example, cultural activity.

London is such a location. As a global city (its status confirmed by hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012), London’s dual role is to continue the worldwide circulation of capital and to maintain the circulation of meaning—functions fulfilled by financial services and cultural activity, respectively.

But to maintain circulation is also to perform a mediating role. Financial circuits, for example, rely upon a variety of brokers whose financial products’ serve as mediating links between the previous transaction and the next. Just as financial circuits are comprised of these mediating links, so, to the extent that London as a whole has taken on this character, the city itself has acquired a mediating role. Accordingly, the people of London have become mediators, first and foremost, positioned, and repeatedly positioning themselves, between successive moments in a continuous process of circulation. Even when not performing this mediating role in a professional, paid-for capacity, many Londoners are constantly rehearsing for it via cellphones, social media and a remix culture which repackages and re-sends existing cultural artefacts, in much the same way that financial products’ are not originals so much as re-iterations of existing products and value, re-configured into selfexpanding forms. Unlike earlier iterations of this capital city (mercantile London; industrial London; imperial London), twenty-first century London is a matrix of finance and culture in which financial activity lends its characteristic shape to contemporary cultural activity.
Not a Gift Shop: Arts-based Narratives of the Canadian North
Authors: Luka Mary Elizabeth
Published: April 2018

This paper explores four visual culture projects arising from artwork created in or about the Canadian North. Edmund Carpenter’s meditations on early-1950s Eastern Inuit art are compared to the constellated works featured in the “Magnetic Norths” exhibition curated by Charles Stankievech that took place in Montreal in 2010. These curatorial projects are analyzed in contrast to two media-based projects: a series of artist interviews and artwork presentations gathered in the 1998–2008 television and website production CBC ArtSpots, and the 2008 film Before Tomorrow, directed by Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu. Narratives of the Canadian North engendered by these artworks are probed using the concept of creative citizenship, bringing them into dialogue with one another and with other presentations of the Canadian North.
Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North: The Cultural Politics of Benevolent Domination
Authors: Vallee Mickey
Published: April 2018

This article follows the critical theory that Canadian wilderness painting exists only when the artist disavows their presence at the scene of capture, and suggests that it is due time the theory be applied to Canadian sound pieces such as Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North (1967). A contrapuntal radio piece that marked Glenn Gould’s baptism into experimental documentary, The Idea of North explores how the North is placed in the Canadian imaginary as an ambivalent object of national identity. In this article, I argue that the aesthetic procedures of The Idea of North create a narrative space through which the Other is constructed as a savage who is subsequently saved by the benevolent welfare state. Thus, The Idea of North idealizes the North by virtue of (1) its distantiation from the North, and (2) its Othering of Canada’s Inuit as savage and helpless, reflective of (3) a new benevolent racism that made up assimilationist ideology, a requisite for post-World War II Northern resource development. The Idea of North is, thus, an aesthetic example of ‘differential racism,’ which proceeds through perceived cultural rather than biological differences, and works to include the targeted social group rather than exclude them. Given The Idea of North’s narrative of the North’s future, I argue that the future is a convenient temporal schematic through which the present remains governed. I maintain that we must add benevolent racism to the cultural theory of exploitation and domination in order to understand the contemporary structure of racism that haunts any cultural denials of colonialism.
Compiling Knowledge, Enacting Space, Binding Time: Innis’s Canadian North (1928–1944)
Authors: Audette-Longo Patricia H. , Buxton William J.
Published: April 2018

While Harold A. Innis’s contributions to media theory and economic history are well recognized, his attention to Canada’s North has received less notice. This paper brings together and analyzes Innis’s most sustained engagement with the North: his sixteen-year project of reviewing more than 150 books about the region for the Canadian Historical Review. By examining Innis’s North as a mediated text, the paper traces how his reviews were informed by concerns with enacting space and binding time. The paper discusses how Innis used his reviews to compile information about a largely unknown area, map its natural-resource potential, and commemorate its colourful and sometimes-turbulent past. Innis contributed to a construction of the region as a last frontier whose conquest could unite Canadians in common purpose and identity. Innis’s reviews provided a platform for him to criticize the federal government’s policies on the region, but his contributions to our understanding of the region largely failed to reflect the complexities of an already occupied, already changing North. Nevertheless, his discussions of political and economic development in the North anticipated current discussions of how Canada’s northern tier is undergoing transformation through the exploitation of resources and climate change.
Super Shamou versus Captain Al Cohol: Inuit Cultural Productions and the Discourses on Inuit Drinkers
Authors: Stern Pamela
Published: April 2018

The history of alcohol control policy in the Canadian Arctic is perverse. In the 1960s northern administrators regarded alcohol consumption as the right and responsibility of masculine citizens. Thus, they undertook to provide tutelage to Inuit in the “proper” use of the substance in the hopes that Inuit could be produced as proper citizens of the nation. A decade later the alcohol education message directed at Inuit changed. The new message told Inuit to abstain from drink. Many of the educational materials delivering this message, such as the Captain Al Cohol comic book series, started with the premise that Inuit were naïve users of alcohol and that Inuit alcohol abuse stemmed largely from a lack of knowledge about its effects. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this paper I examine Inuit cultural productions dealing with alcohol use and abuse. Some of the works, such as Manassie Akpaliapik’s well-known whalebone and stone sculpture of a bottle embedded in a man’s head, were produced for non-Inuit consumers of Inuit art and culture. Others, including cartoons, short stories, journalism, filmic works and the Super Shamou comic book, were directed at Inuit audiences. I consider how Inuit understandings of citizenship, alcohol, and the self are reflected in these cultural productions.
From Power over Creation to the Power of Creation: Cornelius Castoriadis on Democratic Cultural Creation and the Case of Hollywood
Authors: Holman Christopher , McMahon James
Published: April 2018

This article is a critical investigation and application of the aesthetic theory of Cornelius Castoriadis, one of the most important 20th-century theorists of radical democracy. We outline Castoriadis’s thoughts on autonomy, the social-historical nature of Being, and creation—key elements that inform his model of democratic culture. We then develop a Castoriadian critique of culture produced by capitalist institutions. By also drawing on the political economic thought of Thorstein Veblen, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, our critique focuses on one sector of contemporary culture: Hollywood film. We show how Hollywood, as a business enterprise, uses techniques of sabotage and capitalization to control and occult the social-historical nature of creation. Lastly, by way of conclusion, we gesture toward a mode of artistic production that is able to affirm the democratic values that organize Castoriadis’s thought.
Autodestruction in Lebanon: The Testimonial Uncanny and the Birth of Knowledge in Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group
Authors: Emberley Julia
Published: April 2018

This paper is concerned with the methodological question of what it means to produce “cultural politics from below,” in opposition to “cultural politics from above.” This approach emerges from an examination of memory and memorialization in the context of traumatic events, in particular, the Lebanese civil wars, which took place from 1975–91. My discussion focuses on debates that took place regarding the restoration and rehabilitation of Beirut’s war-torn city-center. I examine how the nation-state sets out to memorialize its own place in the historical record in comparison to how artistic practices question memorialization by interrogating the historical record and the archive’s role in creating memory. I begin this essay by thinking about “explosions” and how the motif of the explosion occupies a particular place in work on testimony and trauma. Often explosions cause trauma, but within the critical literature on testimony, the idea of the explosion has taken on creative, productive elements, becoming a way to conceptualize the birth of testimonial knowledge. In Walid Raad’s project, The Atlas Group, I argue that he represents the possibilities and limitations of re-making testimonial knowledge through his creation of a visual inventory of news-media photographs in the aftermath of car bombings.
What the Poet Does for Us
Authors: Sanders Leslie
Published: April 2018

This article contextualizes the work of Dionne Brand in the politics of liberation struggles of the 1960s and 70s, and then traces the evolution of the poetics of witness in four volumes of her poetry: No Language is Neutral, Land to Light On, thirsty and Inventory. Through an examination of the use of the pronouns I, you and we, it argues for the increasingly complex ways in which the poet invites her readers into acts of ethical witnessing and global citizenship.
Affective Postcolonialities: Love and Devastation in Dionne Brand’s Multicultural Toronto
Authors: Georgis Dina
Published: April 2018

This article reads Dionne Brand’s novel, What We All Long For, and her book of poetry, Inventory, as chronicles of diasporic life in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. Under new racialized terrains, we encounter difficult negotiations and complex subjecthoods. Her texts call us to the affective registers of loss and trauma and resist postcolonial optimism. Indeed, Brand’s work is attentive to postcolonial tragedy. Following David Scott, this paper offers tragedy as an alternative concept to redemptive resistance and allows us to reflect on subjects suffering in historical crisis.
The Organized Response to the “War on Science” and the Lost Potential for Challenging Commercialization
Authors: Holloway Kelly
Published: April 2018

This article focuses on the organized opposition to what dissenters referred to as Stephen Harper’s “War on Science.” I argue that this response had the potential to instigate a critical and long-overdue discussion amongst Canadians about the transformation of academic science into a commercialized and commercializing endeavour. A critique of commercialization entered into the mobilizations in question, but it was not the central focus. I unpack several of the mobilizations’ thematic discourses in an effort to demonstrate how this was a missed opportunity, and argue that the mobilizations could have been a crucial turning point to address the transformation of academic science. These mobilizations had limitations, insofar as they rested on a fairly dated defense of the objectivity of science, but at the same time there was a will to appeal to the idea of science in the public interest—a worthwhile concept to raise, debate and develop.
White Settler Antipathy and the Daniels Decision
Authors: Vowel Chelsea , Leroux Darryl
Published: April 2018

In this short response to Daniels v. Canada, we set out to accomplish two tasks. First, we provide an overview of the decision, with a focus on clarifying its limited reach. In particular, we distinguish between jurisdictional questions under section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867, which Daniels addresses directly, and Aboriginal rights as encoded in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which is outside the reach of Daniels. Second, after confronting the confusion brought forth by Daniels, we examine several different cases of nascent organizations in Québec claiming Aboriginal rights as either self-declared Métis or non-status Indians, and analyze some of their responses to the Daniels decision. We proceed to argue that in their reliance on antipathy towards Indigenous peoples, these organizations exemplify settler nativist tactics that ultimately undermine Indigenous self-determination.
The Culture of Surveillance: G-Men Redux and Total Information Awareness
Authors: Shade Leslie Regan
Published: April 2018

Part of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Awareness Office, the Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, enacted in the wake of September 11th, aims to capture the information signature of citizens suspected of terrorism or criminal acts. Technical means (including computer algorithms and human analysis) afford the government the ability to track those involved in low-intensity/low-density forms of warfare and crime, its ultimate goal to track individuals through collecting as much information about them as possible.Various public interest groups have criticized this initiative, particularly on the basis of privacy and security risks, identity theft, misuse of information, and overt citizen surveillance. This article will provide an overview of TIA and situate it within an ongoing political economy of the military-industrial complex, now revamped for an emerging security industry.
Life in Transit–A Global Condition
Authors: Ekeberg Bjorn
Published: April 2018

As an international airport, Montreal Dorval can be perceived as a portal of globalization. Its space is nowhere, somewhere and anywhere at the same time. This essay reflects on how spatial practices in an airport passenger terminal mirror social, cultural and class-based conditions in an increasingly transient world.
Objective motor assessment for personalized rehabilitation of upper extremity in brain injury patients
Authors: Villán-Villán Mailin Adriana , Pérez-Rodríguez Rodrigo , Martín Cristina , Sánchez-González Patricia , Soriano Ignasi , Opisso Eloy , Hernando M. Elena , Tormos José María , Medina Josep , Gómez Enrique J.
Published: April 2018

BACKGROUND:

The increasing number of patients with acquired brain injury and the current subjectivity of the conventional upper extremity (UE) assessment tests require new objective assessment techniques.

OBJECTIVE:

This research proposes a novel objective motor assessment (OMA) methodology based on the Fugl-Meyer assessment (FMA). The goals are to automatically calculate the objective scores (OSs) of FMA-UE movements (as well as a global OS) and to interpret the estimated OSs.

METHODS:

Fifteen patients participated in the study. The OMA algorithm was designed to detect small-scale variations in UE movements. The OSs for 14 FMA-UE movements and the global OSs were automatically calculated using the algorithm and evaluated by 2 therapists. The interpretation of the global OSs was performed at 3 levels: by item, movement and globally.

RESULTS:

The global OSs calculated by our algorithm had a significant correlation with the therapists’ scores (0.783 and 0.938, p <  0.01). All OSs for each movement were correlated with the scores given by the therapists. The correlation coefficient can reach values as high as 0.981 ( p <  0.01).

CONCLUSIONS:

We provide a new objective assessment tool for therapists to help them improve the diagnostic accuracy and to achieve a more personalized and potentially effective physical rehabilitation of brain injury patients.
Effect of virtual reality training on walking distance and physical fitness in individuals with Parkinson’s disease
Authors: de Melo Gileno Edu Lameira , Kleiner Ana Francisca Rozin , Lopes Jamile Benite Palma , Dumont Arislander Jonathan Lopes , Lazzari Roberta Delasta , Galli Manuela , Oliveira Claudia Santos
Published: April 2018

OBJECTIVE:

To evaluate the effects of gait training with virtual reality (VR) on walking distance and physical fitness in individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD).

METHODS:

Thirty-seven individuals with PD participated in this prospective, randomized, controlled clinical trial. They were randomly allocated to a control group submitted to conventional training ( n = 12), a treadmill group submitted to gait training on a treadmill ( n = 13) and a VR group submitted to gait training using the XboxTM ( n = 12). Clinical measures, gait variables and the Six-Minute Walk Test (6MWT) were evaluated: pre-intervention, after one intervention session, post-intervention and follow up (30 days after intervention).

RESULTS:

The VR and treadmill groups travelled longer distances on the 6MWT and had faster gait speed in comparison to the control group. The VR and treadmill groups demonstrated an increase in pre-6MWT HR. The VR group had more intense HR after the first session and throughout training, but these gains were not maintained at the follow-up.

CONCLUSION:

The present findings demonstrate that gait training with a VR program is as effective as treadmill training with regard to gains in walking distance and improvements in temporal gait variables in individuals with PD.
Immersive virtual reality in traumatic brain injury rehabilitation: A literature review
Authors: Aida Jared , Chau Brian , Dunn Justin
Published: April 2018

BACKGROUND:

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a common cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States with its sequelae often affecting individuals long after the initial injury. Innovations in virtual reality (VR) technology may offer potential therapy options in the recovery from such injuries. However, there is currently no consensus regarding the efficacy of VR in the setting of TBI rehabilitation.

OBJECTIVE:

The aim of this review is to evaluate and summarize the current literature regarding immersive VR in the rehabilitation of those with TBI.

METHODS:

A comprehensive literature search was conducted utilizing PubMed, Google Scholar, and the Cochrane Review using the search terms “virtual reality,” “traumatic brain injury,” “brain injury,” and “immersive.”

RESULTS:

A total of 11 studies were evaluated. These were primarily of low-level evidence, with the exception of two randomized, controlled trials. 10 of 11 studies demonstrated improvement with VR therapy. VR was most frequently used to address gait or cognitive deficits.

CONCLUSIONS:

While the current literature generally offers support for the use of VR in TBI recovery, there is a paucity of strong evidence to support its widespread use. The increasing availability of immersive VR technology offers the potential for engaging therapy in TBI rehabilitation, but its utility remains uncertain given the limited studies available at this time.
Pattern of Cardiovascular Drugs Use in Outpatient Department in a Tertiary Care Hospital of Bangladesh
Authors: Roy Udoy Shankar , Islam AKM Monwarul , Ahmed Mohsin , Khan Murshidur Rahman , Sarker Nihar Ranjan
Published: April 2018

Objective: The objective of the present study was to provide recent population-based information on use of cardiovascular drugs in outpatients in a tertiary care hospital of Dhaka, Bangladesh.Methods: A prospective study of cardiovascular prescriptions of Outpatient Department of Department of Cardiology of Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical college hospital Dhaka, Bangladesh was carried out. A total of 215 prescriptions were collected for the study in Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital Dhaka, Bangladesh from July 2015 to June 2016. The prescriptions were evaluated for rationality based on WHO model list of essential medicines. The prescriptions were critically analyzed using predetermined parameters.Results: Out of 215 prescriptions collected, 120 drugs were found to be repeatedly prescribed. The results revealed that all single dose formulations prescribed were rationally in accordance with WHO essential drug list whereas fixed dose combinations prescribed remain questionable. A pattern of polypharmacy was clearly evident.Conclusion: Medications are a critical modality for prolongation and improved quality of life. Campaign and intervention should be focused on patients with more than three diagnostic cardiovascular conditions in order to minimize polypharmacy in patients particularly elderly.Bangladesh Heart Journal 2017; 32(2) : 65-69
Association of HDL Cholesterol with In-Hospital Outcome of Patients with Acute Coronary Syndrome
Authors: Faruque Chowdhury Muhammad Omar , Chowdhury Abdul Wadud , Chowdhury Miftaul Jannath , Hoque Abu Thaher Mohammad Mahfuzul , Mia Md Solaiman , Kabir SM Eftar Jahan , Hossain Mofazzal
Published: April 2018

Background:Acute coronary syndrome is a cardiac emergency. It is increasing dramatically and becoming a major burden in our health care system. Relation between serum lipid profile and acute coronary syndrome is well established. Our study tried to reveal association of high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) with in-hospital outcome of patients with acute coronary syndrome.Methods: The study was a cross sectional comparative study. Clinical & biochemical evaluation was done in hospital settings. A total number of 271 patients were included in the study and divided into two groups. Patients with low HDL-C level were in group I and patients with normal HDL-C were in group II.Results: Group I populations had more complications & more in- hospital stay than group II (74.3% vs 28.9%, P<0.001 and 6.65±2.04 days vs 5.09±1.44 days, p<0.001 respectively).Conclusion: The study revealed significant association of HDL-C with outcome of acute coronary syndrome patients. Complications of acute coronary syndrome were more in patients with low HDLC level.Bangladesh Heart Journal 2017; 32(2) : 114-118
Our Evolving Understanding of the Mechanism of Quinolones
Authors: Gutierrez Arnaud , Stokes Jonathan , Matic Ivan
Published: April 2018

The maintenance of DNA supercoiling is essential for the proper regulation of a plethora of biological processes. As a consequence of this mode of regulation, ahead of the replication fork, DNA replication machinery is prone to introducing supercoiled regions into the DNA double helix. Resolution of DNA supercoiling is essential to maintain DNA replication rates that are amenable to life. This resolution is handled by evolutionarily conserved enzymes known as topoisomerases. The activity of topoisomerases is essential, and therefore constitutes a prime candidate for targeting by antibiotics. In this review, we present hallmark investigations describing the mode of action of quinolones, one of the antibacterial classes targeting the function of topoisomerases in bacteria. By chronologically analyzing data gathered on the mode of action of this imperative antibiotic class, we highlight the necessity to look beyond primary drug-target interactions towards thoroughly understanding the mechanism of quinolones at the level of the cell.
Cebpd Is Essential for Gamma-Tocotrienol Mediated Protection against Radiation-Induced Hematopoietic and Intestinal Injury
Authors: Banerjee Sudip , Shah Sumit , Melnyk Stepan , Pathak Rupak , Hauer-Jensen Martin , Pawar Snehalata
Published: April 2018

Gamma-tocotrienol (GT3) confers protection against ionizing radiation (IR)-induced injury. However, the molecular targets that underlie the protective functions of GT3 are not yet known. We have reported that mice lacking CCAAT enhancer binding protein delta (Cebpd−/−) display increased mortality to IR due to injury to the hematopoietic and intestinal tissues and that Cebpd protects from IR-induced oxidative stress and cell death. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Cebpd mediates the radio protective functions of GT3. We found that GT3-treated Cebpd−/− mice showed partial recovery of white blood cells compared to GT3-treated Cebpd+/+ mice at 2 weeks post-IR. GT3-treated Cebpd−/− mice showed an increased loss of intestinal crypt colonies, which correlated with increased expression of inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, increased levels of oxidized glutathione (GSSG), S-nitrosoglutathione (GSNO) and 3-nitrotyrosine (3-NT) after exposure to IR compared to GT3-treated Cebpd+/+ mice. Cebpd is induced by IR as well as a combination of IR and GT3 in the intestine. Studies have shown that granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (G-CSF), mediates the radioprotective functions of GT3. Interestingly, we found that IR alone as well as the combination of IR and GT3 caused robust augmentation of plasma G-CSF in both Cebpd+/+ and Cebpd−/− mice. These results identify a novel role for Cebpd in GT3-mediated protection against IR-induced injury, in part via modulation of IR-induced inflammation and oxidative/nitrosative stress, which is independent of G-CSF.
Fluid Intake and Beverage Consumption Description and Their Association with Dietary Vitamins and Antioxidant Compounds in Italian Adults from the Mediterranean Healthy Eating, Aging and Lifestyles (MEAL) Study
Authors: Platania Armando , Castiglione Dora , Sinatra Dario , Urso Maurizio , Marranzano Marina
Published: April 2018

The aim of the present study was to investigate the total water intake (TWI) from drinks and foods and to evaluate the correlation between the different types of drinks on energy and antioxidant intake. The cohort comprised 1602 individuals from the city of Catania in Southern Italy. A food frequency questionnaire was administered to assess dietary and water intake. The mean total water intake was 2.7 L; more than about two thirds of the sample met the European recommendations for water intake. Water and espresso coffee were the most consumed drinks. Alcohol beverages contributed about 3.0% of total energy intake, and sugar sweetened beverages contributed about 1.4%. All antioxidant vitamins were significantly correlated with TWI. However, a higher correlation was found for water from food rather than water from beverages, suggesting that major food contributors to antioxidant vitamin intake might be fruits and vegetables, rather than beverages other than water. A mild correlation was found between fruit juices and vitamin C; coffee, tea and alcohol, and niacin and polyphenols; and milk and vitamin B12. The findings from the present study show that our sample population has an adequate intake of TWI and that there is a healthy association between beverages and dietary antioxidants.
Respiration Symptoms Monitoring in Body Area Networks
Authors: Liu Lu , Shah Syed , Zhao Guoqing , Yang Xiaodong
Published: April 2018

This work presents a framework that monitors particular symptoms such as respiratory conditions (abnormal breathing pattern) experienced by hyperthyreosis, sleep apnea, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) patients. The proposed framework detects and monitors respiratory condition using S-Band sensing technique that leverages the wireless devices such as antenna, card, omni-directional antenna operating in 2 GHz to 4 GHz frequency range, and wireless channel information extraction tool. The rhythmic patterns extracted using S-Band sensing present the periodic and non-periodic waveforms that correspond to normal and abnormal respiratory conditions, respectively. The fine-grained amplitude information obtained using aforementioned devices is used to examine the breathing pattern over a period of time and accurately identifies the particular condition.