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Old German Baptist Brethren: Plain but Different, Part 1
Get PDFThis article utilizes a narrative methodological research paradigm to explore perceived distinctions between the Old German Baptist Brethren (the main Old Order expression of the Schwarzenau Brethren) and other Plain groups. The authors explore three areas of specific distinction: (a) The group’s weave of Pietist as well as Anabaptist historical and theological influences, (b) a strong emphasis on the ritualized enactment of a discrete array of ordinances, (c) an emphasis on orthopraxis rather than doctrinal uniformity as a marker of church unity. All these, together with four other areas addressed in the second part of the article, combine to create a distinctive and unusual expression of Plain spirituality and life practice
The Power of Basic Math: Preparing Students for a World Beyond the Classroom
No full textIn this short op-ed, the authors make the argument for the use of real-world contexts to promote student interest and engagement at all levels of instruction
Trapped Within Borders: Exploitation of Migrant Seasonal Workers in German Agriculture During COVID-19 Lockdown; Placing the Actors and Understanding Their Roles
Get PDFWhile European borders were closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Europe witnessed the exodus of Romanian seasonal workers to Germany. Although both countries’ governments agreed to allow this under the condition of the strictest adherence to the sanitary restrictions and workers’ rights, soon after, the media began to report situations of non-adherence to the coronavirus-related measures and workers’ labor rights. Following the theoretical framework of the Routine Activities Approach and its updates, this case study combines the collection of press material (N=140), Facebook posts (N=93), and interviews with seasonal workers in agriculture (N=5) and identifies the exploitative behaviors and actors involved. The results suggest that the perpetrators of these behaviors were certain intermediaries as well as farmers. The seasonal workers most at-risk were those with poor literacy who had not mastered the German language, were financially precarious, and were unwilling to seek the authorities’ help. The spaces in which the exploitation occurred were cyberspace or isolated rural farms. Seven guardians and seven super-controllers played a considerable role in protecting the workers on the farms, but not during the recruitment process. Situational prevention techniques, such as the creation of a mobile application to inform workers of their rights and allow them to report violations remotely, and collaboration with online platform services to flag fraudulent job advertisements automatically are proposed
Going the Distance: Field Approaches to Researching the Rural – A Research Note
Get PDFStudies of crime in rural settings have expanded in recent years. Seldom discussed are the challenges associated with conducting rural field research. This research note describes the methodological approaches utilized in a multi-year study of rural law enforcement across Oklahoma and a nearby state in the United States. Research aims and methodology evolved over time in line with the flexibility inherent within ethnographic approaches. Interviews and field visits were conducted with 39 individuals from 2017 to 2019 for the purpose of understanding rural communities, crime and policing. Data were gathered through in-depth interviews, field visits, ride-alongs, observations and photographs. Owing to the nature of the subject matter, researchers had to maintain flexibility throughout the research process. This research note discusses the range of approaches utilized to gather data, obstacles encountered and insights discovered through the process
Impact of the 2022 Mpox Outbreak on Future Public Health Initiatives in Ohio
No full textThe 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) created a global public health emergency costing the lives of millions, but the advent of COVID-19 vaccination allowed our society to contain infection and morbidity. As global health began to slowly recover in 2022, the emergence of mpox (monkeypox) in the Western world led to fear that global health would soon be under threat by another viral infection. Mpox is known as a viral zoonosis, or a virus transmitted from animals to humans, which presents with symptoms similar to those of smallpox. Mpox and smallpox belong to the orthopoxvirus genus in the Poxvirdae family, however, mpox is less clinically severe than smallpox, the latter being fully eradicated. Transmission occurs when an individual has direct contact with an infected rash, bodily fluids, respiratory droplets, or via fomites. From July 2022 to May 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the mpox outbreak as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Therefore, the establishment of treatment guidelines and medication has been widely distributed which include vaccinations based on smallpox and supportive treatments. Most importantly, there are apparent health care disparities in vaccine distribution and treatment which disadvantage Black and Latinx populations, in addition to LGBTQIA+ youth. This review characterizes the human mpox infection and analyzes the impact of mpox in the state of Ohio, with a special focus on tackling the disparities that are disproportionately affecting certain groups
Median-Joining Networks and Bayesian Phylogenies Often Do Not Tell the Same Story
No full textInferring phylogenies among intraspecific individuals often yields unresolved relationships (i.e., polytomies). Consequently, methods that compute distance-based abstract networks, like Median-Joining Networks (MJNs), are thought to be more appropriate tools for reconstructing such relationships than traditional trees. Median-Joining Networks visualize all routes of relationships in the form of cycles, if needed, when traditional approaches cannot resolve them. However, the MJN method is a distance-based phenetic approach that does not involve character transformations and makes no reference to ancestor–descendant relationships. Although philosophical and theoretical arguments challenging the implication that MJNs reflect phylogenetic signal in the traditional sense have been presented elsewhere, an empirical comparison with a character-based approach is needed given the increasing popularity of MJN analysis in evolutionary biology. Here, we use the conservative Approximately Unbiased (AU) test to compare 85 cases of branching patterns of cycle-free MJNs and Bayesian Inference (BI) phylogenies using datasets from 55 empirical studies. By rooting the MJN analyses to provide directionality, we report substantial disagreement between computed MJNs and posterior distributions on BI phylogenies. The branching patterns in MJNs and BI phylogenies show significantly different relationships in 37.6% of cases. Among the relationships that do not significantly differ, 96.2% show alternative sets of relationships. Our results indicate that the two methods provide different measures of relatedness in a phylogenetic sense. Finally, our analyses also support previous observations of the statistical hypothesis testing by reconfirming the over-conservativeness of the Shimodaira-Hasegawa test versus the AU test
Bed/Life: Chronic Illness, Postcolonial Entanglements, and Queer Intimacy in the Stay
No full textIn the conceptual sculpture titled, I Think We’re Alone Now (Host), Constantina Zavitsanos presents the bed as a site of desire, intimacy, and horizon for the sick/disabled queer body, bringing a multitude of meanings to the notion of “host.” This paper engages this artwork considering the politics and poetics of hosting and “the stay” as queer intimacies are formed in and with bodies—both in the chronicity of pathogenic presence effected through transnational flows of medical coloniality; and as an anti-colonial practice of disalienation, hospitality, and invitation into the erotic and social life lived in the space of the bed. I approach this work of disability scholarship through a feminist understanding that chronic illness is a condition of global entanglement within the colonial and postcolonial milieu of racial capitalism, its afterlives, and its historical traumas. To host challenges the notion that to be chronically sick and bedbound is an existence delimited by isolation and social death produced in the bedbound subject as one denied full entry into the western, liberal, public-political articulation of the human. I reflect on what it means to be a queer, brown, sick/disabled body and turn toward the possibilities of the bed as a material spacetime and hermeneutic for alternative expressions of aliveness through stillness and immobility as the entanglements of our histories and medical conditions also open space for our entangled practices of countermemory and ontological disobedience: how we refuse to be colonized objects of ruin. As settler colonial framings of illness evoke an always-already racialized diagnostic apparatus through which surveillance, impugnment, negation, and alienation are deployed via the medical industrial complex and the medical gaze as a subjugating mode of relation, bedlife is a vital counterpoint to this violence, a portal to crip fugitivity, existential and political affirmation, and connection. Finally, through encountering different artworks, this essay explores the linkages between intimacy and future-making, collapsing the space between queer desire for each other and one another’s bodies, and the particularly queer politics of desire for a world unbound by oppressive structures and the limitations of imposed binaries. Against what disability scholars Eli Clare and Eunjung Kim, among others, have critiqued as the hegemonic imperative toward cure, which seeks to get us out of bed and into capitalism’s racist and ableist coercive temporalities, this paper looks to the bed as a heuristic and material site for a radical politics of feminist carework, queer desire, crip time, and decolonial worldmaking. What it is to want — in all its senses, suggests there is a relevant kind of intimacy between what we are denied as sick and disabled queers in a heterosexist society founded on racial capitalism and colonial regimes of body, self and other—and how we share closeness, cultivating desire for each other and other possible worlds
Abnormal Abilities: Black Women and the Production of Able-Bodied Normalcy in Thylias Moss’s Slave Moth
No full textThis article offers an alternative genealogy for disability accounts of normalcy by analyzing American poet Thylias Moss’s 2004 neo-slave narrative in verse, Slave Moth. While disability scholars have historically understood normalcy and able-bodiedness as synonymous, ability is not always normative for Black women. Although Slave Moth’s narrator Varl is putatively able-minded, her enslaver positions her as abnormal because she is literate. Drawing on Black feminist thought, I argue that normalcy describes multiple, seemingly contradictory, measures that operate through racialized standards of proper capacity. Moss illuminates how Black women and girls might inhabit a position of abnormality-ability because she situates abnormality within chattel slavery, making freak shows peripheral to the narrative. The anti-black formation of abnormality-ability mediates the boundaries of ability/disability and normal/abnormal. I address how this occurs in disability scholarship. Research on normalcy and the freak show has argued for the importance of disability as an analytic by relying on blackness as a fungible site of meaning. Ultimately, able-bodiedness becomes normative for white subjects, and disability abnormal, through their frictional relationship to and reliance on Black women’s abnormality-ability. However, Varl illuminates, critiques, and refuses this weaponization of abnormality. Through her embroidery, Varl develops technologies for living in the fissures of both abnormality and able-bodiedness
“Yanqui-man Put Roots on Her”: Afro-Religiosity and (Dis)abilities in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints
No full textThis essay analyzes (dis)ability at the intersection of colonialism, afro-religiosity, and literary studies to reassess illness and (dis)ability under histories of racialization. I approach Nelly Rosario’s novel Song of the Water Saints (2002) as a “texto montado” (possessed text), following Lorgia García Peña (2016), to suggest an alternative reading of (dis)ability in diasporic texts, particularly in relation to Afro-religiosity and colonial violence. By bringing together the history of colonial erasure of Afro-religiosity and violence against Black and poor women, this essay examines the stages of syphilis on the protagonist’s, Graciela, body and life alongside the material impacts of U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924). If readers are to take the story of Graciela’s life as one of the erased and unrecorded narratives in the colonial archives, how do we make sense of the otherworldly ontology accessed through (dis)abilities offered toward the end of Graciela’s life? Rosario’s novel is a practice of truth-telling and a resistance against the erasure of Dominican women’s stories of violence and power. Finally, this essay demonstrates the possibilities of bringing together Afro-religious ontologies and disability studies to expand our understanding of (dis)ability as a condition of becoming imbricated within colonial and imperial history
Presenting the SWTC: A Symbolic Corpus of Themes from John Williams’ Star Wars Episodes I-IX
No full textThis paper presents a new symbolic corpus of musical themes from the complete Star Wars trilogies (Episodes I-IX) by John Williams. The corpus files are made available in multiple formats (.krn, .sib., and .musicxml) and include melodic, harmonic, and formal information. The Star Wars Thematic Corpus (SWTC) contains a total of 64 distinctive, recurring, and symbolically meaningful themes and motifs, commonly referred to as leitmotifs. Through this corpus we also introduce a new humdrum standard for non-functional harmony encodings, **harte (Harte et al., 2005; Harte, 2010). This report details the motivation, describes the transcription and encoding processes, and provides some brief summary statistics. While relatively small in scale, the SWTC represents a unified collection from one of the most prolific and influential composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, and the under-studied subset of film and multimedia musical material in general. We hope the SWTC will provide insights into John Williams’ compositional style, as well as prove useful in comparisons against other thematic corpora from film and beyond