Absent Presence Research Articles

Performance Assessment of ELISA Using the Trypanosoma cruzi-Specific Antigen Tc323 for the Diagnosis of Chronic Chagas Disease.

In the chronic phase of Chagas disease (CCD), diagnosis relies on detecting specific IgG antibodies due to the low or absent presence of the parasiteTrypanosoma cruzi in human blood. However, the performance of current serological tests is highly variable, lacking a "gold standard" assay with 100% sensitivity and specificity, which challenges the exploration of new biomarkers. In the present study, we evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of an optimized ELISA using the predicted immunogenic domains (called TcD3 and TcD6) of Tc323, a protein highly conserved among T.cruzi strains but absent in other clinically significant parasites such as Leishmania spp. This study was conducted using plasma or serum samples from CCD individuals with different clinical manifestations and living in endemic regions in Latin America, subjects with unrelated infectious diseases, and noninfected donors. The sensitivity and specificity of recombinant TcD3 were 90.8% and 92.6%, respectively, while rTcD6 displayed values of 93.1% and 93.6% for the same parameters. Area under curve (AUC) values were 0.949 for rTcD3 and 0.954 for rTcD6. The receiver operative characteristic (ROC) curve showed a highly significant difference between CCD individuals and noninfected donors. Cross-reactivity was 10.2% for rTcD3 and 8.2% for rTcD6 in subjects infected with leishmaniasis or with toxoplasmosis. In addition, the reactivity against rTcD3 differed among some geographical areas while no significant difference was found using both domains for the detection of T.cruzi-infected individuals with or without cardiac symptoms. Our findings show that the recombinant antigens rTcD3 and rTcD6 could be used as highly potential biomarkers for the serological diagnosis of CCD.

‘The Flight of One Small Soul has Tipped the Scale’: Parental Grief in Modern and Contemporary Irish Poetry of Child Death

This essay explores how, in Irish poetry of parental bereavement, child death variously is confronted, conceded, recalibrated and countervailed – often all within the same poem. Probing the paradoxes inherent in faith and art when brought to bear on this devastating life circumstance, modern and contemporary Irish poetry interrogates the role of both otherworld-belief and of the formally achieved poem in reshaping the meaning of such loss. Irish poetry intimates that bereaved parents’ complex and culturally situated sense of alienation is an experience which – once adequately acknowledged – can be combined with hope. Thus, drawing upon a wide range of Irish poems, the essay argues that this poetry dynamically witnesses both to the overwhelming void of meaning which follows upon child death, and to the possibility (however tentatively claimable) of such loss being redeemed. Highlighting the fact that for bereaved parents, acute consciousness of the child’s present absence often leads towards openness to the child’s absent presence, Irish poetry shows that a parent’s expression of unanswerable longing for their missing child can validly coincide with their affirmation of continuing bonds with the deceased. In this light, the essay attends to the recuperative role of surrealistic imagination in Irish poetry of parental bereavement, further exploring how this poetry recognises both division and vital relationship between bereaved parents and their wider community.

Working with Absent Presences: Disappearances and Materiality in Post-War Sri Lanka

This paper is about affective potencies of materiality that aid grieving war-related disappearances in post-war Sri Lanka. Based on ethnographic narratives of those who have lost someone to disappearance during the 1983-2009 civil war, the paper questions the nonrepresentationality of traumatic grief and problems with established processes and practices of grieving in cases of disappearances. It also elucidates how survivor’s affective experiences of grief are ever-evolving, both subjective and objective, personal and political. The paper explores the polymorphous and potentiating nature of materiality as a means to address otherwise non-representational and ever-evolving grief, highlighting how materiality assists grieving the disappeared specifically by bringing the missing to the forefront.

Exploring Ethical Potentials of Christian Narrative Testimonies

Abstract Over the last decades, the role of narratives in Christian theology and ethics has been debated controversially. In light of this, this article explores the ethical potential of Christian narrative testimonies. First, it shows that the mode of Christian testimony to God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ is narratively structured. Second, it unfolds a threefold hermeneutic of these narratives: a hermeneutic of the simultaneous presence and absence of God in these testimonies, a hermeneutic of commentary and criticism, and a hermeneutic of attentive humility in the face of other narratives. Last but not least, ethical potentials of Christian narrative testimonies come into view: These narratives can bear witness to God’s absent presence, especially when they reveal themselves as radical contingent, when they are open to transformation by narratives of the other and when they motivate people to question the status quo of any given society in order to act for a more just future.

Absent Presence – Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial to Reduce Phubbing in Couples and Enhance Individual Well-Being

Absent Presence – Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial to Reduce Phubbing in Couples and Enhance Individual Well-Being

Absent Presence: The Human Influence in AI-Generated Content in the Age of Technoculture

Absent Presence: The Human Influence in AI-Generated Content in the Age of Technoculture

Dark tourism goes underground: ghostly materialities of Japanese occupation in Datong, China

In north China, memorial museums are often associated with the suffering of victims of the Japanese occupation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945). The Datong Coal Mine Massacre Site Memorial Hall affords visitors opportunity to bear witness to atrocities at the hands of the occupiers. At the 10,000 men pit (wanrenkeng), where over 60,000 miners perished, visitors gaze at the corpses of dead miners in two deep pits, at harrowing photographs of excavated remains and at unnamed spirit tablets in the memorial hall and on the hillside above. The research brings together the spectrality of absent presence with the Chinese tradition of hungry ghosts as social actors. Referencing the newly available North China Railway Archive of photographs taken by the Japanese of everyday life on the Datong coalfields, read through a lens inspired by Georges Didi-Huberman, we aim to enrich the state-authorised narrative of victimization and humiliation with narratives of individual people. The photographs summon the survival, or afterlife, of those depicted, sometimes smiling into the camera. We suggest that the photographic archive may afford identification of miners, enabling their lives to be honoured as well as mourned and their ghosts to be appeased. Collaborative development of a traditional Hungry Ghost festival could fold memorial sites together with intangible cultural heritage to offer visitors opportunity to commemorate both death and life through integrating history with culture.

Black + Brown ≠ Green: The absent presence of the Anthropocene in Wakanda Forever

Four years after the globally-lauded premiere of Black Panther, Marvel-Disney launched its sequel Wakanda Forever. The film centres on the new all-female leadership of the fictional African monarchy as it grapples with an emergent threat from Namor, the centuries-old ruler of an undersea Mesoamerican kingdom known as Talokan. Employing an assessment of the absent presence of the Anthropocene in the text, this article interrogates the popular, political, and planetary geographies of the expanding BP universe, focusing on what is screened in WF and what is left unscreened (obscene). In terms of the former, the article complicates the potential-if-unrealised geopolitical condominium between black and brown superpowers against the (neo)imperial white/surface world. Regarding the latter, it examines director Ryan Coogler's retro-active change in continuity which denudes Namor of his ecological activism and his burden of care for the oceans and the innumerable lifeforms contained therein. While anthropogenic climate change, rampant oceanic pollution, and humanity's geological agency stalk the filmic narrative, these hyperobjects are conspicuously missing from the diegesis, thus indicating the unwillingness and/or inability of Disney – qua the consummate American global conglomerate – to make a case for environmentalism in the face of cascading planetary crises.

Disaffected teachers: disrupting normalized feelings of race and gender in teacher education research

ABSTRACT Making sense of normalized feelings in teacher education, scholarship on race and gender has spotlighted the affective and emotional landscapes of teaching and detailed how the profession has been shaped around its primary workers, cisgender straight white women. Disaffection, though, or unfeeling in ways that disrupt the sociality of affective norms, provides one conceptual and methodological tool for shifting well-worn patterns of normalized feelings in teacher education. Revisiting data from two previous studies of teachers’ affective practices, we used disaffection as a lens to analyze interview and group session transcripts, interpreting how unfeeling disrupts the racialized and gendered norms of grieving and liberationist politics of outness in classrooms. Inviting antisociality, disaffection offers researchers and educators a methodological expansion for studying affect, emotion, and feeling in teacher education, specifically by looking for the absent presence of unfeeling.

George Takei’s Allegiance: WWII Japanese American incarceration as a cautionary tale

ABSTRACT The musical Allegiance was inspired by the childhood of actor-activist George Takei, a Japanese American whose family was incarcerated by the United States government in ‘war relocation camps’ during World War II. Performed in both New York and London, the play is a rare popular depiction of Japanese detention – a chapter of American history that is simultaneously present and hidden in U.S. public imagination. The musical underscores the realities of racial discrimination that rendered Japanese Americans vulnerable to rights abuses and asks whether a citizen must prove one’s loyalty. Thinking through the ‘absent presence’ of Japanese American incarceration by viewing performances such as Allegiance is a vital step for acknowledging the precariousness of American citizenship and for preventing human rights abuses in the future. Today, this play serves as a cautionary tale for the United States as anti-Asian hatred spikes and citizenship stripping among naturalized American citizens increases.

Inclusivity, diversity, and the absent presence of class: a logics approach to England and Wales cricket Board (ECB) policy discourse

Class is central to Englishness and English cricket. Conversely, despite the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) making an explicit attempt to address social issues in cricket, class has largely been excluded from ECB policy discourse. In response to this absence, this paper mobilises a Lacanian-inspired logics approach to examine ECB policy discourse from 2015-2023. Through this approach, the paper highlights the hegemony of inclusivity and social cohesion in ECB discourse, a hegemony that has been enabled by a political shift away from class analysis and politics. In response to this absence of class, the paper argues that a fantasmatic logic has emerged within ECB discourse in which the inescapable presence of class in English cricket is reframed as the more manageable problem of social exclusion, which can be overcome through more inclusive practices rather than structural changes.

Can You See Her? The Absent Presence of Black Female Subjectivity in Get Out (2017)

ABSTRACT This article investigates racial-sexual violence, and conceptualizations of Black female subjectivity as they are situated in the cinematic Black political imagination. Through a Black feminist analysis of Get Out (2017), the author argues that the film and its articulation of race in the post-Obama US fails to account for gender and sexuality by tangentially engaging Black women in its dissection of race and racism. The author contends that Black women are the absent presence in the film and utilizes theories of temporal, spatial, and material racial-sexual violence and the coupled subject invisibilities to dissect the (in)visible Black women in film.

Why Post That? Re-thinking the Problem of Absent Presence within Social Media

While social media have the potential to promote positive relations online, the increasing use of contemporary apps, such as Instagram, distances many from important face-to-face interactions. In this study, we rethink the problem of ‘absent presence’ within social media by revealing the language games of Instagram. Drawing on social media literature and Gergen’s (2002) concern about the erosion of cultural norms due to the absent presence generated by new media, we engaged in a qualitative study of active Instagram users. Employing a unique ‘prompt and response’ interview approach, in which we asked participants to explain why they would (or would not) post particular statements, we gain insights into social norms of Instagram as expressed by active social media users. The results of this study show that participants base their posting decisions largely on their perception of a desired self, without much concern for who is posting or why they are posting. Because our findings reveal that posting on Instagram is done without much engagement with others and is often done only if a message corresponds with their own experiences or self-identification, this study extends the concern about absent presence. Specifically, we argue that the complex blurring of monologic and dialogic forms of communication found in contemporary social media apps generates hollow and inconsequential language games that maintain narrow concepts of self and fail to generate interactions necessary to co-create relevant and meaningful social values.

A Theatre of Inquietude

The present paper aims at putting into discussion several ways of dramaturgically and scenically embodying the state of inquietude incorporated in Eugène Ionesco’s dramaturgy, placing emphasis mainly on the plays Jack, or The Submission and The Chairs. Ionesco conceives dynamic psychologies, introduces contradiction into noncontradiction, creates the presence of the absent presence, which inhabit the character projecting it into the past. From this perspective, his theatre has its source in the human anxieties and, in this respect, we note the manifestation of various ways of unmasking conventions, of materializing the state of uneasiness, of incarnating a world which is on the thin edge between the unreal and the real, the poetic and the trivial, the oneiric and the diurnal.

The politics of face and the trouble with race: Exploring relations at the interface between the individual and the collective in forensic practice.

This special issue interrogates race through the lens of face. Its central faces are those in forensic settings. Promising immediate legibility and access to the individual suspect, forensic faces nevertheless mobilize a variety of collectives. We offer conceptual and methodological tools to examine the face as both an individual and a collective phenomenon, and demonstrate through detailed cases how the face thus allows us to address the absent presence of race. Given its long and convoluted history in physical anthropology, as a marker of racial typology, the face forces us to reckon with colonial histories of ordering human difference. But the face also allows us to question a regime of visuality that congeals around the face in Western culture. In this introduction to The Politics of Face and the Trouble with Race we elaborate these concerns and introduce the contributions to this volume.

The case for educational reparations: addressing racial injustices in sustainable development goal 4

This paper presents an examination of the education Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) through the lens of race. It argues, at this mid-way point of the SDGs, that race continues to be erased, acting as an absent presence, in global educational policy, practice and goals. To address this, the paper calls for a radical review of contemporary development discourse such that the SDGs, and in particular SDG 4, are framed in ways that acknowledge histories of colonial exploitation and epistemic violence. Acknowledging these histories and their reproduction in the Western-led development project, the paper advocates for reparative redress. It argues for the re-orientation of SDG 4 in the interests of racial justice in education by calling for the material redistribution of resources, challenging the hegemony of the Western episteme in curriculum and languages of instruction, holding international agencies and governments to account and reforming the governance of SDG 4 in ways that prioritise racial justice. The paper takes the position that while education has been detrimentally implicated in the Western colonial and development project, it has a key role to play in challenging racist systems as the global community looks towards the 2030 Agenda and beyond.

The Doubling Self

Abstract The Tunisian state and Tunisian cultural systems that predate it dictate social and material realities for Tunisian women. Where these systems of authority conflict, a woman may feel that she is herself in the reality she inhabits, yet she is also an other who surveils herself, resulting in a self/other dichotomy. Surrealism, while frequently associated with early twentieth-century Europe, is a liberatory approach that stretches across global art, poetry, and literature. One of its primary objectives is to challenge accepted realities. This article argues that artworks by the contemporary Tunisian artists Meriem Bouderbala and Najah Zarbout invoke the aesthetics and ideologies of surrealism to mediate the ground between the embodied self and the observer self through portrayals of female sexuality as constituted by multilayered selves. In doing so, they evoke a surrealist history of vision, doubling, and mirroring, reframing the female body as an absent presence that eludes surveillance and regulation.

The Missing Corpse in Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad and Muhsin Al-Ramli’s Daughter of the Tigris

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the trope of the missing corpse in two contemporary Iraqi novels: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) and Muhsin al-Ramli’s Daughter of the Tigris (2019). Drawing mainly on critical work on the corpse and death studies as well as critical ideas on relics and hauntology the essay asks: What place does the missing corpse occupy in a body of contemporary literary outputs that have witnessed a significant engagement with the materiality of the dead body? How is the narrative of the absent corpse structured and framed? How is it experienced and accounted for? What forms and shapes replace the absent body? The essay argues that the missing corpse takes on an “absent presence” that haunts the narrative while the dead body’s very disappearance is compensated for through relics, surrogates, replacements, and repetitions. In conclusion, the essay contends that this absent presence further signals a haunted futurity that is entangled in Iraq’s history of violence but which, nonetheless, offers the potential for a radically new and democratic vision for the country’s future.

Displaced Rituals, Replaced Contexts: Reimagining Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee in Charles Dibdin's The Younger Brother (1793)

Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) played a central role in David Garrick's epochal Shakespeare Jubilee, held in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, the biggest media event of the age. He later became a prominent critic of the Jubilee, but his major imaginative response to it in his first and most personal novel, The Younger Brother (1793), has gone unexamined. The ‘Jubilee of Hearts’ built into this novel is an alternative Jubilee, moved several miles up the River Avon to the Warwick area, where it can be divorced from commercial considerations, corrective in its emphases, and serve as a counter-ritual. Needing a theme proportional to Shakespeare's genius, Dibdin chose local harmony as a microcosm of national unity. Dibdin's effort to imagine a Warwickshire Jubilee which has nothing to do with Shakespeare was notably unsuccessful, though: thus Shakespeare is, revealingly, a powerful absent presence at the ‘Jubilee of Hearts’.

Worshipping Musically Online During Covid-19

The Covid-19-pandemic and resulting infection control measures drastically impacted the ability of Christian worshippers to gather and practice their faith. As a result, online solutions emerged as the primary option for maintaining religious practice. In this article, I conduct an autoethnographic study of my own experiences as a member of a Lutheran congregation to explore the impact of online worship practices during the pandemic. Specifically, I examine how music and sounds in worship online shaped worshippers like me through affective means, and what social and political effects these sonic engagements had. To guide my analysis, I draw on Gibson’s concept of affordance and affect theory as theoretical frameworks. It is important to acknowledge that online worship during the pandemic was experienced in different ways. Some individuals may have experienced a sense of flourishing and connection through online worship, while others may have felt isolated and disconnected. Although online worship may lack the physical presence of traditional religious gatherings, it can still serve as a means of facilitating a sense of an ‘absent presence’ for individual worshippers. Overall, understanding the impact of online worship practices during the pandemic is an important area of study with significant implications for the future of religious practice.