1,720,954 research outputs found
Migration and Diasporic Identity in Scholastique Mukasonga’s Un si beau diplôme !
No full textIn Un si beau diplôme! (2018), Franco-Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga recounts her experiences as a refugee in Burundi and her quest to obtain a degree in social work. She also describes the challenges she had to overcome to get her foreign degree recognized and to be able to practice her chosen profession when she and her family immigrated to Djibouti in 1986, and then to France in 1992. Mukasonga concludes her text by narrating a recent visit to an economically and socially transformed Rwanda. As a whole, the text underscores the importance of her degree, which was ultimately essential to her survival. However, this essay focuses on how Mukasonga navigates each of these physical displacements. For instance, she was able to navigate the gender-specific perils of exile as a female refugee in Burundi by developing her professional identity of social worker, by refusing to be immobilized by her refugee status, and with the support of other female refugees. I also study her experiences of inclusion and racial exclusion in Djibouti and France and how she developed a more expansive and inclusive sense of identity, that of an African and French woman. Finally, I examine how Mukasonga’s return to a changed Rwanda allowed her to reconnect and altered her perspective on her homeland. This essay argues that Mukasonga’s experiences expand our understanding of migration by not only engaging with issues of gender, hegemony, belonging, agency, otherness, solidarity, and diasporic identity, but also by counteracting and transcending dominant discourses and expectations of migratory experiences
“Nous étions ici pour durer”: Memorialization and environmental advocacy in Véronique Tadjo’s \u3ci\u3eEn Compagnie des Hommes\u3c/i\u3e
No full textDetected for the first time in 1976 in Northern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and in Southern Sudan (now South Sudan), the Ebola virus has reemerged periodically mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa. The deadliest outbreak of Ebola occurred in Guinea, eventually spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone from 2014-2016. At the end, there were 28, 652 cases and 11, 325 deaths (cdc.gov). The outbreak generated international news coverage and sparked panic, especially once cases were reported in the U.S., in Spain and in the UK. It also incited Veronique Tadjo’s latest work, En compagnie des Hommes (2017), as she explains in an interview published in the Australian Journal of French Studies (2018) : “Étant de la Côte d’Ivoire et connaissant la Guinée et le Libéria ( beaucoup moins la Sierra Leone), je me suis dit que derrière ces images, il y avait des tas d’autres choses qui n’étaient pas dites, qu’il y avait des vies, des êtres, des histoires” (252). Beyond the desire to humanize the outbreak, she also insists on the need to remember the outbreak: “… une fois la maladie déclarée officiellement terminée, eh bien on n’en a plus entendu parler! […] Je me suis dit qu’on ne pouvait quand même pas oublier quelque chose qui avait été aussi terrifiant. Il faut continuer à réfléchir sur ce qui s’est passé et sur ce que l’avenir pourrait nous réserver” (252). Tadjo’s objectives are not surprising considering her previous works, especially L’Ombre d’Imana (2000) in which she undertook the arduous task of commemorating and bearing witness to the 1994 Rwandan genocide as part of the Fest’Africa project, ‘Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire’. In the same spirit, with En Compagnie des hommes, Tadjo memorializes the victims and the heroes of the Ebola. The novel reflects this with its polyphonic structure that consists of 16 chapters narrated by different agents that were directly impacted by or implicated in the outbreak. Tadjo includes not only human agents but also includes chapters by a Baobab tree, a bat (the host) and the Ebola virus itself. Through all these narrators, Tadjo voices the trauma, the mercilessness of the virus, its sociological and economic impact as well as people’s resilience and solidarity. However, I intend to explore the text through an eco-critical lens. After the release of the novel, Tadjo expressed the ecological message of her novel and the relationship between ecology and literature in several interviews. For instance, in “Agir par l’imagination” ( 2018), an interview with Lucile Schmid, she remarks: “Pour que la conscience écologique soit renforcée et disséminée, il est essentiel que les arts accompagnent le travail des scientifiques. La literature a la faculté de s’immiscer dans la vie quotidienne des lecteurs. Elle peut aller ou la science s’arrête. […] il faut également agir par l’imagination, toucher l’homme dans sa représentation du monde et lui offrir des récits de transformation” (182). As such, I propose an analysis of the ecological issues raised within the text and the techniques she uses to guide the reader. I will begin my analysis with her portrait of the Baobab to demonstrate how the text bears witness to the connection between the inhabitants of the region and the environment, as well as the inhabitants’ environmentally violent practices. I will then study how, through several narrators, Tadjo depicts the negative impact of the Ebola virus on people’s connection to the natural world. Lastly, I will examine how Tadjo’s text expresses her hope of renewing human beings’ respect for nature. In this paper, I will argue that En compagnie des Hommes is a memorial to the environment and a call to action
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Panel: Mediating War in the Literary Text
No full textMarda Messay Associat Professor, Washburn University, Witnessing the Trauma of Former Child Soldiers: Lucien Badjoko’s J’étais Enfant Soldat
Carol S. Loranger, Wright State University, “Books as Tools for Mediating Cultural Difference in Andrew Krivak’s The Sojourn”
Khani Begum, Bowling Green State University, South Asian Filmic Responses to 9/11 and the War on Terror
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