Chance Encounter Research Articles

A chance encounter: making meaning from coincidence

A chance encounter: making meaning from coincidence

Book Review: Roberto Castillo, African Transnational Mobility in China, Africans on the Move, London: Routledge, 2021

The prologue to this volume of the Routledge African Studies, entitled African Transnational Mobility in China, Africans on the Move, describes Roberto Castillo's experiences in China, focusing on a chance encounter with a man named Myers during a train journey. Myers, originally from Sierra Leone, shared his journey to China in search of opportunities, highlighting the challenges faced by foreigners in a new country. Castillo reflects on the uncertainties and difficulties Myers encountered in China, expressing concern for his well-being. This encounter with Myers and subsequent news events of a demonstration involving Nigerians in China, led the author to ponder the complex dynamics of immigration and cultural integration in China.

Women’s search for public space and leisure in Agra: cots, courtyards, and riverbank

ABSTRACT Historians have often highlighted the centrality of bazaars and the streets in urban public life in India as a space for politics and mobilisation. Historically, these bazaars and streets have been the domain of men, while spaces created by dominant urban planning logics like sequestered parks and enclosed marketplaces are marked by exclusion across various axes. Where do women then find opportunities for leisure, solidarity, chance encounter, or discursive politics? The paper explores this question through a case study of a low-income riverside settlement in Agra using ethnographic field work conducted in 2019. This included observations, interviews, and group discussions with residents, community leaders, and police officials, and a systematic review of local and national news reports. The paper finds that for women, public spaces like riverbanks, streets, and large parks are characterised by a ‘mahaul’ (translated here as affective environment) that is risky and ‘kharab’ (immoral or corrupt) due to their sticky affective association with harassment, transgression, romance, and the risk of elopements. Instead, women find opportunities for leisure and sociality by coming together on cots in shared courtyards or rooftops within their neighbourhood – these form their ‘enclosed outside’ where they find opportunities for sociality, leisure (which exists simultaneously with work), and discussion. By centring women’s experiences, vocabularies, and everyday relationship with public spaces, and underscoring the register of ‘affect’ in these experiences, this paper makes an important contribution to the growing literature on gendering right to the city and the feminist argument for women’s right to leisure spaces. The paper also centres the importance of local built elements like shared courtyards within a neighbourhood especially for women, with implications for urban planning and design.

The Archetype of the Anima and the Phenomenon of Anima Projection in Wilkie Collins’s Basil

First published in 1852, Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel Basil offers a very fascinating portrayal of anima projection through the story of an aristocratic young man against the backdrop of Victorian England. The protagonist of the novel falls head over heels in love with a mysterious dark lady called Margaret after a chance encounter on an omnibus. Following a hasty marriage with strange conditions, he spends a whole year in her company – neglecting his own family – until he discovers that he was deceived by Margaret who had been having an affair with her father’s clerk Mannion. This article argues that the intensity of the connection Basil feels for Margaret can be attributed to what the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung called anima projection. Jung defined the archetype of the anima as the feminine element in a man and suggested that it was knowable only through projections that contained our own psychic contents. When we project our anima or animus on to a person, our perception of that person is fundamentally altered. As Basil’s case aptly illustrates, when the anima is projected, it is almost impossible to recognize it in us since it appears outside of us, embodied in another human being. Drawing on insights from Jungian psychoanalysis, this article will examine the archetype of the anima and the phenomenon of anima projection in Wilkie Collins’s Basil.

The Dalit Panthers: A Voice From the Below

This article investigates the process of the domestication of ideas by the Dalit intellectuals leading to its radical assertion of ‘Dalit Consciousness’. A chance encounter with an article about the US Black Panthers in the Time magazine proved to be a wake-up call for the subalterns in India. The present paper centres around the ideologies adopted by the Dalit Panthers, the syncretism of ideas of B. R. Ambedkar, Jyotirao Phule and Karl Marx. Delving deeper into Ambedkar’s American academic background and his intellectual odyssey at Columbia University during the Harlem Renaissance, the article will look into the politics of emancipation, exchanges and similarities of both the intellectuals, W. E. B. Du Bois and B. R. Ambedkar as well as the influence of the Black Power movement on the Dalit movement and its literature. Tracing the trajectory of intersectional political and ideological diffusion between the two movements, this article, in addition to the above observations, will draw parallels by underlining the texts and themes of oppression present in both caste and race.

“You Allowed My Body To Do What It Needed”: Supporting Birthing Persons Through Conscious Empowerment

A midwife's chance encounter with a former client demonstrates the importance of supporting birthing persons through conscious empowerment.

If only we could, Call the Midwife! Gender, class and the hegemonic power of television costume

The starting point for this article was a chance encounter with an episode of the BBC’s Call the Midwife (‘Episode 12.7’ 2023) whilst visiting my elderly mother on a Sunday evening. The brutal and graphic portrayal of women’s health issues and abject poverty in Poplar, East London during the latter part of the 1960s elicited feelings of warmth and nostalgia in my mother, not anger or frustration at the lack of progress for working-class women like her with regard to some of the issues represented, this was difficult for me to understand. Indeed, as recently as August 2022, the UK government published data that confirmed that there remains a gender gap in healthcare; the 51 per cent of the UK population that is female will spend a significant portion of their life in poor health compared to men, and this is further compounded for those women that live in poverty. What is it about this text that produces a form of soporific nostalgia that seems to dissolve feminist recognition that women’s health is still an issue, thereby nullifying the drive for change? This article suggests that the reasons for such reactions are symbolized through and within the costuming. The language of clothing employed, particularly the use of print and colour saturation work to render the clothing items as meaningless within the text, actually negating the power of the narrative in relation to the intersection of gender and social class. The costumes do however produce a different type of meaning at the margins of the text that articulate not only the production team’s creativity but also their subjective understanding about class dressing that, it is argued, is in part responsible for producing the gendered form of alienation embodied by my mother and others like her. This article employs critical theory across cultural studies, sociology, film studies and the philosophy of language as a useful and emerging cross disciplinary framework to examine costume and costume drama. Applying theories that may appear disconnected to costuming is a means by which to suggest that the shift in perceptions of working class sexuality and relationships experienced by the working class during the 1950s and 1960s and represented within Call the Midwife via the costuming has had far reaching effects on gendered class identity and consequently on contesting the negative material effects of the current UK class system including the issue of women’s health.

Photospheric magnetic flux and coronal emission properties of small-scale bright and faint loops in the quiet Sun

Context. The study explores the photospheric magnetic properties of bright and faint small-scale loop systems in the solar atmosphere of the quiet Sun, also known as X-ray or coronal bright points. Aims. To understand how plasma confined in small-scale loops is heated to million degrees, the loop-associated photospheric and coronal magnetic flux properties should be known because the magnetic field is generally assumed to be the main energy source or waveguide. This and follow-up studies aim to provide a qualitative and quantitative investigation of these magnetic properties and their impact on the heating of plasma to million degrees. Methods. We used quasi-temporal imaging observations taken in the 193 Å channel of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) and line-of-sight magnetograms from the Helioseismic Magnetic Imager (HMI) on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The observations cover 48 h of data at a 6 min cadence with a field of view of 400″ × 400″, from which 90 loop systems (of which 83 are CBPs) were extracted and analysed in full detail. Results. We obtain the evolution properties of both faint and bright small-scale loop systems (SSLSs) related to either magnetic flux emergence or magnetic flux coalescence and a chance encounter of magnetic fluxes. We estimate the lifetimes of the two loop systems and the impact of the magnetic flux evolution on their life span. The photospheric magnetic flux associated with SSLSs confining plasma heated to coronal temperatures is found to cover at least two orders of magnitude from 3.0 × 1018 Mx to 1.8 × 1020 Mx. The analysis of the maximum intensity of SSLSs during their lifetime shows numerous spikes of intensity that are identified as small (a few AIA pixels) compact brightenings associated with cancelling magnetic fluxes. Most of them are identified as microflares. The intensity flux range of these spikes is reported. The coronal intensity flux evolution of SSLSs is strongly correlated with the total unsigned photospheric magnetic flux evolution when there is little or no contamination in the selected field of view of the SSLSs by unrelated magnetic fluxes or intensity features. We report on the footpoint separation and change during the lifetime of the faint and bright SSLSs. The magnetic flux emergence and decay rates of some of the SSLSs are also provided in this study. Conclusions. The power-law index α of the logarithm of the total unsigned magnetic flux and the total intensity for the full lifetime of SSLSs is 1.10 ± 0.02, compared with 1.14 ± 0.03 for a previous study of the whole disc in the same intensity range (Fe XII 193–195 Å). This indicates that the emission of the corona of the quiet Sun at ∼1.25 MK is mostly confined to small-scale loops (some brighter, others fainter). Therefore, it is imperative to understand the mechanism that heats the plasma in these loops.

Foreign Intimacies and Political Pasts in Paula Markovitch’s El actor principal (2019)

This article studies the intersection of the protagonists’ basic emotions, bold gestures, and defiantly occupied places in Paula Markovitch’s El actor principal (2019) , which, in turn, reveals the tensions between their precarious livelihoods and subtle forms of agency. Markovitch’s fourth film focuses on a chance encounter in Berlin between a Mexican non-professional actor and former petty criminal, Luis, and a laundry room worker and Kosovo war survivor, Azra. Unable to communicate in the languages they speak (Spanish for Luis and Albanian for Azra), they begin to generate a unique intersubjectivity where contradictions make sense. Such communicative efforts, failures, and breakthroughs between the main characters paradoxically succeed in illuminating the deepest quandaries of their broken selves, emotional states, and political struggles of the past. As the protagonists’ exchange about personal past and present encumbrances grows increasingly dependent upon their gestures, their emotional bonding intensifies as well. Such a bonding ultimately sheds light on Markovitch’s complex aesthetic explorations of social marginality and resistance.

Translation and Transmission

Translation and Transmission

Spectroscopic survey of faint planetary-nebula nuclei – II. The subdwarf O central star of Fr 2-30

ABSTRACT Fr 2-30 = PN? G126.8−15.5 is a faint emission nebula, hosting a 14th-mag central star that we identify here for the first time. Deep Hα and [O iii] images reveal a roughly elliptical nebula with dimensions of at least 22 arcmin × 14 arcmin, fading into a surrounding network of even fainter emission. Optical spectrograms of the central star show it to have a subdwarf O spectral type, with a Gaia parallax distance of 890 pc. A model-atmosphere analysis gives parameters of $T_{\rm eff}=60\, 000$ K, log g = 6.0, and a low helium content of nHe/nH = 0.0017. The location of the central star in the log g–Teff plane is inconsistent with a post-asymptotic-giant-branch evolutionary status. Two alternatives are that it is a helium-burning post-extreme-horizontal-branch object, or a hydrogen-burning post-red-giant-branch star. In either case, the evolutionary ages are so long that a detectable planetary nebula (PN) should not be present. We find evidence for a variable radial velocity (RV), suggesting that the star is a close binary. However, there are no photometric variations, and the spectral-energy distribution rules out a companion earlier than M2 V. The RVs of the star and surrounding nebula are discordant, and the nebula lacks typical PN morphology. We suggest that Fr 2-30 is a ‘PN mimic’ – the result of a chance encounter between the hot sdO star and an interstellar cloud. However, we note the puzzling fact that there are several nuclei of genuine PNe that are known to be in evolutionary states similar to that of the Fr 2-30 central star.

A chance encounter leads into immunogenomics

A chance encounter leads into immunogenomics

The Stoner Book Club

Abstract With decades of newspaper reporting behind him, the author took a mid-life pivot to teaching that started as a high school substitute. He describes how a student's question about life in the eighties triggers a flashback to a day that gave his life meaning and direction after a chance encounter with a group of troublemakers. They offer him a nonfiction book about a band that seemed like they were from another world. As a result, the author grew wiser that day and decided he would try to change the world as a journalist, writing about people and places that needed discovery. The story proves inspiration can come from the most unlikely place— and all it takes is one book or one song for life to change course.

Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun

Reviewed by: Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun Gershon Bacon Natalia Aleksiun. Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press, 2021. xii + 329 pp. A chance encounter with the name of Polish Jewish historian Majer Bałaban, previously unknown to her, proved transformative for Natalia Aleksiun in her choice of career, and ultimately resulted in the excellent volume here under review. Conscious History is a delicately executed portrait of a small, but significant cohort of the interwar generation of Polish Jews, but it provides the reader with much more. It is a masterful and erudite summary of the writing of Polish Jewish history from its beginnings in the nineteenth century until the Holocaust. The chapter structure of the book is a felicitous combination of chronological and thematic approaches to the subject at hand. Chapter 1, “Beginnings,” speaks of the initial stage of historical research on Polish Jewry, usually by amateurs. Chapter 2, “The Making of Professional Jewish Historians,” is a fascinating portrayal of the first generation of university-trained Jewish historians, focusing on those scholars who played a crucial role in training the young historians of the interwar generation: Majer Bałaban, Ignacy (Yitzhak) Schiper, and Mojżesz (Moshe) Schorr. One point that stands out in her narrative is the centrality of Galician institutions (as well as the University of Vienna) in the formation of this first generation, in which another noted historian of Jewish origin, Szymon Askenazy, served as an enabler, even though his personal historical views as an integrationist differed from the more nationally minded scholars of the younger generation whom he encouraged. Chapter 3, “Becoming Polish Mainstream,” begins Aleksiun’s coverage of her main subject, namely the generation trained and active in the interwar period, now centered in Warsaw, with the leading role played by Bałaban, both in Warsaw University and in the Institute of Jewish Studies. Bałaban’s dual appointment at the two institutions created a formal scholarly setting of great consequence, enabling him to train over sixty male and female students of Jewish history who would earn university diplomas. He would become the first and only professor of Jewish history in a Polish university in the years before the Holocaust. Aleksiun rightly puts this phenomenon in its proper perspective. At the time that Bałaban and his cadre started their activity, the only comparable enterprises were the chair held by Salo Baron at Columbia University, the fledgling Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University, and a lone professorship in Jewish studies at the University of Madrid. As in the previous generation, here too a noted Polish historian of Jewish origin, Marceli Handelsman, gave important support to Bałaban’s professorship and to university-level teaching of Jewish history. The final two chapters of the book are thematic in nature. Chapter 4, “Beyond the Ivory Tower,” as its name implies, offers a wide-ranging survey of the activities of the university-trained young generation of Jewish historians. For the most part excluded from a career in Polish academia, or in state or non-Jewish institutions, [End Page 196] they worked in Jewish high schools, carried on their research, particularly in local history, and functioned as public intellectuals, publishing articles on popular history in numerous Jewish periodicals in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. In their work, the line between the academic and popular remained constantly blurred. History was a tool in the fight to define the relationship of Jews to Poland and to the Poles, and was a struggle about the present and future no less than the study of the past. In view of this trend, the chapter examines such things as the use of Jewish history in parliamentary debates, in the work of Jewish army chaplains, and in remaking the curriculum for training rabbis. The final chapter, “Themes and Trends of Historical Enquiry,” well illustrates the historical agenda and changing approaches of the younger generation, among other things, their growing emphasis on economic history. A substantive epilogue and an extensive bibliography round out this impressive study. While Aleksiun’s discussion demonstrates a progressive academization and...

Listen to the shopkeeper

His mosquito control project heading for failure, a field entomologist recalls how a chance encounter led to a Eureka moment.

I'm Your Boy: Dan Fogelberg and Peoria, Illinois

I'm Your BoyDan Fogelberg and Peoria, Illinois Ray E. Boomhower (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Dan Fogelberg in concert, May 1984. Photo by MediaPunch Inc./Alamy Stock Photo On a snowy Christmas Eve, 1975, the Fogelberg family of Peoria, Illinois, celebrated by enjoying some Irish coffees. Unfortunately, they were missing an important ingredient—whipping cream. The Fogelberg's youngest son, Dan, a musician who had released his second solo album (Souvenirs) the year before on Epic Records, and was visiting for the holidays, headed out to fill the order. With most stores closed, he ended up at the Convenient [End Page 231] Food Mart, located at the top of Abington Street hill. Browsing the aisles, Fogelberg came across someone he knew—Jill Anderson, his onetime girlfriend during their school days at Woodruff High School, class of 1969. A schoolteacher in Chicago, Anderson had come to the store in search of another holiday staple: eggnog. The two decided to catch up on each other's lives, sharing a six–pack of beer (Olympia) in Anderson's car before parting ("We drank a toast to innocence/We drank a toast to now/We tried to reach beyond the emptiness, but neither one knew how"). As he started to go to rejoin his family, Fogelberg, filled with memories of the pain of their breakup long ago, noticed that the snow had turned to rain.1 Five years later, the chance encounter in the city on the Illinois River had been turned by Fogelberg into a song, "Same Old Lang Syne," released as a single in November 1980 and later included on his seventh album, The Innocent Age, a double LP released in 1981. As he noted in a 1997 interview, he did not usually write fictional songs, preferring to express his own experiences and philosophy, trying to write stories with his music. "If you do it well and honestly, it will connect with other people," Fogelberg said. "Same Old Lang Syne" peaked at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and since its release has become a regular part of the holiday season, played along with other traditional Christmas songs. Although Fogelberg believed the song was important, he had written it "as somewhat of a joke, you know, the first four verses of that were just funny. It really happened, obviously, but I wrote it as a joke one afternoon." Fogelberg sought to stretch himself as a songwriter, seeing if he could do a song "about nothing, about something so inconsequential." As he continued to work on the song, however, its tenderness struck him deeply. "And it started taking on a life of its own," Fogelberg admitted. Powered at its end by a Michael Brecker saxophone solo to the tune of the Scottish folk song "Auld Lang Syne," a New Year's Eve staple, Fogelberg's tune has engendered both heartfelt emotion and derision from listeners. For examples, while fellow singer/songwriter Jackson Browne said he hated to admit it, but the song made him cry, as it "encapsulated the passing of time and the revisiting of former hopes and dreams," a Chicago newspaperman lambasted the song as "the worst thing to ever come out of Peoria."2 Whatever one's opinion about "Same Old Lang Syne," it showcased the close ties between Fogelberg, who died at the age of fifty-six from prostate cancer, and his hometown, a quintessential midwestern community known best, perhaps, for the ubiquitous question about the viability of everything [End Page 232] from plays to consumer products, "Will it play in Peoria?" It was in Peoria where Fogelberg began his rise to musical stardom in a career that began in the early 1970s and lasted until the 2000s, spawning several platinum (a million copies sold) and multiplatinum records, as well as such memorable hit songs as "Part of the Plan," "The Power of Gold," "Longer," "Heart Hotels," "Run for the Roses," and "Leader of the Band." Peoria has remembered its native son, honoring his memory and that of his family by renaming the street near the convenience store he made famous with "Same Old Lang Syne" Fogelberg Parkway in 2008...

Grief, Loss, and Restoration on America's Last Prairie

Grief, Loss, and Restoration on America's Last Prairie John O'Keefe (bio) Sometime in the mid-1990s I took my family on a camping trip to Fort Robinson in the northwestern corner of Nebraska. On the way home we decided to take an alternative route back to Omaha, turning south on what in retrospect was probably Nebraska Highway 27. Within minutes of turning, we found ourselves in the middle of an implausible expanse of grass and sky, rolling seemingly endlessly in every direction. As a child of the East Coast, I felt that we were driving across an ocean, riding up and down undulating swells, which, while stable and unmoving, seemed to possess the energy of water. "What is this place?" I remember thinking, in somewhat stunned reverence. "Where are we?" It turns out we were in the Sandhills. As we drove along, I resolved that I would one day come back. It took me more than twenty years. Life often takes us down unexpected paths. In the space between my first encounter with the Sandhills and my eventual return, I built my career as a theology professor at Creighton University, raised a family, and slowly, over time, changed from a coastal resident to an inhabitant of the Great Plains. In the early years of the first decade of the 21st century, I had an ecological awakening and found my intellectual interests shifting from the study of ancient Christianity to the study of the newly emerging field of eco-theology. Along the way, a failed bid at academic administration opened an unexpected opportunity to merge my life-long hobbyist dabbling in photography and filmmaking with my theological training. Thus, in the summer of 2016, after learning how to make documentaries from very talented teachers, something inside said, "It's time to go back, this time as a filmmaker." The Sandhills is (most people refer to the Sandhills in the singular) one of the last intact prairies on earth. Recently, two scholars at the University of Nebraska published a study assessing the health of the world's grasslands (Schlotz and Twidell 2022). The study begins with a series of declarative sentences that deliver, quite unsentimentally, some very bad news: • Grasslands are the most imperiled terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. • Grasslands have experienced a far greater rate of global conversion than forests, yet forestry conservation is far ahead in terms of global advocacy and action to maintain large and intact forested regions. • Grasslands have relatively little federal or international protection, corresponding to the least amount of safe operating space to anthropogenic pressures driving global change. • Grassland biodiversity is the most threatened especially endemic avian diversity which has been the most severely affected with more than 60% already lost since the 1970s in North American grasslands. • Yet, grasslands play an important role in carbon sequestration mitigating the effects of climate change. Consequently, the ecosystem services unique to grasslands, particularly those beyond agricultural production are threatened, especially those ecosystem services that are scale-dependent and require large regional connectivity. The article goes on to assess the health of the remaining grasslands and their locations. There are seven such places left, representing a tiny fraction of their former expanse. One of these is the Sandhills of Nebraska, which the authors describe as "the most intact temperate grassland region in the world." [End Page 1] When I first moved to Nebraska, I knew nothing about grasslands and their significance. My chance encounter with the Sandhills began to change that. I found myself reading about prairies and learning the names of some of the most import grasses such as switchgrass, little bluestem, and big bluestem. The work of Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, and Wes Jackson all provided intellectual context for my gradual realization that while I lived in an actual place called Nebraska, I also inhabited a mythic Nebraska, or more specifically, a mythic prairie. The tallgrass prairies that stunned Lewis and Clark, that Willa Cather described so lyrically, and that Laura Ingalls Wilder made iconic in the American imagination, have all been destroyed. They now exist mostly in our minds. When my friends from the East Coast jokingly asked me, "How's it going out...

The Moores Lab & ACRD-Advanced Biomaterials and Chemical Synthesis Team.

This invited Team Profile was created by the Moores Lab at the Centre in Green Chemistry and Catalysis at McGill University and the Advanced Biomaterials and Chemical Synthesis (ABCS) team of the Aquatic and Crop Resource Development (ACRD) research centre of the National Research Council of Canada in Montréal. They recently published an article on the first solvent-free method for the synthesis of cellulose and chitin nanocrystals. "High-Humidity Shaker Aging to Access Chitin and Cellulose Nanocrystals", T. Jin, T. Liu, F. Hajiali, M. Santos, Y. Liu, D. Kurdyla, S. Régnier, S. Hrapovic, E. Lam, A. Moores, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2022, e202207006; Angew. Chem. 2022, e202207006.

Black Joy: Love, Intimacy, and Sexuality Amongst Black Intellectuals in the Academy

When I was in graduate school, I met a Black man! Before I knew his name, or anything about him, I was drawn to his energy. It was a chance meeting outside the Black Cultural Center. Little did I know then, God had a plan for this man and I. Eventually, I met this man. His name was Lewis. Only later did I remember the chance encounter. At first, we connected professionally based on our shared research about the Black community in Columbus, and we met … at the Black Cultural Center. The chance meeting, and our first meeting, however, would set the stage for our intellectual triumphs, professional challenges, community strength and most importantly, our shared love, intimacy and sexuality. While there is a body of literature that has examined the lived experiences of Black scholars in the academy, none of it has elucidated Black love, intimacy, and sexuality amongst two Black academics in Predominately White Institutions (Christian, 2017; Hendrix, 2021; Kuradusenge-McLeod, 2021; McFerguson, 2022; Mukandi & Bond, 2019; Stewart, 2020; Ward Randolph, 2010). This autoethnographic article explored love, intimacy and sexuality in the academy amongst two Black scholars. In this treatise, the author's musings focus on the love, intimacy and sexuality she shared with her late husband, a political scientist. She illuminated the significance of love, intimacy and sexuality in fostering productivity in the academy, how African American intellectuals addressed challenges through intimacy, and how love, intimacy and sexuality served as a protective and restorative shield that strengthened their communal bond in the hostile environment often accosting Black faculty in higher education which can amount to "state-based racist violence" (Mukundi & Bond, 2019, p. 254). In turn, shared love, intimacy and sexuality amongst these two academics highlights the need for them in the lives of Black faculty as a buffer against institutional violence in PWIs (Varel, 2018).

A physician’s grief observed

![Figure][1]</img> Palliative care interested me early in my career, even though there were no formal training options available at the time. After residency, a chance encounter with a colleague led me to a palliative care role, where I learned as I went. I was good at symptom management and