Author Contends Research Articles

All That Moves Us: The Semantic Density of Clothing and Objects in El Buen Vestir-Tlakentli’s Choreographies of Indigenous Movements

This article explores El Buen Vestir-Tlakentli 2 (2017 and 2019) and argues that the two iterations of this dance-theatre piece are powerful explorations—through dance and the artists’ sensate relation to objects—of the moving journey that led artists Leticia Vera and Carlos Rivera Martínez from Mexico to Canada and from a sense of estrangement from their Indigeneity to an encounter with their ancestors’ complex and resistant negotiations with the oppressive forces ushered in by settler colonialism in Mexico. Shedding and layering clothes and leveraging the knowledges they encode, the artists remind us of all that moves us in the world. Through inhabiting clothes saturated with meaning, the dancers embody their ancestors throughout the performance, returning to them to better understand the past, its violence, and its joy and imagine a future remapped through decolonial geographies. This future, the author contends in conversation with the artists’ own words, takes the form of a hopeful reconfiguration of the symbolic space of Aztlán. Critical of its problematic past entanglement with race yet mobilizing its transformative power, the artists create a space where Indigeneity is no longer relegated to the past, where kinship is articulated on radically different terms, and where it might be possible to shed the layers of settler-colonial violence—gendered violence in particular–that continue to impact the everyday life of Indigenous women and girls.

The reality of environment reimagined: Niklas Luhmann and the new ecological paradigm

AbstractThis article delves into the underpinnings of environmental sociology, with a specific focus on the influential contributions of Dunlap and Catton. While acknowledging the increasing societal detachment from the environment, the article questions the projection of this phenomenon onto the structure of social thought. The author contends against dismissing theoretical exemptionalism, advocating for its potential to provide a nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between society and nature. Illustrating this perspective through the lens of Niklas Luhmann's sociological theory, the article demonstrates how theoretical exemptionalism can furnish valuable tools for grappling with environmental issues. Furthermore, it challenges Dunlap and Catton's critique of constructivism, proposing that a moderate form of the latter can shed light on interactions between society and nature. Throughout the discussion, a crucial emphasis is placed on the fundamental distinction between society and its environment, laying the groundwork for a deeper exploration of Luhmann's ontology.

Letter writing as a Chicana/Latina healing tool: the affordances of a Critical Race Feminista Epistolary Praxis

Heeding Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2012) call to cultivate, “new theories with new theorizing methods,” this article articulates the contours of a Critical Race Feminista Epistolary Praxis (CRFEP). CRFEP, a writing-based methodological intervention nestled within anti-racist and social justice traditions, fosters opportunities for Women of Color to communicate their resistance against the historical legacies and contemporary manifestations of racialized and gendered oppression. The author addresses the following questions: (1) What constitutes a CRFEP in education research? And (2) What does the empirical application of a CRFEP look like in scholarship that centers the educational life experiences of Chicana/Latina mothers and daughters? The author contends, a CRFEP uplifts a textual platform for Chicanas/Latinas to exert a literary presence and it facilitates a transformative process of healing and transformation for Women of Color epistolarians. Indeed, the CRFEP humanizes the research process and disrupts traditional modes of data collection and analysis in education research.

‘Oh, so that’s what it was like!’: The Personal Essay in Hard Times

This article explores characteristics of personal essays, primarily written by American essayists, that appeared in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and protests against racial injustice that erupted around the U.S. It does so against the historical backdrop of essays that were written during other global hard times, particularly the second wave of the bubonic plague epidemic in the 1500s, when Montaigne wrote The Essays, and the 1918 flu pandemic. It notes significant differences in the contemporary responses – for one, an extraordinary level of detail about life in a pandemic – many of which unite around a communal despair over pandemic losses, outrage at racism, and hope for a better future. One of the challenges faced by essayists in public hard times is how to position their personal experiences amid a public calamity. Writers of colour, the author contends, face additional challenges as they navigate the complexities and pressures of representational narratives.

How to Analyse Emojis, gif s, Embedded Images, Videos, and url s: A Bakhtinian Methodological Approach

Abstract This article offers a means of analysing social networking, visual dialogues of emojis, gif s (images in the Graphics Interchange Format), embedded images, videos, and url s (Uniform Resource Locators). Doing so addresses these often overlooked and undervalued forms of visual communication, suggesting a unique means of gaining insights into their use within online interactions. Utilising a Bakhtinian methodology, the author extracts excerpts from her research, situated within Facebook, to demonstrate a Bakhtinian genre analysis, a framework that the author contends is adaptable to multiple social networking spaces. Highlighting emojis, gif s, embedded images, videos, and url s as integral components of online communication, an emphasis is placed on how the text dances with the visual, presenting a nuanced framework for such an analysis. Consequently, an argument is developed for the significance of visual dialogues in contemporary online spaces, and the need for researchers to better understand these dynamic forms of communication, offered through Bakhtinian dialogism.

US v. Thind and the Rhetorical Labors of “Where Are You From?”

This paper returns to United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind to take a closer look at the rhetorical logics within the case to understand how race-making discourses solidify the place of South Asian Americans within racial hierarchies. The author contends, an engagement with the rhetorical racialization of Bhagat Singh Thind throughout his trial provides an opportunity to unravel the racial dimensions of the question “Where are you from?”—a kind of historical origin story and illumination of the work of a phrase endemic to the Asian American experience. The question is deployed as a synecdochal framework for capturing the configuration of ocular and geographic ways Thind, and Asian Americans generally, are racialized. This essay argues, through a rhetorical criticism of Thind’s brief, Justice George Sutherland’s majority opinion, and the US brief against Thind, the Supreme Court deployed spatial and temporal discourses as rhetorical mechanisms that racially sutured Thind to a particular spacetime beyond the ostensible boundaries of whiteness. Tracing these discourses illuminates how Thind’s brownness became a coded index of white supremacist conceptions of origin, contributing to a conceptual collapse between the ocular, spatial, and temporal. The paper also argues, the oft-cited phrase “Where are you from?” functions as a rhetorical process of producing race that rests upon spatiotemporal assumptions. The question operates as a racial-ontological query to locate the primacy of whiteness and dislocate “questionably ethnic” people. Interrogating the racial and rhetorical labors of “Where are you from?” shifts the query from the status of a microaggression to a powerful practice of racialization.

Thoreau’s Stoicism inLetters to Various Persons: The Spiritual Direction of Harrison Blake

ABSTRACTIn the present contribution, the author contends, first, that “the perfect piece of Stoicism” that Emerson wanted to make out of Thoreau’s philosophical correspondence with his disciple Harrison Blake in Letters to Various Persons (1865) was neither concerned with a personality stereotype, as Sophia Thoreau feared, nor with the specifically Stoic way of living, as Richardson and Risinger have claimed in response. This first edition of Thoreau’s correspondence was in fact meant to be representative of that generally philosophical “art of living well” to which Thoreau was entirely committed. Second, the author provides a comparative analysis of Thoreau’s philosophical letters to his pupil and Seneca’s epistolary with Lucilius, in order to ascertain precisely how Thoreau’s letter-writing itself, apart from Emerson’s framing of it, might have been informed by his knowledge and interest in Stoic epistolary practices.

Editor's Note

HAWTHORNE, SPEAKING THROUGH “COVERDALE,” describes a fictionalized failed utopian community in 1840s Massachusetts. History is filled by the wreckage of good ideas shattered on the shoals of human frailty, ego, and miscalculation. But as Hawthorne suggests, important things may be learned by examining lost hopes. Perhaps a dream is resurrected. “A Missed Opportunity in the Catholic War on Poverty: Chicago's Archdiocesan Inter-Parish Movement” by Kevin Ryan offers an analysis of a failed effort in the 1960s to bring together poor inner-city parishes and affluent city and suburban ones in a movement to learn from each other while fighting poverty and racism.But, Ryan notes, the effort came at one of the worst periods of racial tension in the city's history, as white ethnic neighborhoods sometimes reacted violently to the movement of Black citizens into their enclaves. The program's goal was to put teeth into the Catholic War on Poverty by allowing the poor and affluent parishes to work together on the challenges of income inequality and race. Sadly, these challenges remain, confounding our relations with one another.Daniel Garrison Brinton lived through a challenging time in Illinois a century before Chicago's racial crisis. As the surgeon in charge of the US Army General Hospital in Quincy, Brinton was relieved to escape the carnage of the Chancellorsville and Gettysburg battlefields but found much to keep him occupied supervising a five-building complex. Jonathan W. White and Michael Sparks have edited and annotated his letters home to Pennsylvania family. In his frank comments to relatives, Brinton recounts tensions in Quincy, a city and area he believed dominated by Democrats, various business ventures, efforts to get out the soldier vote in the 1864 election, and his use of the race card to break a strike by Irish washerwomen.Through strong scholarship and analysis, Wayne Duerkes takes us into an Ottawa general store as Illinois-Michigan Canal construction created an economic boom in the mid-1830s. “Conrad Seabaugh & Company: An Inside Look at an Illinois Hinterland Merchant” utilizes the day books kept by Seabaugh during the years he operated the business. Placing him in the context of his times’ business practices, Duerkes demonstrates not only the economic power of the canal project but the national economic conditions and Seabaugh's likely erratic business practices influencing the enterprise's success and failure. Merchants like Seabaugh, the author contends, played a prominent role in local economic development.Though touching two centuries of history, these articles share a common theme—challenge and response. As our state sails on into the twenty-first century, it is helpful, no, important, to never lose the lessons offered by the past.

Mapping violence onto the body of the ‘other’ in Julie Taymor's Titus (1999)

In Julie Taymor's film Titus (1999), which adapts Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, the Roman nation is both violated and violent. Taymor exposes the audience to different kinds of violence – intrafamilial, political, sexual, as well as revenge, infanticide, and racism – all of which are mapped onto characters who are othered by race, ethnicity, gender, or posthumous banishment. This article aims at exploring the relationship between othering and violence in the construction of nationhood. The one who others, the author contends, is also othered, because of the cycle of violence at stake in the film.

The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor by Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky

Reviewed by: The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor by Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky Juan Llamas-Rodriguez (bio) The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor by Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky. Duke University Press. 2020. 336 pages. $104.95 hardcover; $28.95 paper; also available in e-book. Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky begins her absorptive and accomplished monograph by describing in detail exemplary sequences from a range of different films that illustrate the key characteristics of what she calls the process genre. From A Visit to Peek Frean and Co.’s Biscuit Works (Cricks and Sharp, 1906) to El Velador (The Night Watchman, Natalia Almada, 2011), the variety and abundance of examples in this early section of the book reveal both the aims and ambition of Skvirsky’s project: to theorize a “phenomenon with which we are all familiar but that does not have a name.”1 She coins the term process genre to describe films that organize the representation of processes (usually production processes) into sequentially ordered series of steps. For Skvirsky, it is a ciné-genre since it achieves its fullest expression in moving image media by utilizing the medium’s “constitutive capacity to visually and analytically decompose movement and to curate its recomposition.”2 The process genre is also “a genre of modernity” insofar as its method for representing a way of doing something functions simultaneously “as an index of a mode of production” and “of the status and character of a people or civilization.”3 The process genre’s robust cultural life in the present, the author argues, marks a renewed anxiety and uncertainty about the conditions of human life in light of today’s significant changes in the organization and management of [End Page 200] production.4 In the process genre’s methodical representations of technique, Skvirsky finds a humanistic genre that commands fascination, glorifies labor, and allegorizes alternative national formations. The first two chapters of the book define what the process genre is, first extrinsically and then intrinsically. Chapter 1, “The Process Film in Context,” situates the ciné-genre within a longer tradition of processual syntax present in forms such as live demonstrations of crafts and pictorial instructions. Processual representation’s stability of form, the author contends, accounts for its persistence across multiple centuries and for a variety of functions. The chapter also differentiates the process genre from established categories of film analysis, including the industrial, educational, and ethnographic film. Skvirsky argues not only for considering the process genre as separate from these other types of films but also against subsuming the genre in a subdivision of these types. The process genre must be thought of as separate lest our theorization fails to seriously consider the genre’s anti-instrumentalist ethos as part of its distinctive politics. Chapter 2, “On Being Absorbed in Work,” analyzes the formal elements of the process genre’s most notable phenomenological aspect: its mesmerizing sense of absorption. Skvirsky establishes that the genre’s appeal cannot be reduced to an “operational aesthetic”— that is, the pleasure in understanding how things work— nor to a basic fascination with watching movement. Rather, it is the process film’s overarching narrative structures that drive its signature sense of absorption. The process film lies in the tension between the generic and the singular; though devised as a how-to, or a general protocol of a kind, the genre’s reliance on film’s indexicality means that each representation of a process is still unique, still a record of an unrepeatable past moment. By analyzing the famous “How People Make Crayons” segment of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (NET, 1968– 1970; PBS, 1971–2001), Skvirsky argues that the generic character of processual representation indeed holds the key to its absorptiveness. She then proposes three expositional discursive structures that the process film may deploy: surprise, suspense, or curiosity. Close readings of The Unstable Object (Daniel Eisenberg, 2011) and A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956) offer representative examples of these three discursive structures and how they can interact within a film. The author concludes by affirming the importance of narrative closure for the process genre. The spectator must realize that the narrative has answered all their lingering questions— that...

Give and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and the Pharmaceutical Industry in East Africa by Nitsan Chorev

Reviewed by: Give and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and the Pharmaceutical Industry in East Africa by Nitsan Chorev Jennifer Tappan Nitsan Chorev. Give and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and the Pharmaceutical Industry in East Africa. Princeton Studies in Global and Comparative Sociology. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019. xii + 305 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-691-19784-5) Nitsan Chorev’s Give and Take is an in-depth and well-researched comparative historical analysis of the kind of foreign aid that facilitated the development and growth of the pharmaceutical industry in East Africa. The study is framed as a contribution to debates over foreign aid and its efficacy. Shifting from a focus on quantity and statistical evaluations of success and failure, Give and Take instead [End Page 605] considers what kind of aid proves to be what Chorev terms “developmental.” Through an examination of the pharmaceutical sector, Chorev identifies the kind of assistance, which has the capacity to be developmental, as aid that specifically creates markets, provides monitoring as well as the mentoring needed to meet quality standards and market demand. One of the strengths of the analysis is the close attention to the specific economic, social, and political contexts, and local conditions. The value of education and global networks was, for example, featured throughout. Nor did the author ignore the importance of power. Rather, Chorev argues that the evidence from the pharmaceutical industries in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda illustrate just how crucial it is for aid recipients to actively negotiate, albeit from within the “shadows of power” (p. 10). The question of power is further implicated in the final discussion of why foreign aid must work with, rather than bypass, the state. The introductory chapter is followed by an examination of the shift toward generic drugs in East Africa and the Global South, focusing specifically on the rise of Indian pharmaceuticals in East Africa and multinational pharmaceutical companies’ unsuccessful attempts to maintain their market dominance. The rest of the book is divided into six chapters (followed by a conclusion), which document and compare the emergence and upgrading of pharmaceutical companies in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, respectively. The first set of chapters examine the period from the 1970s/1980s through the 1990s, and the second set focus on the initial decades of the twenty-first century—when global activism led to lowered costs and increased funding. Numerous insights emerge from Chorev’s close analysis of data collected from an array of sources, including interviews conducted in all three countries. The central findings support the argument that developmental aid was instrumental in both the emergence and growth of pharmaceutical industries in East Africa. The comparative analysis illustrates how distinctions between Kenya and Tanzania (particularly in the earlier period) led to very different outcomes and how those patterns continued to play out in more recent decades. For example, the decision to purchase locally manufactured drugs for “rations kits” in Kenya, but not in Tanzania or Uganda, was instrumental in the growth of the Kenyan industry and equally detrimental to the fledgling Tanzanian and virtually nonexistent Ugandan pharmaceutical sectors. Moreover, Chorev shows how this creation of a market, which expands significantly in the wake of HIV/AIDS, was only part of the equation. By monitoring to ensure quality standards, aid agencies helped to upgrade the industry, particularly in the context of limited state regulatory capacity. Mentorship and technology transfer were equally crucial for the companies that were able to expand and improve their production thereby increasing their market share and, in a few cases, reaching the highest international quality standards. My critiques are few and are offered with the caveat that I approach the text as a historian, not a sociologist. Although, the organization of the text features the specific trajectory of individual pharmaceutical companies, dividing the comparative case studies across two sets of individual chapters led to some redundancy [End Page 606] and diminished the force of the narrative. Specific facets of the pharmaceutical sector make it a more unique case than the author contends, potentially limiting the general applicability of the findings. The terminology monitoring and mentoring are unfortunate given the colonial history of development in Africa. Finally, the...

Enhancing Personhood in the Care of Older Adults with Dementia: A Biblical Perspective.

Using a biblical worldview, this article develops a philosophical discussion about what comprises an individual's personhood. The author contends for the perspective of a person as a human being created in the image of God based on who he or she is, not on the basis of how well he or she functions. Understanding the biblical concept of personhood allows the establishment of meaningful relationships with people with dementia, resulting in compassionate, quality care.

Cultural Interference [Microwave Bytes

Examines what the author contends are the differences most frequently noted between digital and RF electronics. I have recently encountered another cultural conflict in the technological zone of optical communications— more specifically, the process of “detecting” an optical signal to obtain a microwave output. This is a world where the “RF” is light, and “intermediate frequency” (IF) is gigahertz. Despite having the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum chart and Maxwell‘s equations rammed down my throat from a relatively early age, I have always been fascinated by the “gap” that exists between where microwaves give way to light waves. It is an enormous gap, an unexplored EM ocean, comprising maybe about five orders of magnitude of wavelength.

تشكيل الفضاء الروائي في رواية مابعد الحداثة

The modernist retreat of the author from his/her prerogated space as “authorial persona” precipitated the radical changes in the nature and form fictional space that bifurcates into narratival and narrational. This evacuation of the authorial persona space, effected by the cultural pressures that render “totalization” difficult, transfers the interpretation responsibility to the reader. Postmodernist fictions, in this respect, push the reader to occupy more space in the narrative by leaving sizable gaps in it; metafiction presents itself as a logical outcome of this process. When the reader has secured a place within the narrative ontology, the metafictional author contends with the reader for the occupation of fictional space. This results into the foregrounding of the fictional space and fictionality in general. The dynamics of this process relates to a consideration of the space of the speaker, the narrational space of fiction. This paper discusses the issue of postmodernist fictional space with reference to pertinent theories and relevant postmodern novels as examples that clarify the discussion.

Kenelm Digby on Quantity as Divisibility

Abstract Kenelm Digby’s Two Treatises, of the Nature of Bodies and of the Nature of Mans Soule (1644) defends quite an idiosyncratic approach to mind-body dualism. In his use of the divisibility argument to prove that the human soul cannot be a material substance, Digby takes an uncompromising stand for merely potential material parts. In his Treatise of Bodies the present article focuses on the mode of construction of the definition of quantity as divisibility and on its links to two distinct fundamental arguments against the actual material parts doctrine. The first, positive, argument consists of a semantic reason drawn from Digby’s general doctrine of meaning, whereas the second, negative, argument, addresses the traditional question of the composition of the continuum. The latter, the author contends, does not build on the medieval controversy itself, but on Digby’s opposition to Galileo’s claim of indivisibilism in his Dialogues Concerning Two Sciences (1638).

A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans

Reviewed by: A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans Selena Sanderfer (bio) A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland. By Sydney Nathans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 313. $29.95 cloth) One of the most difficult tasks for historians is to uncover the voices of peoples who have faced erasure or left little evidence that has survived in the historical record. In A Mind to Stay: White Plantations, Black Homeland, Sydney Nathans unearthed the lives of Paul Hargis, a family patriarch who experienced the transition from slavery to freedom, and the peoples of Cassimore, the all Black community that he and other formerly enslaved people helped to establish in Hale County, Alabama, after the Civil War. Hargis left few clues about his life: a Freedmen's Bureau contract signed with an 'X' in 1865, his place of residence in census records, and a deed documenting that he purchased land in the 1880s. In order to elucidate Hargis's story, the author oftentimes had to investigate him indirectly and comb the thousands of papers left by his former owner, Paul Cameron, for greater insight. Nathans has completed an immense undertaking in reconstructing Cassimore by collecting oral histories, reconstructing family trees, and perusing the masses of public records referencing the community's longtime residents. The backdrop to these experiences is the land itself. Culminating with the modern civil rights movement, the story of the land spans the one hundred seventy-year history of the residents' enslavement in the antebellum period, their attempts to become economically self-sufficient in the postwar era, community development during the age of Jim Crow, and the challenges of commercialized farming and outward migration in the twentieth century. Nathan contends that Black residents, who chose to stay, connected landownership to true freedom. His work is "an account of the meaning of land to those who lived on it, and how the land's role and meaning changed over time" (p. 14). A Mind to Stay covers the economic, political, and social history of Cassimore, including people such as Tom Ruffin, a formerly enslaved person, who by 1900 was the largest Black landowner in the county, and Ned Forrest Hargress, a landowner, church elder, and [End Page 363] rumored son of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Also included are residents who challenged racial and economic injustices such as James Lyles, a preacher and civil rights leader, who along with his wife, Mildred, began a local Black credit union and the Alabama Farmer's Cooperative in the 1960s, and Alice Sledge Hargress, who in 1964 at the age of fifty mobilized during the civil rights movement and, like thousands of other Blacks in Hale County, registered to vote for the first time. Some contention might be made at the author's attempts at emotional conjecture, applied at times to Cameron and to Hargis. Nathans portrays Paul Cameron as a paternalistic slaveowner, one who cares for his enslaved workers more than profits. The author contends, "Indeed, within bondage, as Paul Hargis and his siblings could testify, the fair measure of 'humanity' was comparative, and by comparison, the Camerons and Bennehans of the early nineteenth century stood high among their peers" (p. 98). Yet, there are also accounts in which Cameron exhibits the demoralizing characteristics of southern slave owners. In 1865 one of his former bondsman called him a "hard Master—yielding short supplies of all sort & granting no indulgences" (p. 98). An absentee owner to many of his slaves, it can also be said that he was driven by profit, condoned contemporary tortures, and always displayed bias toward the word of his white employees. Although possibly contrived, most of the assertions about Cameron's motivations, Hargis's concerns, and the rationale of both enslaved people and owners, are reasonably surmised. Within this microhistory of one Black community in Alabama, readers will gain insight into and recognize themes of westward migration, Black resistance to economic and political subjugation, and southern genealogy. A Mind to Stay will also begin to allow readers to understand how for Black Americans living on family land provided a sense of pride, self-determination, and sanctuary from Jim Crow that cannot...

Joining gangs: living on the edge?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to disseminate street gang research by Hesketh (2018) that has identified a major aspect of young disenfranchised people’s attraction to street gangs as edgework risk-taking. The study which sought to identify differences between those who joined street gangs compared to those who abstained on Merseyside. Design/methodology/approach Two samples were taken from locations within the five boroughs of Merseyside, the first comprising of 22 participants (18–25) involved in street gangs as active and ex-members with a second sample consisting of 22 participants (18–25) who had completely abstained from street gang membership. Data were collected through adoption of biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM) (Wengraf, 2001), with analysis taking the form of Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) version of grounded theory. Findings Of the many findings that surrounded what was identified as the core category/central phenomena of “coping with limited opportunity” it emerged that marginalisation and austerity were contributing to increasing inequality and institutional constraint on young people on Merseyside. As a result, many of the 18–25 year young men felt powerless, lacking identity and aspirational drive. Joining a gang thus became not only a way in which control was seized back from such constraint through criminal risk-taking behaviour, what Lyng (1990) has termed “edgework”, but also a means in which many of the young men interviewed gained an identity of being “bad” from which intrinsically pleasurable seductive and criminally erotic sensations were derived (Katz, 1988). Moreover, a relatively new version of edgework was also identified, even though by way of male testimony. Called “vicarious edgework”, the phenomena sees young women drawn to male gang members (“bad boys”) to derive the excitement of risk indirectly while remaining law abiding. In sum, the paper highlights a concerning socio-psychological and key motivating driver triggered by marginalisation. Research limitations/implications Study samples were all male. Thus, any observations on the vicarious edgework aspect of risk taking requires further research involving both young men and women. Practical implications The paper highlights the need for more understanding of the allure of risk-taking. The paper identifies a new form of female edgework. The paper draws attention to gang membership and non-membership on Merseyside, an area that has been greatly neglected by gangs’ studies in the UK. The paper describes a novel way of data collection using an adoption of BNIM. Social implications In sum, the paper highlights a concerning socio-psychological and key motivating driver triggered by marginalisation. This, the author contends has been largely neglected by risk factor focussed interventions that largely concentrate on the idea of rational choice theory and sociological positivism. Originality/value The paper attempts to disseminate original street gang research by Hesketh (2018) that has identified a major aspect of young disenfranchised people’s attraction to street gangs as edgework risk-taking.

Deciphering the landscape of international humanitarian law in the Asia-Pacific

AbstractThe 70th anniversary of the adoption of the Geneva Conventions on 12 August 1949 provided an opportunity for reflection on international humanitarian law (IHL). This article continues that reflection and presents some fresh scholarship about and from the Asia-Pacific region. The region's plurality leads to a complex and diverse landscape where there is no single “Asia-Pacific perspective on IHL” but there are instead many approaches and trajectories. This fragmented reality is, however, not a mess of incoherence and contradiction. In the following pages, the author argues for and justifies the following assessments. The first is that the norm of humanity in armed conflict, which underpins IHL, has deep roots in the region. This, to some extent, explains why there is no conceptual resistance to IHL, in the way that exists with the human rights doctrine. The second is that there has been meaningful participation of certain States from the region in IHL law-making. Thirdly, some Asia-Pacific States are among those actively contributing to the development of new or emerging areas relevant to IHL, such as outer space, cyberspace and the protection of the environment in armed conflict. This leads to the unavoidable issue of contradiction. How is it that in a region where such findings can be made (i.e., where there is discernible positivity towards the norm of humanity in armed conflict), there are so many armed conflicts with very serious IHL violations emerging? Should we reflect in a more nuanced way on “norm internalization” and “root causes”? These issues will be considered in the second section of the article. This examination leads to a third and final section, a concluding reflection on what all of this reveals about IHL in the Asia-Pacific. The real challenge for progressive humanitarianism, the author contends, is to traverse disciplines and to build on work done in, on and from the region in order to develop more informed and nuanced approaches to understanding the countries and societies of the region, moving on to study the process of norm internalization, and then developing creative and meaningful strategies for strengthening the links between that internalization, actual conduct on the ground, and norm socialization in the wider community.

Resisting Assimilation to the Melting Pot:

The melting pot metaphor suggest that people from different backgrounds come to the United States and through the process of assimilation adapt to a new lifestyle integrating smoothly into the dominant culture. This article argues that immigrants from diverse cultural and ethnic groups that try to keep some of their cultural traditions may encounter conflict when trying to adapt to their life in the new context. The author contends for a cultural curriculum of the home endorsing family cultural values and traditions tha is overlooked by schools and educators, disregarding its potential for enhancing children’s learning process and academic achievement.

Hybrid Telecoaching for Corporate Speech Training and Potential Applications to Clinical Practice

Purpose The purpose of this article was to describe a model for “hybrid speech telecoaching” developed for a Fortune 100 organization and offer a “thought starter” on how clinicians might think of applying these corporate strategies within future clinical practice. Conclusion The author contends in this article that corporate telecommunications and best practices gleaned from software development engineering teams can lend credibility to e-mail, messaging apps, phone calls, or other emerging technology as viable means of hybrid telepractice delivery models and offer ideas about the future of more scalable speech-language pathology services.