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Was Dionysus a Music Therapist? Therapeutic Musical Ecstasy in the Ancient Greco-Roman World
No full textIn the Ancient Greco-Roman world, Dionysus was the deity to call upon for all things relating to intoxication, ritual madness, and religious ecstasy. Living firmly in the realm of festivity and celebration, he appears to be a one-dimensional pleasure deity. But what if Dionysus was more than simply the god of parties? I propose the potential therapeutic value of Dionysian (ecstatic) music by applying both ancient and modern interpretations to close readings of Ancient Greco-Roman mythological texts. In section one, I define Dionysian music against its more demonstrably therapeutic Apollonian counterpart, drawing from a variety of Ancient writers including Homer, Euripides, and Ovid. While this section emphasizes negative psychological effects of Dionysian music, section two argues that the mythical hero-musician, Orpheus, links Apollo to Dionysus and thus suggests the therapeutic potential of Dionysian music. I further this argument in section three through a discussion of how Dionysian music can be interpreted by Plato, Aristotle, and modern psychologists as therapeutic due to its ability to both express and regulate emotions. I conclude that although Dionysus does not belong amongst modern music therapists, his presence is certainly at home in modern theories of music therapy. 
Anarchy In Southeast Asia
No full textClaudia C. Lodia is a lecturer in the Department of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She was born and raised in Manila, Philippines. As a queer lesbian Pinay, her research interests lie at the intersections of queer theory, Asian diaspora studies, critical race theory, and activist ethnography. Broadly, her research explores the connections, aspirations, and ruptures between and among themes and ideas in these diverse fields. Before joining the Department of Asian American Studies, Claudia held a Teaching Fellowship and a Writing Fellowship at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she also received her PhD in Anthropology and Social Change. As part of her on-going activism Claudia has co-organized and facilitated talks on queer Asian diasporic experiences and non-state spaces, contributed commentaries to Io, an international feminist collective based in the Philippines, and participated in activist forums that highlight the role and urgency of co-creating an interdisciplinary social science practice. She has contributed articles and reviews to the Journal of Contemporary Asia, Inter-disciplinary.net, and Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. More recently, she participated as a fellow at the 2023 Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) Summer Seminar held at the New School for Social Research, New York. She has also begun a collaborative research project that explores the queer outside, a conceptualization inspired by the work of Fred Moten
Kathy Ferguson, Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023
No full textMigrant Childhoods and Temporalities in India: A Reflective Engagement with Dominant Discourses
No full textTemporality is recognized as critical to the understanding of childhoods by contemporary scholars of childhood. This paper explores the varying temporalities through which marginal childhoods (and their educational inclusion), particularly those situated in contexts of temporary internal migration, are constructed in the Indian context. Drawing on ethnographic data from the city of Bangalore, this paper problematizes how dominant ideals around migration, childhood, and schooling frame migrant children’s lives through linear temporalities. Furthermore, the paper argues that policy interventions that ostensibly include migrant childhoods do not engage critically with the politics of linear temporality which, in turn, is central to the exclusionary dynamics of migrant children’s schooling
Domestic Workers in the Arabian Gulf: Precarity, reality, and resistance
No full textThis paper’s aim is to further the literature on the global Migrant Domestic Workers (MDWs) social movement aimed at denouncing their exploitation and asserting the value of their labour as an irreplaceable contribution to the functioning of society. The Gulf region has been largely absent in this literature. This article argues that this exclusion from the migrant-led domestic care mobilisation in no way implies that MDWs have made no efforts in Gulf states to improve their labour conditions, but that the context in which they are employed make it such that they are unable to organise together due to the stern policing and isolating norms that prevail. Instead, their resistance is predominantly situated within the confines they are subjected to, resulting in what has been called “everyday resistance.” Drawing on relevant secondary literature on the systemic precarity experienced by domestic workers in the Gulf region and feminist scholarship on MDWs micro-level, everyday assertions, this article argues that the confined living situations under the Kafala labour system set the terms and conditions for how MDWs political resistance can be - and is - expressed.1 By focusing on a global social movement premised on outward expressions of protest, the existing literature’s omission of micro-level acts of resistance results in MDWs in certain contexts being overlooked as agents of social activism in their own right. This article contextualizes the strategies of resistance made by MDWs in the Gulf region by first examining the systemic and gendered control under the Kafala system. It then argues that the inclusion of everyday resistance allows for a more holistic vision of MDWs assertions of labour rights consciousness and ultimately of justice, one that includes a defensive protection of personal dignity and notions of selfhood
Picturing Modernism: Architecture, Lifestyle, and the “Embodied Image”
No full textHow do architectural images influence our physical experiences of a building or site? Why do some architectural images become iconic, while others fail to resonate? In this essay, I focus on the iconic photograph of the now-famous Stahl House (Case Study House #22) and consider how the image impacts our engagement with the architecture through conscious and non-conscious processes. I analyze the photograph through three different lenses: first, in its context within the greater field of architectural photography; second, as an iconic photograph and its influence on lifestyle and architectural tourism; and finally, through an emerging field of research in the cognitive neurosciences related to the embodied simulation of images. Through these three lenses, I argue that the image works on different levels of embodiment, as a result of the interplay between the published photograph and the built structure. Because this Case Study House was essentially built to be photographed, I contend that the built form serves as a supplement to the published photograph, which ultimately influences our engagement with the actual site. In this essay, I consider the roots of the photograph’s iconic status, its role in perpetuating the legacy of its subject, and what this might reveal about our aesthetic and architectural beliefs and experiences. I apply recent research from the cognitive neurosciences to explore how we respond to architectural photographs in general, and the iconic image in particular. I conclude that the two- and threedimensional realms work in concert to influence our engagement and embodied experience of architecture
