Ambiguous Space Research Articles

Choosing to Provide: Early Medical Abortion and Clinician Conscience in Ireland

Providers are essential to the delivery of abortion care. Yet, they often occupy an ambiguous space in political discourse around abortion. The introduction of a new abortion service in Ireland invites us to look afresh at providers. Since the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 came into force, by far the most common form of abortion care has been early medical abortion (EMA). This is typically provided by General Practitioners (GPs), with approximately 10% of GPs having chosen to provide EMA. This article draws on an empirical study of providers to investigate their motivations for, and experiences of, provision and their views on colleagues who have not chosen to provide. The study shows that for many providers, the choice to provide was grounded in a moral commitment to protecting women’s rights to autonomy and health and ensuring that the harms of the past were not repeated. The article argues that notwithstanding increased normalisation of EMA in Ireland, conscience still has a role to play in abortion care provision and it is important to reflect on the various aspects of this role.

Competing Claims of Caliphal Legitimacy: Al-Tamaghrouti’s Rihla and the Moroccan-Ottoman Early Modern Diplomatic Landscape

This article explores al-Tamaghrouti’s Rihla, Al-Nafhah al-Miskia fi al-Sifarah al-Turkiyah [The Fragrant Breeze in the Turkish Embassy], to illuminate his engagement with the spiritual and temporal legitimacy of caliphal claims in the early modern Islamicate Mediterranean. It argues that Moroccan embassies to the Sublime Porte were arenas where claims to temporal and spiritual superiority played themselves out in the form of competing caliphal symbolism. When situated within Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur’s caliphal vision, Al-Tamaghrouti’s account reveals a discursive landscape marked by contrasting claims to the superiority of the Moroccan normative order. His Rihla vividly captures the double-bind challenges faced by al-Mansur’s Morocco in the sixteenth century: Iberian imperialism and Ottoman expansionism. I resituate the insight that dynamic interactions among various Muslim-Christian universalistic principles maintained a paradoxical longevity of peaceful relations (Windler 2018) within the rubric of Muslim-Muslim relations to explore how different universalistic ideologies interact within inter-imperial/religious Muslim relations, particularly in the context of diplomatic engagements and political interactions. Al-Tamaghrouti drew on various spiritual and temporal motifs to construe a space of hermeneutic ambiguity whereby Sultan al-Mansur’s claims to universal caliphal leadership not only fulfills Mahdist qualities but transcends them, construing a discursive field in which al-Mansur emerges as a leader who transcends prophetic norms. By analyzing the interplay of power, religion, and diplomacy in al-Tamaghrouti’s travelogue, we gain a deeper understanding of the intricacies of statecraft and the ongoing pursuit of legitimacy in the Islamic world.

'You're just a Guinea pig': Exploring the barriers and impacts of living with long COVID-19: A view from the undiagnosed.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a disproportionate impact on ethnically minoritised and other marginalised communities, yet little is known about the impacts of long COVID-19 (LC) on this group. Living with LC takes its toll both physically, emotionally and financially and even more so when a diagnosis is hard to come by. By using qualitative interviews centring the view of undiagnosed and marginalised communities already classed as 'underserved' in the medical literature, we show the range of barriers and impacts faced by these groups in the UK, and the strategies of resilience they use. Whether trapped on a 'diagnostic odyssey' at the level of primary care, struggling to maintain employment and businesses, or managing family commitments, we argue many minoritised communities are caught in a liminal space of misrecognition, invalidation and ambiguity. We show how these impacts are generated by tensions and challenges in the process and categorisation of diagnosis, and how this effects the daily lives of many individuals already on the receiving end of health inequity. We also offer some examples and suggestions for best practices.

Floating notions of selfhood: interrogating cultural displacement across generations in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

ABSTRACT This paper, based on an argumentative essay, without involving any human-participation, is focusing on how the diasporic identity remains rooted in fixed cultural templates despite enduring shifts and transformations as depicted in two contemporary South Asian American novels, namely, The Namesake (2004. The Namesake. New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers, 40–289.) by Jhumpa Lahiri and Jasmine (1989. Jasmine. New York: Virago Press, 26–185.) by Bharati Mukherjee from an intergenerational lens. The sociocultural dynamics of name change reveal the nuanced interface between belonging and non-belonging, acceptance, and alienation. The second-generation occupies an ambiguous space, the very polysemic ambiguity that Lacan’s ((1956) 1977. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious.” In Écrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock.) letter manifests as a material object, text, and sign. One of the most potent instruments of defining oneself is the name as it is not merely a proper noun to identify an individual, it is a multifaceted identifier denoting among others, the gender, religion, ethnicity, race, and even the condition of hybridity (Saha, Amit Shankar. 2023. Transitions Indian Diaspora and Four Women Writers. Kolkata: Virasat Art Publications.).

Mapping traces in the art of Ibrahim Mahama

ABSTRACT Disappearance is an inherent quality of the ‘trace’. A trace, moving within the ambiguous space between absence and presence, refers to some other event connected with it. In this essay, I apply my hybrid model of the trace, derived from the philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Tim Ingold, in an analysis of the works of Ghanaian artist, Ibrahim Mahama. Mahama’s art responds to traces of failure and disappearance in the urban landscapes of Ghana. Working with materials and spaces in decay, Mahama maps residues of the past embedded in the material, tracing within its narratives of trade, migration, labour, capital, and commodity exploitation. By engaging communities around him in collaborative processes that are often large of scale and presented in public spaces, Mahama recollects memories of labour and exposes extreme histories that inform the present.

Reading the Complexity of James Bond's National Identity on Film

Though frequently conceived of as an essentially neo-colonial figure, James Bond’s national identity in the Eon Productions film series is more complex. Rather than solely or even predominantly rooted in the imperial centre of England, Bond frequently emerges from peripheral and ambiguous spaces, whether the marginal within the United Kingdom – Scotland, Wales – or from former colonies, like Ireland or Australia. Of the six men who have portrayed Bond in the series, two are English (Roger Moore and Daniel Craig). The remainder portray Bond as ambiguously English-and-not. All of this comes to the forefront in 2012’s Skyfall, which directly addresses Bond’s national origins. The title refers to Bond’s homeplace: his family’s estate in Scotland. Bond is played here by Craig, an English actor, and the film avoids pinning down when he left Scotland, other than it being after his parents’ death. Because Skyfall has priest holes, this film also frames Bond as explicitly Catholic, further positioning him outside Britain’s imperial centre. Bond’s complex and peripheral national identity complicate postcolonial readings of the films. Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of mimicry illuminates Bond’s doubled existence: when members of a colonised society imitate and take on the culture of the colonisers, the effect is, as Lacan notes, “camouflage ... it is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled". In this context, Bond’s role “on her majesty’s secret service” raises questions of complicity, compliance, and the fraught, always incomplete disavowal of Otherness.

Shadows in the Shape of Swan Lake

Swan Lake, with its rich history of productions and iconic place in culture, is easily one of the most famous ballets of all time. Each new reimagination of the popular story situates itself uniquely as a form of artistic commentary and reflection of the time and space in which it was created. Taking into consideration the historical context of the ballet as well as creative choices made in previous adaptations, I have choreographed and produced a short film adaptation of Swan Lake through the lens of authoritative censorship. The story of Swan Lake is inherently about freedom: Odette is trapped by both Rothbart’s curse and then later Siegfried’s betrayal of their love. My film follows Odette as she navigates a morally gray world in search of truth. She encounters the Swans, a censored version of the people she knows, as well as their puppeteer, a stranger who alternates between the roles of Siegfried and Rothbart. After being tossed about this ambiguous space, Odette eventually finds reality and truth, but not without serious repercussions. With this film, I speak to the voicelessness that artists and citizens experience during times of suppression of information and speech. Furthermore, this film asks the audience: who gets their voice heard in modern media, and how is that voice and its accompanying statements interpreted and used over time?

Organizing for deputy principalship in Swedish school organizations: The triggers and factors shaping the process

Although constituting a significant position in the daily practices and development of many school organizations, little is known regarding how the position of the deputy principal is organized. The purpose of this paper is to explore how Swedish principals organize for the deputy principal position by focusing on the triggers and factors constituting their sensemaking of the division of responsibilities. The paper provides an additional perspective by focusing on the interpretive aspects comprising the organizing processes. The paper draws from qualitative interview data from a larger study on deputy principals’ position in the Swedish school system. The results show how principals’ sensemaking is triggered by contextual cues and reform-driven factors that together create spaces of ambiguity in relation to the organizing of the deputy principals’ position. Principals make sense of these events based on personal- and identity-oriented beliefs, as well as frameworks and perceived expectations from municipal organizers.

‘Beware of dalals’: a moral world of health market brokerage in Bangladesh

AbstractAnthropological enquiry into brokers and brokerage practice provides a prime entry point for making sense of social change. This article tends to the ways in which the trope of the broker and the everyday practice of those identified as enacting brokerage act as linchpins in broader moral grappling during a period of rapid social change. It draws from the ethnographic context of brokerage discursively constituted and enacted within maternal health markets in Bangladesh, focusing on the trope and actual practice of those identified as morally compromised dalals: brokers bringing women and families from public to private health institutions. It argues that the trope of the dalal operates as a metaphor for immorality ascribed to morally ambiguous spaces of the private health sector, a way for people to contend with a moral discomfort integral to applying market logics to health services enacted largely outside the jurisdiction of formal regulatory mechanisms. The practice of those identified as embodying dalals, in contrast, while flourishing in these conditions, is rooted in economic precarity, primarily of young men with limited power waiting for better opportunities, who negotiate and balance moral and economic imperatives in their line of work.

Contested Appropriations: Informal Migrant Settlements as Ambiguous Spaces Beyond Temporal Borders

Temporalities of control are a key element of the migration reception regime: deadlines, waiting times, and limited durations of stay link safe housing to temporal and normative prerequisites. As a result, those who are unable to cross these temporal borders are stuck outside of reception and beyond the temporal nomos of the asylum system, in heightened im-mobility, cut off from protection mechanisms, and in a vicious circle of illegalisation. Based on a literature review and on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Italy between 2018 and 2023, and from the analytical vantage point on migrant practices of appropriation, this article aims to explore informal camps as ambiguous spaces between coercion and subversion. While informality is used by state authorities to disrupt migrant multiplicities, mobilities, and temporalities, it can at the same time become a loophole for migrants to evade control, deportation, and detention and to pursue their migration projects. Through practices of appropriation, migrants regain not only time and space but also rights that have been denied to them. In doing so, they contest the temporalities of control, demonstrating that time can be “taken” through endured limbo, but that it is still relative and can thus be recoded. Despite presenting informality as an arena of collective renegotiation, the article concludes arguing against a romanticisation of informal encampments, showing that they are subject to politics of violence and abandonment.

Leave Her Alone, She Speaks the Truth

Most feminist debates, including Western Feminism and postcolonial strands of feminism such as African Feminisms, place emphasis on religion – specifically Christianity – as an oppressive structure dominating women, and justifiably so. Within feminist and colonial discourses, however, Christianity occupies complex, ambiguous spaces. In considering Christianity’s positioning within colonialism and feminism, an African feminist position should seek to recognize the contradictions inherent in Christianity and, by extension, facilitate the nuanced experiences women in postcolonial, global South contexts have with Christianity. While some women might find Christianity oppressive, others may find it deeply fulfilling and others still may experience these dichotomies simultaneously. This article presents an African feminist reading of Katori Hall’s play, Our Lady of Kibeho (2018). Inspired by real-life events and centering Christianity (specifically Catholicism), Hall’s play tells the story of three Rwandan convent high-school girls – Alphonsine, Anathalie, and Marie-Claire – whose Marian apparitions garnered widespread attention. Through a textual analysis of, primarily, Alphonsine, who reportedly had the first and most frequent visitations, Christianity is proffered as a site of concurrent oppression and liberation. This article does not engage in the specificities of Catholic doctrine, but rather offers a discussion of varied encounters with Christianity.

Urban Wilderness

The new urban condition has generated ambiguous spaces within it: Terrain Vague or Urban Voids are spaces within the city, nameless and without clear boundaries, difficult to define. They are unpaved and vegetated spaces that are neither public spaces, nor gardens, nor agricultural fields, lying in a state of abandonment, suspension, and invisibility. With no specific function and temporarily outside the logic of the market, these spaces are appropriated and used daily by people and nature.
 Indeed, they eschew traditional cartographic representation, where they are often represented as mere white spaces, or spaces with future destinations. For this reason, walking as a common action becomes the fundamental tool for approaching, getting to know, and studying these spaces, while photography and other visual media become not only a means of representation, but also of studying and understanding the dynamic reality of these spaces and the different realities that inhabit them.
 With this visual essay, I do not aim to provide an unambiguous representation or definition of these spaces, far from it. Going along with the fragmentary and uncertain nature of these places, I have used photography as a means of urban research to understand and describe these places, and as a personal travelogue within these spaces, as if to take notes. Having chosen Lisbon as the privileged terrain of my research, this visual essay has the sole purpose of trying to represent these spaces in a disorderly and fragmentary way, following their nature, and in doing so, trying to unveil a hidden beauty and reveal their enormous potential for the city.

Spatial Identification and Change Analysis of Production-Living-Ecological Space Using Multi-Source Geospatial Data: A Case Study in Jiaodong Peninsula, China

The significant heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of point of interest (POI) data, the absence of human socio-economic activity information in remote sensing images (RSI), and the high cost of land use (LU) data acquisition restrict their application in PLES spatial identification. Utilizing easily accessible data for detailed spatial identification of PLES remains an urgent challenge, especially when selecting a study area that encompasses both urban built-up areas (UBUA) and non-urban built-up areas (NUBUA). To address this issue, we proposed a PLES spatial identification method that combines POI data and land cover (LC) data in this paper. The proposed method first classified spatial analysis units (SAUs) into agricultural production space (APS), ecological space (ES), and ambiguous space (AS) based on the rich surface physical information from LC data. Subsequently, the AS was further classified into living space (LS) and non-agricultural production space (NAPS) based on the rich human socioeconomic information from POI data. For the AS that contains no POI, a simple rule was established to differentiate it into LS or NAPS. The effectiveness of the method was verified by accuracy evaluation and visual comparison. Applying the method to the Jiaodong Peninsula, we identified the PLES of the Jiaodong Peninsula for 2018 and 2022, further explored their spatial distribution characteristics, and analyzed their changes. Finally, we conducted a discussion on the real-world situations and driving mechanisms of the PLES changes and proposed several policy insights. The results indicated that both the spatial distribution characteristics of PLES and PLES change in the Jiaodong Peninsula were obvious and showed significant differentiation between UBUA and NUBUA. Climatic and natural resource conditions, geographic location, macro-policies, and governmental behaviors drove the PLES changes.

African Diasporic Narratives from the Czech Republic

Abstract Studies have addressed the historical trajectories of people of African heritage in the Czech Republic (CR), but there is no comprehensive study of the contemporary lives and identities of African people. Given the increasing number of African people living in the country, research into an emerging African diaspora is imperative. This empirical study emerges as part of a larger project which aims to address this paucity through an interdisciplinary and ethnographic lens. Its primary aim is to develop a detailed and nuanced account of sociopolitical identities among people of African heritage in the CR by focusing on the dynamics of language and race and, to a lesser degree, gender. Theoretically based on intersectionality and drawing from the recently developed framework of ‘raciolinguistics’, this paper provides the first diasporic narratives of African people in the CR who have varying degrees of Czech language fluency and experience diverse forms of racialisation and racism. Individual multiple life trajectories in the CR suggest that African migrants feel caught in a complex matrix of linguistic and racial discrimination but that they have a sense of reasonable safety and security. This highly ambiguous space also shows that, on the one hand, there are instances where Czech language skills have the capacity to mitigate the challenges in racial discourse and racism, but on the other hand there are clear limits to the power of language in the face of racial Othering and racism.

‘Neither work nor leisure’: Motivations of microworkers in the United Kingdom on three digital platforms

This article examines the experience of microworkers living in the United Kingdom. Based on a survey of 1189 microworkers and 17 in-depth interviews, the article explores the experiences of UK-based microworkers on three digital platforms: Prolific, Clickworker and Amazon Mechanical Turk. The article draws on the theoretical framework of self-determination theory to analyse workers’ motivations for performing microwork. It reveals that workers’ relatively high satisfaction with otherwise low-paying and low-status work was possible because workers conceptualised their activity as occupying an ambiguous space and time in their lives, blurring traditional distinctions between work and leisure. These findings contribute to our understanding of how microworkers experience their relationship to work in the United Kingdom.

The enhanced search procedure in a coordinate domain for precise satellite positioning

Recently, there has been an increase in the availability of GNSS satellites for observation, which poses new challenges in the computational process of precise satellite positioning. Ambiguity resolution is a crucial step in achieving accurate relative positioning. In this regard, an improved version of a searching procedure in a three-dimensional coordinate domain has been proposed and tested. The method starts with a float solution, similar to classic methods like the LAMBDA. However, the subsequent step, the search procedure, is conducted in the coordinate space instead of the ambiguity space. This shift to a three-dimensional coordinate space leads to reduced computation time. A computational experiment was performed to validate the proposed method, which demonstrated a significant reduction in processing time. The advantages of this method are particularly prominent when dealing with a large number of satellites.

“Ninna nanna che tu crepi”. Female Fears and Struggle in Italian Lullabies between the 19th and 20th Century

This paper aims to analyse textually the lullabies collected throughout the Italian territory and dated between the late 19th and late 20th centuries as a form of counter-narrative from the female point of view. Nurtured by the protected environment of domestic walls, embedded in the labour of care which was almost exclusively a duty of the poor class of women, lullabies inhabit an intimate yet ambiguous space between wakefulness and sleep, far from the educational and public context of other narrative forms. The content of a specific corpus of lullabies driving a female counter-narrative will be identified and analysed. The various themes included in the stream will be identified and illustrated. The analysis will help contextualise this specific kind of lullaby in a precise historical and sociological climate and evaluate their extent. A comparison with the Italian fairy tales collected by Calvino in 1956 will allow the highlighting of the peculiarities of the lullaby as a form of female counter-narrative, emphasizing its implications, potential, and limitations.

Sounding War: Subverting Jim Crow in Not Only War and Sula

A sound-studies-centered reading of Victor Daly’s Not Only War: A Story of Two Great Conflicts (1932) and Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) sheds light on the sonic realities of WWI, both before and after, for Black soldiers. Both novels, set during and after WWI, utilize music to subvert the codified system of Jim Crow through sonic resistance. The term generative entropy offers a theoretical intervention in the field of sound studies to enable a better understanding and identification of the emphasis both novels place on narrative possibility rooted in sonic and physical spaces of ambiguity.

Psofotopias

Psofotopias is an essay that observes how different media, cultural artifacts, and narratives depict dreams and the act of dreaming. I connect these popular media examples to critiques of contemporary technology and media theory, to brain science and philosophy of noise, and I conclude with a commentary on one of my recent art installations. This text is inspired by an interview with Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter published under the title “Dreamful Computing”, which takes a quote by the late Bernard Stiegler as its prompt: “In order to do politics today, we must dream”. Their overall interest is that of “designing theories that don’t disavow the uncertainty, noise, and contingency of the situation of media”, an interest that I align with in refusing the often clear-cut separation of dreams and nightmares into either utopias or dystopias. By treating dreams with moral indeterminacy, a space for interpretation, analogy, and (trans)individuation is opened up. This space of ambiguity and uncertainty is what I call a “psofotopia”. Psofotopia is a portmanteau (psofos, noise; topos, place) that allows me to argue that dreams, with their cognitive, interpretive, and affective ambiguity, are “spaces of noise” that offer a model to deal with complexity. The dreaming, and its hallucinatory qualities, produces a para-conceptual and para-real psofotopia, a space that triggers collisions and clashes between the immaterial and the physical. An analogy can be drawn between the para-reality of dreams and that of the virtual space, initially imagined by cyberpunk authors as a consensual hallucination that would free humans from their bodily constraints, and eventually developed into an expensive technological infrastructure that aims to perpetuate interpassivity. I will conclude with a discussion about my new work, NNNV XR, an expanded dream that utilizes VR in combination with a sound installation and custom-made transducing furniture producing haptic signals. The installation connects the virtual and the physical world, allowing the experiencer to dream along my dreams. By navigating the sensorial inputs of NNNV XR, the experiencer inhabits the multimedia psofotopia I propose while being aware of the threads that connect the immaterial and the tangible through the para-real.

Managing and/or Leading? Exploring the Identity of Unit Coordinators through Two Case Studies

Literature has shown that unit coordinators at universities, who are considered middle managers, occupy a rather ambiguous space. This is because the nature of oversight employed by unit coordinators could be that of managing or leading. These types of oversights, however, may not be easily distinguished. This caveat serves as the basis for this study, which seeks to explore the professional identity of two unit coordinators — Aileen and Daron. Data was collected from reflections written by Aileen and Daron over one academic year (two semesters) about their experiences of oversight of two separate modules.