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Rural Women Redefining Care and Agency in the Argentine Pampas
No full textThis article provides an ethnographic analysis of the agency of women who reside in the rural areas of the Argentine Pampas, based on their promotion and production of agroecological family horticulture. The recognition of these women’s agency through care – care of their children, global care, and green care – offers a significant challenge to some metrocentric and Eurocentric feminist perspectives that claim care work can only be oppressive for women. The first of these types of care empowers women to improve the nutrition of their children. It also relates to another underlying type of care, which is to provide a sufficiently robust education as to ensure their children have a better and alternative future. The second type of care has the power to socially transform the territorial space of the district’s countryside and its marginalized populations which, through care, acquire greater public and political attention. The third type of care empowers women to transform and care for the environment, and is exercised by not using pesticides in horticultural production and by disseminating knowledge on the matter. In line with discussions of postcolonial feminism (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Mahmood, 2001; Suárez Navaz, 2008), I argue that certain properties that are attributed to women relative to caregiving – by way of a dichotomous view of gender relations – fuel their agency: for these women the cultivation of vegetables is a form of agency that actively combats food, training and labor inequality
Patron of the Past: Philemon Holland\u27s Translation of Pliny\u27s Natural History
No full textThis essay provided a rare opportunity for an undergraduate history student—doing hands-on research with a copy of a seventeenth-century book held in the Brock University\u27s Special Collections. The essay provides a "way in" to understanding early English book culture. It explores that culture through an investigation of Philemon Holland’s 1635 translation of Pliny’s Natural History
Not Naïve Natives, but Poor Treaty Implementation: The Politics of Treaty Signing in Nineteenth-Century Canada
No full textThis essay is about the role that the Canadian government has played in treaty-making with the Indigenous population since 1871. The scope of this paper is a closer examination of Treaties 4, 6, and 7 of the 11 numbered Treaties signed by various Indigenous groups and the Canadian government from 1871-1921. This essay uses an interesting combination of primary and secondary sources to best analyse the negotiations and outcomes of these treaties. Primary sources from authors like Alexander Morris and the Treaty 7 Elders help the reader grasp the argument of Indigenous people, while secondary interpretations from modern-day historians like St. Germain and Tobias explain how treaty debates may have been misinterpreted in the past. This paper investigates all of the hardships that Indigenous people have faced and scrutinizes the false promises the Canadian government has made because of Treaties 4, 6, and 7. Most of all, this essay is a call to action. The goal of this essay is to spread awareness of issues that Indigenous people have faced in the past so that Canadians might better understand their struggles. Many Canadians are still completely unaware of Indigenous issues like the ones discussed in this essay, which remain largely unresolved and affect Indigenous groups to this day
Introduction: Medical Posthumanities - Reassessing and Reimagining the Human
No full textn/a - editorial 
Reimagining Medical Encounters and Intimacies: The slip of the tongue, the motif of the worm
No full textThis creative-critical essay reflects on the moving image artwork O (Symptom) (O. Turner, 2021), its recurring motif of the worm, and the artist’s lived experience of chronic illness to bring focused attention and critical study to the ways women’s bodies are treated, (mis)understood, and visualised within medicine. The medical and pharmaceutical interventions performed on and between human and animal bodies, implicate the social, economic, and patriarchal structures of power and influence. The external bodies, hands, organs, and instruments acting on the medicalised body, evoke the parasitical and pathological nature of the worm. To be a lover and a parasite is to unravel experiences of pain, pleasure, and abjection experienced in the clinical encounter. O (Symptom) calls for an alternative corporeal language that speaks beyond the paternalistic and patriarchal clinical tongue to reimagine language, experience, and care
In conversation with Renee Hess of Black Girl Hockey Club
No full textRenee Hess founded Black Girl Hockey Club in 2018 as a way to create a sense of community of Black women who identify as hockey fans. She currently works as the organization’s Executive Director and collaborates with its many committees organizing social, educational, and advocacy activities all centered around anti-racism. Outside of this role, Hess holds a Master’s degree in Literature and works as the Associate Director of Service Learning at La Sierra University in California. This text is a transcript and related commentary on Black Girl Hockey Club written by sociologist Kristi Allain based on her conversation with Hess about the importance of leaning into discomfort around committing to change, inauthentic displays of solidarity and progress, and the importance for Black women to feel a sense of joy and community among other like-minded folks when participating in hockey
“It’s still Cleveland baseball”: Exploring the media response to the Cleveland Guardians rebrand
No full textIn the summer of 2021, Cleveland’s Major League Baseball franchise announced the rebranding of the club’s nickname from the decades-long controversial “Indians” to the” Guardians.” The long-standing use of Native American imagery in sport has long been the source of contention, and for this reason, the Cleveland Guardians have continually been in the public eye prior to their rebrand. This article examines both the organization’s rebranding efforts and media coverage surrounding the team’s new identity. Guided by the theory of framing, this study applies themes of sports rebranding to analyze the team’s announcement video and sequentially deploys an inductive approach to identify the media frames present following the rebranding. Three sports rebrand frames were identified from the Cleveland Guardians’ announcement: regional pride, nostalgia, and rebirth. The media response looked at 79 articles and found two higher-order frames - broader movements and branding commentary – with six subcategories. In total, these frames indicated that rebranding efforts sought to center the new identity around the city of Cleveland while deemphasizing damages from the use of derogatory racial Native American imagery. The media response also shows that the rebrand is contextualized through broader movements and is politically contentious. Future directions of framing theory in sports rebranding and the discourse around the use and removal of racial imagery in sports is discussed
The Strategies Sport Fans Used to Cope with the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown of Sporting Events
No full textWhen the COVID-19 pandemic shut down occurred, virtually all sports leagues—from recreational sports to professional leagues—were paused or canceled. This left a gap for fans of those sports to fill. The purpose of the present research study was threefold: 1) to examine what strategies sport fans used to cope with the loss of the live sport viewership/spectatorship; 2) determine how effective fans believed those coping mechanisms to be; and 3) examine fans’ behavioral intentions once sports were allowed to resume. Participants were recruited via a snowball sample and the Amazon MTurk platform. A total of 384 sport fans responded to the survey. While not all participants responded to all items, 168 indicated coping mechanisms for dealing with not watching sports and 219 reported coping mechanisms for not attending sports. The most common coping mechanism was watching old sporting events on television or via the internet. These mechanisms were reported to be very effective in helping participants cope with the loss of sports (M = 5.76, SD = 1.68 on a 1 to 8 scale). These findings provide support for the Team Identification – Social Psychological Health Model and suggest areas for interventions for sport marketers who are looking to maintain fans’ loyalty during future shutdowns of sport seasons, or other instances of missed sporting events
Thinking Beyond the Present: Advocating Continuity of Practice of Emergency Remote Teaching in Higher Education Institutions in Nigeria
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic led to the disruption of education systems and the closure of schools all over the world. To ensure that teaching and learning continued during the pandemic, Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in Nigeria adopted Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) and moved classes to online and distance education platforms. The expectation is that ERT will be an alternative to face-to-face teaching methods, which were the norm before the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we argue in favour of HEIs continuing to utilize ERT rather than leaving remote teaching by both lecturers and students untapped. We will also provide justifications to support this ongoing use of ERT. We suggest that institutions should embrace a blended learning approach. This involves implementing an ERT contingency plan for potential future crises, integrating ERT as a mandatory component of academic staff professional development, enhancing the skills and readiness of academic and support staff for ERT, and formulating a strategy to address the challenges associated with ERT. We conclude that ERT presents a promising pedagogical approach that has the potential to bring about positive transformations in Nigerian higher education institutions
Devi postfacière de Tchak : les origines d’un malaise littéraire
No full textLiterary accomplice of Sami Tchak for more than fifteen years, Ananda Devi wrote a Postface to the book Les fables du moineau by the Togolese author, published in Seuil in 2020. This short text is located in the series of resonances between the work of the Togolese and the Mauritian, and announced in particular in the short stories that the two writers inserted in the collective work Paris, Lumières étrangères, published two years earlier. This article will start from the notion of afterword, as defined by Gérard Genette, to then make an analysis of this story which highlights Devi’s inner conflict: encouraged by Tchak to live the life of her characters, she stages herself in this fictional story and undergoes a mystical experience with a fatal outcome. These events are set in Naples at night during a volcanic eruption. Parallelisms, both formal and content-wise, will be established with Gérard de Nerval\u27s short story Octavie, in which the hero (Nerval himself) experiences the same sensations in the Campanian capital. At the centre of our concerns is Ananda Devi\u27s desire to get rid of a form of writing, almost stereotyped, which distinguishes her and which continues to haunt her.Complice littéraire de Sami Tchak depuis une bonne quinzaine d’années, Ananda Devi a rédigé une postface à l’ouvrage Les fables du moineau de l’auteur togolais, paru au Seuil en 2020. Ce court texte se situe dans la suite de résonances entre l’œuvre du Togolais et de la Mauricienne, et est présagé en particulier dans les nouvelles que les deux écrivains ont insérées dans l’ouvrage collectif Paris, lumières étrangères, publié deux ans plus tôt (2018). Cet article part de la notion de postface, telle que définie par Gérard Genette, pour ensuite faire une analyse de ce récit qui met en valeur le conflit intérieur qui existe chez Devi : encouragée par Tchak de vivre la vie de ses personnages, elle se met en scène dans cette histoire fictive et subit une expérience mystique à l’issue fatale. Ces événements sont situés durant une nuit à Naples pendant une éruption volcanique. Des parallélismes, aussi bien formels qu’au niveau du contenu, seront établis avec la nouvelle « Octavie » de Gérard de Nerval, dans laquelle le héros (Nerval lui-même) éprouve les mêmes sensations dans la capitale campanienne. Au centre de mes préoccupations se trouve la volonté d’Ananda Devi de se défaire d’une forme d’écriture, presque stéréotypée, qui la distingue et qui continue de la hanter