Conceptual Site Research Articles

"If I am native to anything": Settler Colonial Studies and Western American Literature

"If I am native to anything"Settler Colonial Studies and Western American Literature Alex Trimble Young (bio) and Lorenzo Veracini (bio) In "The Problem of the West" Frederick Jackson Turner simultaneously recognizes and negates the possibility of western regionalism: The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American development. . . . The West, at bottom, is a form of society rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. ("The Problem" 61) Turner signals the importance of what he calls western "sectionalism" but then claims that it is impossible to parse out the problem of the West from the problem of the United States. The West, Turner argues, is the superstructural production of the frontier, the site that, before its closure, defined the American character and the unique nature of American development. For a writer to imagine a geographically defined West is, Turner argues, to "proclaim the writer a provincial" (61). For Turner the West is less a region than a "form of life" produced by the frontier history of the nation. In the postfrontier era, the West is the conceptual site where a nation "thrown back upon itself" will work out its contradictions (75). Turner's frontier was at once metaphysical and materialist, a spatiotemporal site produced by the collision of European ideas with a perceived wilderness both sublime and prosaic. As William Cronon reminds us, the "free" in Turner's "free land" was more about land that was available at no monetary cost to homesteaders than it was about "freedom" in the abstract (82–83). For Turner, "the problem of the West" was the problem of maintaining American [End Page 1] exceptionalism in an era when the palliative effects of wilderness on the "American character" and the ameliorative effects of free land on American social conflicts would no longer be nourished by the open frontier. The field of western American literary studies emerged in the 1960s and '70s as a regionalist critique that imagined a western ethics of place against the Turnerian consensus that then dominated American studies. Working in tandem with historical critiques that were recasting the frontier as a site of imperial, patriarchal, and ecological violence, the critique offered by western literary regionalism hinged on an effort to decouple the frontier from the West. By imagining a regional identification that would work in opposition to the logic of Turner's frontier, this critique has reimagined the West as a potential emancipatory place for the staging of environmentalist, feminist, queer, and antiracist challenges to American political and cultural norms (Comer 161). This tradition of place-based (and often bioregional) western literary studies met a challenge from a new generation of critics beginning in the 1990s. The "postwestern" critics, informed by poststructuralist theory, followed Turner to the extent that they understand the West more as a "form of society" than as a definable geographical space. Rejecting the place-centered critique as inflected with lingering patriarchal and nationalist politics, the postwestern critics worked to extricate "westness" as a social construct from the nationalist constraints that Turner imagined. In postwestern critique, there is no "authentic" frontier or "true" West, whether critical or celebratory, to which we have recourse to explain "westness." "Westness" is reconceived as something between (in post-western critique's more Baudrillardean mode) the totalizing simulacrum of the "hyperreal West" or (in its more Deleuzean mode) a transnational form of potentiality.1 Postwestern scholarship has, however, curiously hedged in its commitment to the poststructuralist bent of its critique of place-based scholarship. In a 2005 roundup review of several influential works of postwestern literary scholarship, Nina Baym notes a curious ambivalence about the postmodernist and poststructuralist thought that put the "post" in "postwestern": [End Page 2] [W]hether they offer an uncomplicated materialism or an advanced postmodernism, [these works] insist, sometimes against their own inclinations, that western stories have some connection to places that really exist. To the extent that postmodernism denies the category of the real altogether, [these works] cannot follow; they are western. All of them can be thought about therefore as...

Sample size allocation for food item radiation monitoring and safety inspection.

The objective of this study is to identify a procedure for determining sample size allocation for food radiation inspections of more than one food item to minimize the potential risk to consumers of internal radiation exposure. We consider a simplified case of food radiation monitoring and safety inspection in which a risk manager is required to monitor two food items, milk and spinach, in a contaminated area. Three protocols for food radiation monitoring with different sample size allocations were assessed by simulating random sampling and inspections of milk and spinach in a conceptual monitoring site. Distributions of (131)I and radiocesium concentrations were determined in reference to (131)I and radiocesium concentrations detected in Fukushima prefecture, Japan, for March and April 2011. The results of the simulations suggested that a protocol that allocates sample size to milk and spinach based on the estimation of (131)I and radiocesium concentrations using the apparent decay rate constants sequentially calculated from past monitoring data can most effectively minimize the potential risks of internal radiation exposure.

Guarding a Cultural Icon: Concurrent Intellectual Property Regimes and the Perpetual Protection of Anne of Green Gables in Canada

This article uses the various intellectual property protections afforded to the classic children’s novel Anne of Green Gables as a means of illustrating the blurring between copyright, trademark, and official marks regimes in Canada. By not keeping these regimes distinct, the author argues, Canadian intellectual property law seriously threatens the integrity of the public domain, a central means by which an appropriate balance is struck between the interests of authors, other cultural producers, and the public at large. The blurring between regimes is located in three conceptual sites: origin in copyright versus source in trademark; reputation in copyright versus goodwill in trademark; and the weak requirement that a public authority serve a "public benefit" in order to qualify for official marks protection, without any consideration of the public interest served by the limitations on protections built into the other intellectual property regimes. Reinforcing the distinctions between regimes and clarifying the public benefit requirement for official marks would help protect the public domain from unjustified encroachments that potentially deprive us of access to creative works of shared cultural significance.

On the Etiology and Politics of Sexual Phenomenology

Working from the conceptual site, which discloses the relationship between the theory and the practice of Judith Butler's post-structuralist framework, this paper looks at male lesbians to amplify the diversity within gender identity and sexual expression. Male lesbians problematise the sex-leads-to-gender hierarchy and, in doing so, unravel the entire enterprise of heteronormativity. More importantly, perhaps, they illustrate the confluence in the culturally manifested and scientifically prescribed binary between nature and culture. In short, this paper considers the myriad possibilities ‘biologically read’ males who identify as lesbians have on the current social epistemology that has been crystallised on dichotomies of male/female and nature/culture.

Conceptual modelling of web sites for end-users

Internet and the WWW more and more play an important role in our information society. It is now one of the major sources of information in every rank of our society. The overwhelming accessibility to data, on a global scale, does not necessarily translate to widespread utility of data. We often find that we are drowning in data, with few tools to help managing relevant data for our various activities. In this paper, we argue that the WWW and its end-users could benefit from the existence of a conceptual web site schema. We propose such a conceptual web site schema that describes what information is available in a web site and how this information is structured into pages and links. To allow to communicate this information through the web, we developed an XML Document Type Definition (DTD) for this conceptual web site schema. We also illustrate the feasibility of the approach by a simple application program developed using the XML Document Object Model (DOM).

Colonial/postcolonial intersections

Lieu de memoire , a concept developed by historian Pierre Nora in order to help explain the construction of a nation or a community, offers a useful tool to architectural historians by emphasizing the importance of physical and conceptual sites. Nora associates the role played by memory with a "symbolic typology" and identifies the sites where memory resides as lieux de memoire (the place, the site, the realm of memory). A lieu de memoire is thus "any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which, by dint of human will or the work of time, has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community."2 Pointing to the difference between history and memory, Nora claims that "memory is life" whereas "history is the reconstruction ... of what is no longer." Memory is subject to remembering and forgetting; it is vulnerable to appropriation and manipulation; and, it can lie dormant for long periods only to be reawakened suddenly. The lieux de memoire , the material, symbolic, and functional sites, are the products of the interaction between memory and

Processes of persuasion: social interests and total quality in a UK hospital trust.

This paper examines some of the processes which have contributed to the development of a 'total quality' (TQ) approach within British health care. The paper challenges the idea that TQ is part of a redistribution of power within the NHS. Rather it is argued that through the elaboration of consumer-led market identities TQ misrepresents the interests of management and constructs a version of the self which obscures new forms of managerial control. TQ constrains alternative forms of social organisation, local knowledge and the social interests invested in them. An example of a competing set of assumptions is discussed. It is suggested that clinical groups--who are primarily motivated by the principles of professional, collegiate control--seek to free themselves from the constraints of TQ. Thus clinical discourse appropriates a professionally led version of the market and protects the traditional autonomy of professionals whilst seeming to render their interests synergistic with those of management. This casts 'quality', and perhaps even the 'market', as conceptual sites upon which different groups strive to construct and legitimate their own interests. It is concluded that the changes explicitly associated with TQ are not as fundamental as they seem.

From the Margins

How can anthropology benefit from cultural studies and cultural studies benefit from anthropology? One area in which these two scholarly trajectories work best together is in theorizing the interface of local and frames of analysis. The challenge here is to move from situated, that is local, controversies to widely circulating or global issues of power and knowledge and back, as this allows us to develop understandings of the institutions and dialogues in which both local and cultural agendas are shaped. This essay is about margins as a conceptual site from which to explore the imaginative quality and the specificity of local/global cultural formation. Margins here are not a geographical, descriptive location. Nor do I refer to margins as the sites of deviance from social norms. Instead, I use the term to indicate an analytic placement that makes evident both the constraining, oppressive quality of cultural exclusion and the creative potential of rearticulating, enlivening, and rearranging the very social categories that peripheralize a group's existence. Margins, in this use, are sites from which we see the instability of social categories. One way of thinking about this agenda is to imagine a conversation between the approaches of Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. Foucault shows us the discursive construction of social categories and forms of subjectivity. Gramsci reminds us that these categories and their associated kinds of agency have no unquestioned hegemony. Where Gramsci assumes too much about self-evident political interests that produce resistance and social transformation, Foucault, in showing the convention-laden assumptions behind resistance, obscures the suspense that infects possibilities of change. My interest is in the zones of unpredictability at the edges of discursive stability, where contradictory discourses overlap, or where discrepant kinds of meaning-making converge; these are what I call margins. Attention to marginality highlights both the play and constraint of subordinate social positions. In the United States, for example, minorities are marginalized by exclusion from the assumption of being ordinary-and often the jobs, housing, or political opportunities that ordinary (white) people expect. At the

The glycogen content of the early pregnant female hamster genital tract, the fertile conceptus and artificially-induced deciduomata.

SUMMARY The quantitative changes in glycogen content of the hamster uterus, cervix, upper and lower vagina during the first 8 days of pregnancy were measured. The amount of glycogen in the conceptual sites on days 6, 7 and 8 was determined and compared with that of artificially induced deciduomata. The greatest concentration of glycogen was demonstrated in the tissue of the upper portion of the vagina. While no significant differences were found in the uterus, cervix and lower vagina during the time-interval investigated, significant increases in glycogen in upper vaginal tissue occurred on the 6th, 7th and 8th day of pregnancy. Uterine glycogen during the first 5 days, or the interdecidual sites on days 6, 7 and 8, did not differ significantly in their glycogen content. On day 6, when the conceptual site becomes discernible, the glycogen values were increased by 370% over the uterine levels of day 5 followed by a 28- and 31-fold increase on days 7 and 8. The glycogen content of deciduomata induced non-mechanically (saline, oil, air) or by trauma (scratching) did not differ significantly from that of the conceptual sites of normal pregnancy. These findings demonstrate that on day 6 a glycogenic stimulus is evoked which results in local stimulation of glycogen production in the decidual sites and the upper vagina. Induction of deciduomata by different procedures results in quantitatively similar amounts of the polysaccharide. The glycogenic factor, therefore (a) stimulates localized glycogen synthesis and (b) can be evoked by either natural or artificial means.