Article Reads Research Articles

Remembering the Disremembered

Abstract This article reads Abubakar Ibrahim’s short story “The Book of Remembered Things” as an anti-jihadist narrative that meditates on the traumatic effects of violent jihadism on the postcolonial Muslim domestic space and a counternarrative to the dominant body of Western fictional responses to the 9/11 terror attacks. Situated at the intersection of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and postcolonial trauma theory, the article argues that Ibrahim mourns and remembers the traumas of the disremembered postcolonial subaltern African Muslim woman elided in the dominant discourses on the WoT and also subtly critiques fundamentalists ideologies like Boko Haram. Ibrahim shows that Jihadists’ quest for an Islamic theocracy or caliphate is doomed to fail because it revolves around a sacrificial structure wherein the Muslin woman is sacrificed on the altar of ideological incoherence. By focusing on the nexus between WoT and gendered trauma, the article explores how Ibrahim reclaims the subaltern woman’s voice in the wake of violent jihadism.

The implications of vibration and sound therapy in modern medicine: A literary review

The following literary review studies the overall science behind vibration-based medicine and healing techniques. Specifically, the effects that 432 hertz has on the body as well as the implications of such healing techniques in western medicine and hospitals. Through studies and literature on the use of sound/music in ancient healing techniques, it is found that sound frequencies (different hertz. levels) can be a healing technique in modern medicine as well. This literary review was found using a multitude of articles and novels on the background of sound therapy, various mediums of implementation, as well as studies on the specific effects on the human body - neurologically and physically. There were 19 articles found through research and 14 were used. The major key words used were frequency healing, modern medicine, sound therapy, 432 hertz neurological impacts, and healing medicine. After reading abstracts of various articles and gathering background information, a culmination of authors’ analysis and studies were used to make a nuanced argument on the implementation of sound therapy in the modern medical industry. After analyzing the data gathered, it was found that there is a direct correlation between frequencies and their ability to help treat diseases throughout the body. Moreover, there were clear links between specific frequencies and how they can be applied to different areas to even diagnose diseases years before current technology can. Building upon that, this healing technique is very versatile in that it can be used for a multitude of problems ranging from physical pain to sleep insomnia to cardiovascular diseases. Furthermore, the research found can be integrated into the western healthcare sector to provide easier, low-cost, and low resource treatment that is effective for all.

Bilingual Viewer: A bilingual text generation tool

This article describes the website BilingualViewer.com; it discusses the technologies used to build it and the engineering challenges that were encountered. BilingualViewer.Com is an open and free application that uses web technologies to create Bilingual versions of articles and books. The website can be saved onto the homepage of a smartphone and used like an App (for reading and converting newspaper articles on the fly), in addition to being opened on a computer's browser to process intensive tasks such as whole book translations. The website will henceforth be referred to as the app. Bilingual text refers here to a piece of writing where sentences in two different languages are presented sequentially, one sentence in the language to be learned followed by the user's primary language. Bilingual texts are particularly useful for students who rely heavily on dictionaries when reading books and newspaper articles.The app helps to create bilingual texts from almost any electronic content. A key feature from a copyright point of view is that the content is generated and stored locally on the device (unless added to an online library). Where a subscription is required to access newspaper content, the app generates a bilingual text article and stores it locally, so that the restricted content does not leave the device (i.e., it does not appear in any cloud server other than Google or Apple translation servers). There is a large features list including switching on and off languages, getting the device to read out loud, saving a list of items on the device along with the currently read position, sending content to an eBook, merging articles and more. A library of pre-translated books is provided in the app with the option of augmenting this with the user’s own on-line content. The app is available at https://www.bilingualviewer.com/ Documentation on the app can be found at hhtps://bv-fc.netlify.app/about/

The Fertility Fix: the Boom in Facial-matching Algorithms for Donor Selection in Assisted Reproduction in Spain

This article reads the uptake of facial-matching algorithms by fertility clinics in Spain through the lens of ‘the fertility fix’: a software fix to the social reconfiguration of kinship and a fixed capital investment made by competing fertility companies and firms. ‘The fertility fix’ is proposed as a critical, ethical lens through which to situate algorithmic facial-matching in assisted reproduction in the context of the racial politics of the face and phenotype and the spatial politics of market expansion. While an ‘infertility crisis’ is often mentioned when explaining the growth of the assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) industry, the use of donated reproductive cells is tied up in societal, ecological and economic shifts. Combining Software Studies analysis with Marxist Feminist and trans*feminist perspectives on shifting re/production dynamics, the article details the role of computational technologies in promoting certain ideas and beliefs about family and fixing certain territories of capital flow.

At the End, Writing

Abstract This article reads Beckett’s poems “Mort de A.D.” and “What is the Word” for how they voice and incorporate notions of formal and epistemic endings, or the lack of an ending. These two poems, written in different phases of Beckett’s career, are useful in mapping a shift in Beckett’s ‘problems’ with endings. Putting Beckett in conversation with the contemporary Italian philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Franco Berardi, specifically their analyses of “infancy” and “conjunctions” respectively, this article pays close attention to Beckett’s poetics of ending, or rather the impossibility of writing about the end.

'Facilitators and barriers to recruitment in mental health research: A survey of psychiatrists and psychiatry registrars in training'.

To explore the attitudes of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) consultants and registrars towards recruitment of patients in mental health research. Specifically, we aimed to measure potential barriers and facilitators for recruitment and comment on strategies for improvement. A survey was distributed to 287 consultant and trainee psychiatrists working across South Australian public mental health services. The survey was hosted via SurveyMonkey and ran for 5weeks from April to June 2023. Participant's attitudes were recorded through use of Likert scale, yes/no and free-text response. In total, 88 responses were collected, corresponding to a 30.7% response rate. Participants were interested in mental health research, with 90.7% reading articles and 61.4% reporting personal research engagement. The factors that rated most highly as recruitment barriers were unawareness of current studies, competing clinical demands and not prioritising recruitment. Factors felt most strongly to facilitate recruitment included the presence of an onsite research assistant and the clinician viewing the trial as clinically relevant. While attitudes towards research were generally positive, many barriers to recruitment were identified. Increased advertising of current studies, presence of an onsite research assistant and reduction in clinicians' workload are likely to improve clinicians' capacity to recruit.

Intergenerational Testimonials and the Politics of Black Cherokee Belonging

Abstract This article extends Tiya Miles’s study on the Black Cherokee Shoe Boots family by reading the legal documents they submitted to the Cherokee Nation—citizenship applications and land deeds as intergenerational testimonials. These documents, the article argues, constitute intergenerational testimonials because they record how the Shoe Boots family produced their own archive, their own print record across time and for future generations, as one strategy to build a livable world within and on Cherokee lands. As intergenerational testimonials, they transmit histories of unfinished familial claims and materially contain the fragmentary echoes of a collective set of desires. These testimonials refuse a racial and colonial conception of belonging. The article argues that the collaborative political labor of submitting claims captures the plurality of expression in the documents. What appears as an individual claim, the article contends, is instead linked to a network of familial ties. Put another way, the article reads the use of “I” in a family member’s citizenship application, for example, as constituting a collective utterance that embeds the desires of family members, whether living, lost, or dead.

The Black Gay Male Image under Siege

This essay discusses Isaac Julien's film Looking for Langston alongside 1980s Black British political culture, in which visual culture played a significant part. Focusing on the role of the image in that time and place, the article reads the embodied performances of waiting, use of the montage, and constructed scenes of Black queer lifeworlds, past and present, as challenging the linear modes of temporality that have confined Black politics to a perpetual state of deferment and the modern notion of vision under which the Black gay male image remains under siege.

Earn Continuing Education Credit for Reading Articles in The Counseling Psychologist!

Earn Continuing Education Credit for Reading Articles in <i>The Counseling Psychologist!</i>

Kafka on the Battlements: Fighting the Great War in “The Great Wall of China”

This article reads Franz Kafka’s 1917 story, “At the Building of the Great Wall of China” (Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer) and the related fragment “An Ancient Manuscript” (Ein Altes Blatt) in relation to World War I. It proposes that Kafka’s story provides a hitherto neglected prism on the topic – and hence offers also a fresh way of conceptualizing and talking about war’s place in Kafka’s oeuvre and modernist literature more generally. More specifically, the article focuses on three ways in which “At the Building of the Great Wall of China” refracts the war: through its thematization of the nationalizing force of militarism; through its relations to Kafka’s office writings on war trauma; and in its treatment of mistranslation and language conflict. Typically, Kafka has been framed as uninvested in war. As this article helps to show, Kafka’s work was inescapably involved in complex ways with the conflict, both patriotic and critical.

The universality of the machine: labour process theory and the absorption of the skills and knowledge of labour into capital

This article contends that deskilling is best understood not as a distinct phenomenon, but as a component of a process Marx (1993: 694) called ‘absorption’. Absorption involves not only the extraction of capacities from labour but also their implementation in machines. The article reads Braverman’s (1998) analysis of Taylorism as a demonstration of how absorption entails a specific labour process of its own, which I call the absorption process. The nature of the absorption process is contingent on many social factors. This article focuses on a technical factor: the particular machines used to implement captured skills and knowledge, called here the infrastructure of absorption. Since technological capacities are ever-evolving under capital due to the continual revolutionizing of the means of production, infrastructures of absorption change over time and this necessitates new absorption processes. Braverman (1998: 132) pointed to a qualitative change in absorption with the digital computer, which he described in terms of a new ‘universality of the machine’. While Braverman rightly pointed out the computer as a novel infrastructure, he did not discern qualitative changes to the absorption process, seeing instead the extension of Taylorist processes of capture of knowledge and skill. I contend that a qualitative shift has become apparent since the rise of machine learning in around 2015. Machine learning enables a different absorption process of emergence which does not require the codification of captured knowledge. Much labour process theory (LPT) (and adjacent) research presumes that deskilling and automation operate in terms of a process of capture, however, I show that emergence presents qualitatively different means for both. I suggest that the infrastructure of machine learning presents the possibility of task-agnostic automation.

Opposing Friendship: Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift

Abstract This article reads Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975)—a novel best known for its fictionalized portrait of the writer Delmore Schwartz—according to a conceptual sympathy between friendship and the novel. Though such a twinning can illuminate Bellow’s career as a whole, I argue here that Humboldt’s Gift represented his most compelling and complex attempt to reckon with opposition as an artistic problem (and opportunity). In 1962, Bellow published an essay talking up the importance of managing ‘opposites’ within a novel and, in his novels of this period, he alludes to an aphorism of William Blake’s: ‘Opposition is true friendship’. This statement, to begin with, fairly encapsulates the volatile relationship between the central characters of Charles Citrine and Von Humboldt Fleischer, but in this article I also interrogate the manifold ways in which an understanding of friendship as oppositional can illuminate mid-century theorizing about the novel as being fundamentally structured by oppositions. More idiosyncratically, Bellow recruits these sympathetic conceptions of friendship and the novel in pursuit of a quasi-gnostical synthesis whereby two exceptional friends might escape the indignities and mysteries of material existence. Elements such as the compositional record of Humboldt’s Gift, the influence of Blake’s Romantic ‘Contraries’, and Charles Citrine’s embarrassed enthusiasm for the ‘anthroposophy’ of Rudolf Steiner demonstrate a mutualistic intimacy between friendship and the novel. Friendship, that is, enlivens the novel with its varieties, flexibilities, and bantering confrontations; the novel, in turn, offers an indispensable forum for scrutinizing the duties and demands of friendship.

A decade of English academic reading research: A bibliometric analysis

This paper addresses a gap in the literature by conducting a bibliometric analysis of research on "English academic reading." The study aims to classify English academic reading articles, identify research trends, and explore popular and emerging topics in the field. To achieve these objectives, relevant articles were located using Publish or Perish software and assessed for quality using the Scimago Journal Rank (SJR). A total of 36 articles from 33 reputable journals, published between 2013 and 2023, were analyzed. Mendeley software managed references, while VOSviewer software classified the articles into six distinct research clusters. The most frequent keywords identified were ‘academic achievement,’ ‘academic reading,’ ‘students,’ ‘development,’ ‘English,’ and ‘case study.’ The analysis also revealed underexplored areas for future research, such as ‘academic performance,’ ‘English reading proficiency,’ and ‘extensive reading,’ among others. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the current research landscape on English academic reading. The findings highlight areas that have been extensively studied and suggest significant opportunities for further exploration. Researchers and educators can use these insights to develop more effective strategies to enhance English academic reading proficiency among students.

“We were fishermen”: The postnational reimagination of community in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen

ABSTRACT This article reads Chigozie Obioma’s Booker-finalist debut novel, The Fishermen, in the light of recent debates on postnationalism in contemporary African literature. The central intervention of the article is its examination of critical, self-reflexive ideations of community in the novel and the argument that such notions of community are vital for resisting theoretical models that presuppose “failure” or “crises” as the framework for conceptualizing contemporary national realities in the African context. Borrowing from Achille Mbembe’s theorization of postcolonial “entanglement” to modify Benedict Anderson’s thesis on the close relationship between enlightenment modernity and national community, the article closely reads the novel as the site of a complex inheritance and reimagination of community. Focusing on narrative voice and entangled temporalities, the article examines the varying registers of the central term “fishermen”. The article proposes that these resistant methodological approaches emerging from postcolonial Nigerian literature represent a layered articulation of alternative collective imaginaries.

Designing a Modern Self: The English Travels of Pandita Ramabai and Krishnabhabini Das

In 1882, Krishnabhabini Das travelled to England and wrote a travelogue, Englandey Bangamahila (A Bengali Lady in England) in Bengali. A year later in 1883, Pandita Ramabai also travelled to England and wrote a letter in Marathi describing her travel experiences, which was later published as Englandcha Pravas (Travel to England). This article reads the two travel accounts together and in relation to one another aiming to compare and juxtapose their differing and at times overlapping navigations and negotiations with the West in an attempt to understand the early expression of gendered subjectivities via narratives of travel at a time when both travel and writing by women were discouraged, if not proscribed. With a focus on two related aspects—(1) the textual construction of the ‘self’ and (2) the trope of the reverse female gaze on the West—the paper argues that these travel writings produce as they record the making of distinct modern female subjectivities at the end of the nineteenth century.

’’I’m a Woman. Man, Woman, M–Woman.’’ – Identity, Sexuality, and the Body in the Short Fiction of Malika Moustadraf

ABSTRACT This article reads Malika Moustadraf’s recently translated collection of short stories as an instance of a new generation of Moroccan female writing that subverts conventional expectations of female fiction and understanding of gender identities in Morocco. Following a narrative criticism approach, the article investigates how Moustadraf uses fiction to communicate an identity crisis when the experiences of the body toggle between desire and disgust, rot and purity, and ultimately, life and delusion. In Moroccan fiction, identity, the body, and sexuality have often been considered a male territory, mostly explored through male lenses. By tackling issues of gender fluidity, cybersex, and body relations in the Moroccan context as early as the beginning of the twenty-first century, Moustadraf’s short stories contribute to an avant-garde female literary tradition that would only gain ground about two decades later. While female writing has long been conditioned by social expectations for language and themes to be feminine, Moustadraf stands out by breaking through the boundaries of taboo identities and excessively polished writing. A close reading of Moustadraf’s long-lost works provides a fresh perspective on the development of Moroccan fiction and gender consciousness in contemporary Morocco.

Assessing the Readability, Reliability, and Quality of AI-Modified and Generated Patient Education Materials for Endoscopic Skull Base Surgery.

Despite National Institutes of Health and American Medical Association recommendations to publish online patient education materials at or below sixth-grade literacy, those pertaining to endoscopic skull base surgery (ESBS) have lacked readability and quality. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) system capable of synthesizing vast internet data to generate responses to user queries but its utility in improving patient education materials has not been explored. To examine the current state of readability and quality of online patient education materials and determined the utility of ChatGPT for improving articles and generating patient education materials. An article search was performed utilizing 10 different search terms related to ESBS. The ten least readable existing patient-facing articles were modified with ChatGPT and iterative queries were used to generate an article de novo. The Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) and related metrics measured overall readability and content literacy level, while DISCERN assessed article reliability and quality. Sixty-six articles were located. ChatGPT improved FRE readability of the 10 least readable online articles (19.7 ± 4.4 vs. 56.9 ± 5.9, p < 0.001), from university to 10th grade level. The generated article was more readable than 48.5% of articles (38.9 vs. 39.4 ± 12.4) and higher quality than 94% (51.0 vs. 37.6 ± 6.1). 56.7% of the online articles had "poor" quality. ChatGPT improves the readability of articles, though most still remain above the recommended literacy level for patient education materials. With iterative queries, ChatGPT can generate more reliable and higher quality patient education materials compared to most existing online articles and can be tailored to match readability of average online articles.

OS IMPACTOS DAS FAKE NEWS POTENCIALIZADO PELA INTELIGÊNCIA ARTIFICIAL NOS RESULTADOS DE CAMPANHAS ELEITORAIS

Considering that innovation technology brings benefits, but also negative impacts on society and human relations, a bibliographic study was carried out with the objective of investigating the influence of the use of artificial intelligence algorithms to disseminate Fake News on public opinion, as well as the their decision-making in the process of choosing candidates for majority positions, which may compromise the integrity of the electoral process. A bibliographic review was carried out on the object of study, based on the systematic reading of scientific articles published and selected through the Google Scholar and SCIELO databases. Furthermore, practical cases were studied in which AI was used to propagate false information in electoral contexts and possible changes in election results, exemplifying the ethical challenges faced in the application of artificial intelligence in electoral contexts, disinformation and political communication. The analysis of the results shows that the case study of recent elections indicates that the use of fake news enhanced by artificial intelligence can induce voters to make mistakes and compromise their freedom of choice in elections, directly influencing ethics and those responsible for the election. use of technological tools in society and in human relations regarding their decision-making power and choice of candidates. Therefore, there is an urgent need for government measures, regulation of social networks and digital platforms to guarantee fairer and more transparent electoral campaigns, preserving democratic integrity.

The Joker’s Shifting Face: Eighty Years of Mad History in Batman and American Culture

That “grim jester with a twisted brain,” Batman supervillain the Joker reflects shifting social constructions of mental difference in the US across eight decades. The article reads Batman serial comics, graphic novels, and film against four key moments in Mad History: eugenics, psychiatric survivor activism in the 1960s and 1970s, the trauma discourses of 1980s popular culture, and the criminalization of mental difference in the twenty-first century. Out of this complex conversation four models of madness are derived: toxic reproduction, liberation, mad genius, and the conflation of madness with violent crime. These models work intersectionally: Joker’s madness, queerness, and exceptionally white masculinity engender each other. Because of his distinctive qualities as a visual icon, he makes Mad History more visible, too.

Inverted Odysseys: Adventure and homecoming in the global subrogation of women’s care work in Jose Y. Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister

Many Filipina care workers are subrogated to the position of mothers in the more affluent states of Asia. As a consequence, they oftentimes play as the unofficial teachers of the children. In this article, I analyse the process of global subrogation, which often end in what I call an inverted odyssey of the Filipina domestic helper. Using the concept of invertedness in commodity fetishism, this article reads Jose Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister as an inverted odyssey which views the migration of Filipina care workers as an adventure but without the heroic homecoming. The novel represents the adventure as a dialectic of systems of carelessness and selfcare that is symbolically resolved within the narrative through the recurring image of the ‘woman in the box’. Thus, the article argues that unlike Odysseus’ triumphant nostos (homecoming), the heroine of this inverted odyssey falls victim to her own erotic drives, drowns in a far-flung kingdom, returns home in a box, and drowns again in the hands of thieves. The novel weaves a counter-narrative on the Filipina care worker that challenges prevailing Philippine state discourses on its overseas work force, thereby problematizing both the limitations of the heroine’s selfcare and the systemic carelessness of the states that make the subrogation possible. Ultimately, the inverted Odyssey as symbolized by the novel’s central image of ‘the woman in the box’ shatters appearances and unveils the tragic position of the unrecognized ‘teachers’ in the global feminization and commodification of care work.