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Forensic sense: sexual violence, medical professionals, and the senses
Get PDFSexual violence is a pervasive form of abuse. Understanding reactions to sexual abuse requires a critical historicization of medical responses to sexual abuse and the history of the emotions, specifically disgust and shame. This chapter historicizes ways of thinking about sexual harms in modern British and American contexts
‘Glimpses of the Wonderful’: the Jamaican origins of the aquarium and Victorian natural history
Get PDFThis paper addresses the well-known history of Victorian naturalist Philip Gosse’s popularization of the marine aquarium through a new lens: the period he spent in Jamaica during the 1840s. Firstly, it reveals the importance of African-Caribbean collectors and naturalists to Gosse’s natural history practise and shows the impact of racialized ethnographic perspectives on Victorian natural knowledge. Secondly, it argues that Gosse’s observations of marine biology in Jamaica were significant for his developing ideas about examining and displaying sea creatures, and informed his designs for British aquaria. Understanding Gosse’s aquatic displays as archives of living bodies, this article sets Gosse’s contribution to Victorian aesthetic, museological and technological developments in the context of his natural history work in Jamaica
Introduction to the special issue on institutions and culture in economic contexts
Get PDFThe need of further research on the interlink between culture and institutions have been strongly advocated by economists and institutionalists alike. However, bringing together culture and institutions within an organic framework, though, is a non-trivial operation. This is due to the complexity of the synergies between cultural aspects and institutional devices. This special issue attempts to start filling this gap and to build an ad-hoc systemic platform for disseminating such a debate. To this purpose, it brings together an organic collection of contributions in well-established conceptualisations of both culture and institutions, supported by robust and consistent methodological applications. The essays presented in this work provide consistent evidence and conceptual perspectives supporting the idea that the synergies between cultural and institutional aspects are of paramount importance to understand human behaviour, individuals’ choices and societies’ patterns. They also improve the theoretical, empirical and methodological understanding of the role of institutions and culture in different geopolitical and socio-economic realms. By doing so, these contributions place this special issue as prelude to further research on the co-evolution of culture and institutions and on its possible implications on different societal aspects, human development, and well-being
The politics of anti-discourse: Copypasta, the Alt-Right, and the rhetoric of form
Get PDFThis essay examines the reactionary turn in digital culture through the copypasta, a meaningless block of text shared on message boards and recognizable only to the already-initiated. Although rarely studied, the copypasta is an archetype of contemporary digital culture. As a form, it refuses representational content and coordinates affect, holding a position against the stream of digital content. I argue that digital form—rather than representational content—carries potent ideological and affective charge. Building on an analysis of the copypastas on 4chan’s infamous /pol/ board, I suggest scholars resuscitate the rhetorical canon of dispositio, or arrangement, for the computational age
Modes of governance and the everyday lives of illicit drug producers in Afghanistan
Get PDFPrevailing studies on illicit drug economies in violent contexts are typically concerned with whether illicit drugs are a driver of insecurity, or vice versa. This paper provides additional nuance to the literature by considering the interaction between different governance arrangements with the everyday life of people involved in the drug economy. Drawing from a systems-lifeworlds approach, we present evidence from interviews and life histories collected in four district case studies in two borderland provinces of Afghanistan. We find that governance in government-controlled areas tends to be more fragmented, negatively affecting the livelihoods of small-scale drug producers and traders. However, we also find exceptions to this trend, where stable governance arrangements emerged under state control. While authority tends to be less fragmented in Taliban-controlled districts, illicit drug producers fared much worse under Daesh-rule, showing stark variation in the effects of insurgency rule on the drug economy. Contrary to prevailing assumptions that participants in the illicit drug economies thrive in ungoverned environments, our findings show that there is considerable, if selective, demand for predictable rule-based political authority, albeit pragmatic enough to allow an open-access illicit drug economy to operate
Mutable bodies: abstraction and modern dance in 1960s Argentina
Get PDFIn this paper I argue that the development of modern dance in Argentina in the 1960s involved both the deconstruction of classical gesture and figuration and an arguably more-than-human abstraction and redeployment of the moving body. The little-researched corpus of choreographies by Argentine dancer and choreographer Ana Kamien is one of the most striking examples of this process. It embodies and performs the dissolution of antinomial oppositions between nature and culture, body and form, figuration and abstraction. In the 16mm film entitled ‘Ana Kamien’ (dir. Marcelo Epstein, 1970), considered to be the first work of video dance or film dance in the country, Kamien dances to a poem that evokes the affective and anatomical world of humans as a topography of mountains, ridges, and seas. Moreover, she progressively renounces both the human face and balletic form to become an increasingly abstracted biomorphic being. On the basis of archival documentation and first-hand accounts by Kamien, I situate her choreographic practice in dialogue with the work of other avant-garde dancers at the time, Pop variété performances at the Di Tella Institute in the 1960s, and the later development of system aesthetics in Argentina’s Centre for Art and Communication (CAYC). Furthermore, I analyse and interrogate Kamien’s description of her choreographic practice as being part of a collective attempt to abstract the female body, at a time when the women’s liberation movement was on the rise – only later to be heavily repressed by the military government of Gral. Juan Carlos Onganía (1966-1973). The seemingly paradoxical question of whether the dancing body can be abstracted leads me to propose an expanded conceptualization of abstraction in the visual and live arts, which takes into account both feminist and more-than-human embodied conceptions of abstraction
The precision of the human hand: variability in pinch strength and manual dexterity
Get PDFChanges in hand morphology throughout human evolution have facilitated the use of forceful pad-to-pad precision grips, contributing to the development of fine motor movement and dexterous manipulation typical of modern humans. Today, variation in human hand function may be affected by demographic and/or lifestyle factors, but these remain largely unexplored. We measured pinch grip strength and dexterity in a heterogeneous cross-sectional sample of human participants (n = 556) to test for the potential effects of sex, age, hand asymmetries, hand morphology, and frequently practiced manual activities across the lifespan. We found a significant effect of sex on pinch strength, dexterity, and different directional asymmetries, with the practice of manual musical instruments, significantly increasing female dexterity for both hands. Males and females with wider hands were also stronger, but not more precise, than those with longer hands, while the thumb-index ratio had no effect. Hand dominance asymmetry further had a significant effect on dexterity but not on pinch strength. These results indicate that different patterns of hand asymmetries and hand function are influenced in part by life experiences, improving our understanding of the link between hand form and function and offering a referential context for interpreting the evolution of human dexterity. View Full-Tex
Global Byzantium: papers from the fiftieth spring symposium of Byzantine studies
No full textBook synopsis: Global Byzantium is, in part, a recasting and expansion of the old ‘Byzantium and its neighbours’ theme with, however, a methodological twist away from the resolutely political and toward the cultural and economic. A second thing that Global Byzantium – as a concept – explicitly endorses is comparative methodology. Global Byzantium needs also to address three further issues: cultural capital, the importance of the local, and the Empire’s strategic geographical location. Cultural capital: in past decades it was fashionable to define Byzantium as culturally superior to western Christian Europe, and Byzantine influence was a key concept, especially in art historical circles. This concept has been increasingly criticised, and what we now see emerging is a comparative methodology that relies on the concept of ‘competitive sharing’, not blind copying but rather competitive appropriation. The importance of the local is equally critical. We need to talk more about what the Byzantines saw when they ‘looked out’, and what others saw in Byzantium when they ‘looked in’ and to think about how that impacted on our, very post-modern, concepts of globalism. Finally, we need to think about the Empire’s strategic geographical position: between the 4th and the 13th centuries, if anyone was travelling internationally they had to travel across (or along the coasts of) the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was thus a crucial intermediary, for good or for ill, between Europe, Africa and Asia – effectively, the glue that held the Christian world together, and it was also a critical transit point between the various Islamic polities and the Christian world
Creating moments of equality when researching sensory ways of knowing homecare: toward an aesthetics of care?
No full textBook synopsis: This book argues that feminist aesthetics as practices of adult education can inform our responses to gendered, racial, class and ecological injustices. It illustrates the critical, creative, and provocative pedagogical theorising, research, and engagement work of feminist adult educators and researchers who work in diverse community, institutional, and social movement contexts across North America and Europe. This book captures the complexity, diversity, energy, and imagination of those who theorise, decolonise, facilitate, investigate, visualize, story, and create within the politics of gender (in)justice and radical change
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