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A Computational Profile Of Invasive Lionfish In Belize: A New Insight on a Destructive Species
Get PDFSince their discovery in the region in 2009, invasive Indonesian-native lionfish have been taking over the Belize Barrier Reef. As a result, populations of local species have dwindled as they are either eaten or outcompeted by the invaders. This has led to devastating losses ecologically and economically; massive industries in the local nations, such as fisheries and tourism, have suffered greatly. Attempting to combat this, local organizations, from nonprofits to ecotourism companies, have been manually spear-hunting them on scuba dives to cull the population. One such company, Reef Conservation Institute (ReefCI), operating out of Tom Owens Caye outside of Placencia, Belize, has dissected their caught lionfish for the past three years and kept logs of results. With little to no studies reliably indexing the Belizean lionfish population, this data set provides a priceless opportunity to take a first look and probe further questions about this relatively unstudied population. This project accomplished this by computing various population statistics using these records, including the differences in sex ratio, presence of supraorbital tentacles, length, age, and more. The results and combinations of these factors provide new insight on current theories surrounding lionfish and their anatomy, but more importantly it opens new questions, the answers to which can shed light on new techniques to more efficiently cull the population for the future
Trauma, Recovery, and Adolescent Relationships in Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower: An In-Depth Analysis
Get PDFThe development of adolescent identity after traumatic experiences is a fragile process. In this essay, I use Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) to explore how adolescent relationships influence the path to recovery after traumatic experiences. After losing both his friend and aunt, Charlie, the novel’s protagonist, begins to write letters, which form the basis of the book. Recounting his journey to recovery, these letters ultimately reveal that Charlie’s aunt molested him when he was a child—a memory that he represses for years. Despite the importance of writing as a way for Charlie to cope with this traumatic experience, the familial, peer, and romantic relationships (both positive and negative) he describes in his letters also play an integral role in helping him negotiate his trauma. Recovery is a social process, just as adolescent identity is not created in isolation, but rather in combination with surrounding individuals. Therefore, it is crucial not to lift shared responsibility from the shoulders of parents, peers, or caregivers. In this way, Charlie’s story provides an important reminder for adolescents, parents, and medical professionals alike about adolescent development and trauma recovery
Interview: Bethany McGowan and Matthew Hannah
Get PDFBethany McGowan is an associate professor in Libraries and School of Information Studies, specializing in health literacy education, and Matthew Hannah is an associate professor in Libraries and School of Information Studies, focusing on digital humanities and media studies. Recently, Professors McGowan and Hannah collaborated on a Diplomacy Lab course in which students helped to develop strategies for identifying misinformation and disinformation
CLCWeb Call for Papers: AI and/as Form
Get PDFWe are now several years into the growing interest in “generative AI” that followed the introduction of transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) and text-to-image generators (Stable Diffusion, DALL-E), and more than a year from the explosive public release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. This special issue of CLCWeb is about how theorists and analysts of culture are approaching formal questions in the context of technologies of machine learning and generative AI, and, also, conversely, about how to theorize AI’s forms.
We seek contributions to these debates that address the question of AI and/as form, with the term “form” encompassing, but not limited to, notions of: style, genre, medium, generated writing and visual “art,” forms of digital labor, material conditions of possibility, digitally enclosed linguistic and artistic commons, and the statistical and textual formalisms that are functionalized in the production of “content.” Recent issues and forums of journals like New Literary History, American Studies, and Critical Inquiry, among others, as well as several conferences in the field, have addressed AI and its critical contexts. This special issue of CLCWeb is aiming to build on some of those conversations through a direct engagement with matters pertaining to AI and form across the arts and humanities, seeking to investigate the ways that scholars are both engaging with and critiquing the mechanical production of art and language now — especially (though not necessarily exclusively) across plural and comparative cultural contexts.
Contributions are invited from scholars working in fields including literature, music, media studies, and the visual arts; comparative theory, critical AI studies, digital humanities, comparative literary studies, digital arts, and the information sciences and arts — all broadly construed; as well as adjacent and allied fields.
Abstracts could address the questions below and other issues:
• How to understand the form and affordances of AI? What does AI enable, how does it constrain, and what does it preclude?
• What are the key metaphors we need to think with or against generative AI? What kinds of cultural production and contestation do these tools enable or foreclose?
• How does AI interact with work on style, tone, genres, and aesthetics in the literary and visual arts? Which traditional habits of thinking about form does AI interrogate? And what new categories for describing form might AI facilitate?
• How might formalist readings resist the immediacy of “generated” artistic and literary thinking?
• How do literary and political formalisms relate to those digital formalisms that best describe AI?
• What happens to the epistemological and ontological status of the work of art, as the modes of mechanical reproduction extend to generative and remixed forms?
• What kinds of cultural production and contestation does the use of AI enable or preclude? How do they intersect with (post)humanist and (post)structuralist theories of language, mind, agency, and embodiment?
• How does the context of AI help scholars of literature and culture clarify or deconstruct binaries such as truth/falsity, mediation/immediacy, good-faith/bad-faith, explainable/black-boxed and authenticity/fakery?
• How, in the AI era, may scholars of form take up questions of pattern, structure, and repetition in visual, textual or sonic arts?
• What are the contours of emerging areas of AI aesthetics? What are the possible tactical/strategic uses of AI aesthetics, especially in the case of today’s generative AI?
• How should critics of genre, power, coloniality and gender address the era of AI? What are key informing discourses, epistemic frames and ideologies that AI makes (in)visible?
• In what extractive contexts and ecologies, and out of which labor régimes or industries, does AI emerge? What new forms of creative extraction does it enable?
• How might the form of writing change after generative AI? What new or traditional forms of scholarship (papers and books, multimodal transformations, machinic “translations”) are enabled or precluded by generative AI?
• What new forms of regulation, restriction, reuse and remixing does generative AI call for? How does it intersect with the forms and categories that constitute neoliberal capitalism? What new enclosures does it represent, and what kinds of commoning practices concerning the linguistic commons and otherwise, should be developed in response?
• How do comparative cultural contexts (across differences in language, power, access to technology, the degree of industrialization or post-industrialization of societies) problematize theories of AI and/as form?
• How does aesthetic, material, and theoretic form illuminate the ongoing generative AI revolution?
• How do we understand the ideological and material consequences of the autonomization of language? What models for investigating language are enable or disabled by generative AI?
• We invite original contributions in response to this theme with abstracts of 250 words, a 100 word bio note, and 5 keywords due by April 1st, 2024. Authors with selected abstracts will be notified by May 1st, 2024, and invited to submit full manuscripts of approximately 5000-10,000 words, critical reviews of 3000 words, or book reviews of 1000 words, for consideration for inclusion in the special issue due by October 1st, 2024, with an expected publication date around March 2025. For more information, inquiries, or to submit an abstract for our consideration and review, please contact the two editors of this special issue, Sayan Bhattacharyya and Gabriel Hankins, by email at [email protected] and [email protected] respectively. Please use the subject heading “CLCweb Special Issue on AI and Form” in any electronic communication or submission
Animal Assisted Play Therapy® for Childhood Animal Abuse Following Exposure to Family Violence: A Case Example
Get PDFIntentional harm to nonhuman animals in childhood often correlates with histories of witnessing, experiencing, or perpetrating violence. Without appropriate intervention, children and adolescents who abuse animals following exposure to family violence risk long-term behavioral health challenges. While some treatment models have been specifically designed to reduce the risk of future violence among children displaying this behavior, interventions involving nonhuman animals represent a novel approach and show promise in addressing behavioral challenges associated with this behavior. Framed through the lens of a clinical case study, this article presents the potential benefits of implementing Animal Assisted Play Therapy® to treat symptoms of trauma and attachment challenges when harm to animals has occurred
Book Review: Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms
Get PDFBook Review Rodríguez, N.N., An, S., & Kim, E.J. (2024). Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms. New York: Routledge.
192 pp.
Pb. $23.96 ISBN-13: 978-103259715
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Knowledge Production in the Theory of Literature and Art in Contemporary China: From a Generations Perspective
Get PDFIn the field of theory of literature and art (i.e., the discipline of Wenyi xue) in contemporary China, the post-1930s and the post-1950s generations (scholars who were born between 1930 and 1939 and between 1950 and 1959, respectively) are the most influential ones. They are father and son generations both in a physiological and a sociocultural sense; both occupied or are still occupying important positions in Chinese academia. Their profound differences in life experiences, educational background, intellectual structures, cultural stances, and literary perspectives significantly affect their knowledge production in Chinese literary theory. This article attempts to use Karl Mannheim’s theory of generations to analyze the knowledge production in literary and art theory in contemporary China and to explore the sociohistorical reasons for the formation of the differences between the two generations of scholars. In order to demonstrate their differences in literary conceptions and cultural positions, by reviewing the “aesthetic ideological debates” that took place in the 1990s within the post-1930s generation, as well as the history of textbook compilation, this article explores how their views on the aesthetic properties and the autonomy of literature are a matter related to “generations.
Out of the Myths of “Revolutionary China”: Liu Kang versus Žižek & Badiou
Get PDFThe highlight of the 2011 special issue of Positions on Slavoj Žižek is the debate between Liu Kang and Žižek on “Revolutionary China.” It unpacks the Western left’s political unconsciousness and myths about China in several respects. First, revolution is not a parody-travesty of the “tradition” that Žižek concocts from romanticized fantasies of a “retrospective tradition” drawn from Jorge Luis Borges and T. S. Eliot. Second, revolution is not Alain Badiou’s “truth event,” which tends to reduce the Chinese Cultural Revolution to an abstract “event” in process, neglecting the real calamities of the so-called utopian experiment. Third, the key problematic of the debate is alternative modernity. Contrary to Žižek’s and Badiou’s rejection of alternative modernity, Liu argues that the Chinese search for alternative modernity ought to be understood in terms of complex and overdetermined historical contradictions. “Revolution” in contemporary China continues to command tremendous emotional, intellectual, and political power, rather than being a “symptom” of or “antidote” to the left’s depression. Finally, Žižek’s contemporary China fad showcases the performativity of an ex-Soviet bloc, PTSD victim’s communist nostalgia, with his radicalism completely hollowed out by Chinese academics. The China that truly exists, however, continues to challenge various myths manufactured by the Žižekians