2045 research outputs found
Sort by
The Cost of Freedom: Revolutionary Hopes & Realities Among Young Tunisians A Decade Post-Arab Spring
Full text linkThe Arab Spring of 2011 was an incredible tale of desperation, defiance, and vast political transformations—of civil society across North Africa and the Middle East revolting against dictatorship, corruption, and demanding democracy and freedom. Tunisia gained widespread international attention following the revolutions as the sole country to attain democracy. However, many Western scholars and news reports have dismissed Tunisia’s triumph as a lucky break and lauded its attainment of democracy and, especially, its newfound freedom of expression. Such a focus on “Tunisian exceptionalism,” however, ignores the nuanced consequences that have accompanied the country’s vast political transformation.
Situated a decade post-Arab Spring in Tunisia, this research explores the impact of the Revolution and democracy on one particular facet of society: freedom. The concept of freedom is a complex, charged, and fluid one. This paper seeks to unpack it through three main strands: its acquisition, performance and manifestation, and costs, through the lived experiences of young Tunisian artists. This was the demographic central to catalyzing, and subsequently, benefitting from what is considered the Revolution’s sole gain: freedom of expression. This study is a primarily ethnographic one that consists of interviews and case studies from one performance arts space in urban Tunis. In discussing freedom and its nuanced expressions through lived realities, this study finds that there is much left to be desired in civil society today and implores a critical analysis of the framing structures of Western neoliberal democracy and postcolonialism that haunt the country
Richard\u27s Bones: Inside the Body of Richard III and the Twenty-First Century Discovery of a Medieval King
Full text linkOne does not simply find the long-lost bones of a fifteenth century monarch on the very first day in the very first trench of an archeological excavation, unless those bones belong to England\u27s Richard III. Richard III, a monarch with a much-debated legacy, remains an enigma in part due to a scarcity of contemporary sources on his life. With the discovery of his remains in a parking lot in Leicester, England, scientific analysis of Richard\u27s bones and the location of their burial provides new insights into his life and death, such as providing new information on the manner of his death and burial from the location within the choir and the position of the skeleton within the grave. Archeology offers the tools and opportunities to reexamine historical figures and complicate our interactions with their stories. Science changes our interactions with historical sources, confirming what we already knew from some accounts, and refuting others – clearly Richard\u27s bone remained buried, rather than ending up thrown in the river. Written accounts tell us of the feasts Richard III ate upon his ascension, while the composition of his bones illuminate the types of food he ate, and how that represented a shift from his earlier diet. The lived experiences of Richard III are available to us through how they effected his body, and. DNA analysis and facial reconstruction help identify how accurate posthumous artistic renderings such as portraits may be, as well as providing an opportunity to examine the contemporary impact of the stories surrounding Richard. The question then, is: can bones change history? Richard III\u27s mortal remains provide an opportunity to consider conceptions of his body during his life and directly after his death
Turner, Anita Skinner. 1999. “An Oral Narrative Recorded by Courtney Reid.” West Side Oral Narrative Project: Transcribing Discourse and Diversity in Saratoga Springs, New York, Annotated Transcript No. 2, March 15, 2021
Full text linkAnita Skinner Turner (1937- ) was born and raised in Saratoga Springs. She shares memories of Black residents and business owners in the Congress Street area, which she calls “Little Harlem.” Anita recalls as a child observing a lively neighborhood from the screened porch of her grandmother’s business, Mrs. Georgia Jackson’s Boarding House. Anita’s grandmother rented rooms to wait staff, racetrack workers, chambermaids, housekeepers, and other local workers. She recalls the twenty-four-hour entertainment district that included Jack’s Harlem Club, Hattie’s Chicken Shack, and other places displaced by Urban Renewal in the 1960s. She remembers entertainers too, including Duke Ellington, Peg Leg Bates, and Phil Black, and she reminisces about the Black Elks Ball that attracted many visitors every August. She also reflects on her family history, including regular train travel from New York City, moving to Saratoga Springs, and her surprise at learning that her mother had been adopted. [Interview duration: 59:30 min
A Kindler, Gentler Time : How Pleasantville and The Truman Show Fix the 1950s Suburban Ideal
Full text linkThe Truman Show and Pleasantville both present a vision of the 1950s that is manufactured and mediated by television. I attempt to explain this using Lauren Berlant\u27s model of the pilgrimage narrative, in which a character encounters true America in Washington, DC. Instead of locating America in the nation’s capital, though, I argue that these films locate America in the idealized suburbs of the 1950s. I propose that this pilgrimage differs from the one Berlant outlines in one crucial way: the capital can be visited at any time, but if America is really located in 1950s suburbia, then citizens of the 1990s have missed the boat on encountering the nation. The anxiety that “real” America may be a relic of the past may help explain why both these movies’ versions of the 1950s have to be constructed by television.
Both films associate the 1950s with the camera of the television show, which they depict as manipulable and unreliable. In contrast, they associate the perspective of the 1990s with the seemingly objective camera of the film itself. The television shows in both movies construct a version of the 1950s that is “fixed” by 1990s values, erasing or repairing the racism and sexism associated with the decade. At the same time, though, in refusing to allow women to partake or succeed in pilgrimages, and in excluding people of color from meaningful roles in the narrative, both films ultimately advance the argument that the only people equipped to successfully encounter the nation are white men
Finding Tomahna: Myst as 1990s Time Capsule and Community
No full textThe original Myst took the 1990’s by storm, quickly becoming the best-selling games in the world after its initial release in 1993. Many gamers and reviewers look back now, accustomed to lightning-fast loading speeds and razor-sharp graphics, ask why? I believe that Myst was able to find such wild popularity because it was a relevant reflection of its time period. In all of its oddity and solitude, Myst is an excellent representation of the feelings of American adults in the 1990’s. This thesis examines Myst as a product of wartime, new technology, and of community
Proline Omega Angle Cis-Trans Isomerization in ArkA12 Using Enhanced Molecular Dynamics
No full textArkA12 is a proline rich intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) region within a larger, more structured, non-tyrosine kinase (ArkA). The disordered region binds to the AbpSH3 domain due to the domain’s high affinity towards PxxP motifs within the substrate. SH3 domains are numerous in the human genome and are largely responsible for cytoskeleton regulation, signal transduction, and gene expression. A binding mechanism for ArkA12 and AbpSH3 has only recently been elucidated via atomistic computer simulations: depicting ArkA12 in a predominately polyproline II helical structure in the fully bound state, with all five prolines in the trans conformation and no isomerization. The structure of the proline side chain allows peptide bonds to sample between the cis and trans states more readily than the other common amino acids. It is difficult to capture the peptide bond isomerization utilizing classical experimental and computational methods due to the characteristic rapid conformational switching in IDPs, as well as the proline isomerization rates occurring on the order of seconds, making it improbable to detect with the current technology. Multiple proteins have evolved to use proline isomerization as a “switch” for processes requiring quick turnaround times such as gene regulation.
Current experimental circular dichroism data of ArkA12 suggests that the in vitro ensemble may be composed, in part, of structures that contain prolines in cis; reinforcing the need to represent this kind of sampling in the computational data to ensure that the computational ensemble is complete, increasing the likelihood of the data accurately complimenting experimental results. There is currently no data in the literature that has observed proline peptide bond isomerization in proteins of lengths larger than ~5 residues, even with enhanced methods. Computational methods that were able to capture the cis conformation used programs that relied heavily on statistical probability calculations which do not subject conformational ensembles to a primarily time-dependent simulation trajectory: complicating the ease and feasibility of comparing the data to experiments, as well as increasing the likelihood of observing wider deviations from the experiments. The same studies only used peptides containing a single proline or peptides with more than one proline with only one proline captured isomerizing. The largest hinderance to sufficient isomerization sampling is the time that the proline peptide bond requires to flip; this means that the free energy barrier between the cis and trans states may be programmed to be too large in the common molecular dynamics forcefield, thus highlighting the need to counteract the default forcefield effects to accelerate sampling.
The current work uses the gaussian accelerated molecular dynamics algorithm along with a modified peptide torsional angle barrier in the Amberff14SB force field to artificially lower the potential energy landscape to promote faster and more diverse structure sampling. Two microseconds of independent simulation data showed simultaneous cis-trans isomerization for all five prolines in ArkA12 starting from an extended structure. Calculating the theoretical circular dichroism spectrum of the computational ensemble and comparing it to the experimental spectrum can possibly be used to decide whether cis sampling occurs for ArkA12 in vitro, as well as confirm whether the sampling method yields a closer fit to the experiments compared to non-modified sampling methods. The results suggest that this gaussian accelerated-lower barrier computational method can be used to sample proline cis-trans isomerization for similar proline-rich IDPs at the nanosecond timescale without implicitly facilitating certain trajectory processes that may compromise the data’s relevancy to the experimental results
