Crisis Narratives Research Articles

TBM-Crise : intervention hospitalière brève basée sur la mentalisation

Contexte Notre équipe travaille dans une unité hospitalière psychiatrique de crise aux Hôpitaux universitaires de Genève (Suisse). Nous y accueillons pour 7 jours des personnes en situation de crise qui présentent des idées ou un comportement suicidaire. Comme facteurs précipitant la crise suicidaire, ces personnes traversent des évènements de vie s’accompagnant d’intenses difficultés interpersonnelles et menaçant l’image qu’ils ont d’eux-mêmes. Il y a dans notre population clinique environ 35 % de patients souffrant de trouble de personnalité limite (TPL). Chez ces patients, les crises à répétition et les comportements suicidaires engendrent des ruptures relationnelles et thérapeutiques fréquentes et dommageables. Notre objectif est de développer une approche spécifique à cette problématique clinique. Intervention Nous avons développé une intervention psychologique brève focalisée sur la mentalisation en 4 temps : accueil, mentalisation affective des éléments de crise, formulation de la problématique, travail sur la sortie et la suite de soins ambulatoires. Cette intervention est adaptée à une équipe médicosoignantes. Du point de vue de la thérapie basée sur la mentalisation (TBM), la phase d’accueil est principalement consacrée à un mirroring et à une régulation affective afin de réduire l’intensité de la désorganisation psychique. Il s’agit ensuite d’activer la capacité à mentaliser, à savoir la curiosité au sujet des états mentaux, au travers d’un travail sur la narrative de crise avec un focus affectif. Nous travaillons ensuite à construire avec les personnes une formulation de sa problématique dans laquelle elle a peut assumer un rôle. Il s’agit de les rendre « agents » de leurs crises. Alors nous pouvons terminer l’intervention en travaillant tant la séparation qu’une projection dans le futur immédiat. Le but est alors de prolonger le travail psychologique entamé au niveau d’un réseau ambulatoire. Cette dernière phase voit se réactiver le système d’attachement et réapparaître les difficultés jusque-là extérieures à l’espace thérapeutique. Implications cliniques La TBM est efficace pour le TPL notamment sur la réduction des gestes suicidaires et du nombre d’hospitalisations. Nous avons ajusté son dispositif théorique et clinique pour des individus hospitalisés en raison d’une crise suicidaire et qui présentent des profils psychopathologiques divers et comorbides. La TBM permet l’adaptation et l’évaluation d’outils psychothérapeutiques empiriquement fondés à différents contextes cliniques, mais aussi à différentes populations cliniques.

Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy by William L. Barney

Reviewed by: Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy by William L. Barney Michael D. Robinson (bio) Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy. By William L. Barney. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 392. Cloth, $34.95.) Over the past five decades, William L. Barney has written extensively on secession, the Old South, and the Confederate experience, richly enhancing our understanding of how and why the nation plunged headlong into civil war in 1861. Barney's unparalleled expertise in the movement for disunion in the fifteen slaveholding states sparkles throughout Rebels in the Making. Primarily focusing on the period between the presidential campaign of 1860 and the summer of 1861, when the Middle South states of Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee exited the Union and joined the seven Lower South states in the nascent Confederacy, Rebels in the Making offers a fast-paced yet carefully argued narrative of the secession crisis. Familiar themes from Barney's earlier scholarship resonate in this book. Categorizing the push for secession as "a slaveholder-driven movement from the top" (4), the author emphasizes the anxieties, fears, and suspicions that increasingly worried white southerners in the 1850s and allowed an often-marginalized cadre of fire-eaters to make inroads in several slaveholding states after the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860. Economic strains drove white southern angst: the price of land and enslaved persons steadily increased over the decade, distressing aspiring planters and limiting the opportunities for the South's landless population to achieve economic independence through the acquisition of real property. The frustrations of white workers in southern cities grew during the 1850s as free Black people and European immigrants offered business owners alternative labor options. Elites worried that the bubbling economic discontent from the lower classes in towns and cities might upset their carefully ordered society and used the pulpit, the press, and their own political power to channel the ire of the white populace toward meddling outsiders, such as abolitionists and Republicans. Barney scrupulously delineates the various opinions in the South about how to respond to these growing anxieties. Older, established planters who enjoyed greater economic stability normally stressed moderation, praised the safeguards for slavery within the Union, and, after Lincoln's election, preferred cooperation among the southern states to rectify the South's grievances. Outside of South Carolina—where depleted soil and soaring out-migration had produced nearly unanimous support for disunion among white elites—younger, aspiring slaveholders who came of age during the 1850s and confronted dwindling economic opportunities provided the vanguard for immediate, separate state secession. The younger [End Page 118] radicals calling for immediate secession may have been stymied were it not for a major drought that ravaged the South during the campaign of 1860. The failure of much of the South's corn crop caused food prices to soar and, along with the caustic presidential contest, placed the white southern populace on edge. Paranoia prevailed by the end of 1860: rumors of slave insurrections abounded, unknown strangers were branded as dangerous abolitionists, and pro-secession militias mobilized. "With the economy at a standstill, food shortages, unprecedented unemployment, insurrection scares, and continued reports of slave resistance," Barney writes, "conditions could not have been more favorable for secession" (135). With these circumstances converging toward the end of 1860, secessionists still had their work cut out for them, even in the Lower South. Barney chronicles how fire-eaters utilized propaganda, spectacle, and coercion to push the seven states of the Cotton South out of the Union between December 1860 and February 1861. The author credits South Carolinians Robert and Henry Gourdin, rather than such firebrands as Robert Barnwell Rhett, with charting a path forward for the disunion movement in the heady days following Lincoln's election. Through their 1860 Association, the Gourdins mobilized public support for secession and eased the concerns of southerners who dreaded following the South Carolina agitators who had led their state to disunionist dead-ends in 1833 and 1850. "The whole approach of the 1860 Association centered on structuring secession as a peaceful, law-abiding movement that would regain the...

A emergência climática é uma guerra ou estamos descolonizando o sistema? O enquadramento de metáforas conceituais no discurso da emergência climática

The visible worldwide consequences of climate change have triggered countless pub-lic debates among scientific communities from several knowledge areas, raising public awareness to this issue. Rhetoric and discourse strategies have played a crucial role on how global warming cannot be ignored, thereby instigating policymakers to implement urgent action to reduce CO2 emissions and other causes of environment degradation. Thus, the present paper aims at dissect-ing a brief corpus of Instagram posts from two renowned environmental activist entities, the NGO Fridays for Future and Greta Thunberg, with the purpose of identifying new metaphorical repre-sentations in the multimodal youth climate activism, alongside with other social aspects involved in this rhetoric. For that goal we chose the hashtag #Uprootthesystem, currently adopted by some environmental activists who believe that the climate crisis narrative makes room for other historical reparation discourses, arguing against colonization, poverty, discrimination, racism, class inequal-ity, climate injustice, among others.

«Анна Каренина»: суицидологический анализ

Objective of the Review: to analyze one of the most popular L. Tolstoy’s works “Anna Karenina” by showing that it illustrates classic and contemporary theories of suicide, starting from the sociological study of suicide by E. Durkheim. Key Points. The novel depicts four episodes of suicidal behavior: ego-dystonic thoughts (Lewin), suicide attempt (Vronsky), completed suicide (Anna) and volunteer fighters (Vronsky and other men going to war). The article draws parallels with four types of suicide according to E. Durkheim: anomic, egoistic, fatalistic and altruistic. Besides, the paper points out changes in worldviews of the main characters that happen after their mortality was made salient, which corresponds to Terror Management Theory in social psychology and works of cultural anthropologist E. Becker. In the end, we look at Anna’s presuicidal state from the point of view of Narrative Crisis Model of Suicide by I. Galynker. Conclusion. Thus, the novel “Anna Karenina” can help specialists in studying various theories of suicidal behavior, as L. Tolstoy carefully depicted the phenomenology of suicidal feelings and mechanisms of psychological defense from the fears of death, even before suicidology was established as a science. Keywords: suicide, Durkheim, Terror Management Theory, Narrative Crisis Model of Suicide, Suicide Crisis Syndrome.

Review of the Book “Historical Memory in Social Media” by Sophia Tikhonova, Denis Artamonov

The subject of review is the book “Historical Memory in Social Media” by Sofya Tikhonova and Denis Artamonov. In the book, the authors focus on the design and specification of the production of images of the past on the Internet and the gaming industry, referring to various materials, from text “fake” messages and memes to computer games. Research is not limited to the description of empirical data. The supporting structure of the research is the author's concept of digital history and digital philosophy of history. Research optics is aimed at determining the status of the digital subject of history, which seems to be an acute anthropological and socio-philosophical problem. The book discusses the issues of modification of the politics of memory, the production of “fakes”, the connotation of historical events, the trend of miniaturization of history and the crisis of great narratives. Considerable attention is paid to the everyday everyday practices of information production, woven into the context of “history making”. The review pays attention to all the main structural parts of the book and reproduces the logical sequence of the key ideas of the text. With references to the original author's text, the reviewer also gives his own interpretations of the conceptual and terminological innovations of the book, and also focuses on some controversial aspects of the research.

Towards an Ethics of Unity: An Ecological Approach to Overcoming Dispossession in Academic Libraries

Crisis narratives are stories meant to persuade that one exists in a state of emergency. Under extractive capitalism, crisis narratives frame the scope of ethical behaviour in response to crisis. Once set, these crisis ethics promote conformity in labour practices to avoid catastrophe. Surrendering the means to self-define priorities, values, and identity of the academic library profession creates a more pliable work force. This essay uses critical and philosophical methods to apply lessons learned from landscapes ruined by extractive capitalism to professional library practice fractured by alienation, diremption, and dispossession. A critique of the exploitation of ethics of fear and hope is offered, along with a method for identifying these as they appear in crisis narratives. The essay concludes with a recommendation to pursue an ethics of unity, predicated on promoting flourishing through professional mutualism, dedication to direct action, and a focus on sustainability.

Genealogy of Refusal

Why can’t librarians “Just Say No”? To answer this question, we look at workplace refusal through the fine arts, literature, and popular culture to construct a genealogy of workplace refusal. In it, we also begin to trace a lineage of crisis narrative critique alongside the library profession’s inheritance of vocational awe. We explore the librarian’s role and voice through the lens of both popular culture and academic publications. In our companion multimedia, hypertextual Scalar project also titled A Genealogy of Refusal: Walking Away from Crisis and Scarcity Narratives, we contextualize strategies of refusal in libraries through critical response to and annotations of film clips and illustrations. We examine gender differences in portrayals of workplace refusal. We laugh when in Parks and Recreation a stereotypical librarian ignores a stripper but warns noisy patrons: “Shh—This is a library!” We are horrified when aspiring librarians in Morgenstern’s Starless Sea, hands tied behind their backs, have their tongues torn from their mouths. Elinguation as a job prerequisite? No, thanks. The implications of saying “No” are many. We explicate ways librarians are made vulnerable by crisis narratives and constructed scarcity. We advocate for asset framing and developing fluencies in hearing and saying “No.” Looking forward, how long will it take librarians to reclaim “Yes” in a way that works for us?

Articulating Our Very Unfreedom: The Impossibility of Refusal in the Contemporary Academy

This paper begins and ends with a provocation: I argue that refusal in librarianship is both impossible and necessary. Reviewing examples of crisis narratives which permeate both American and Canadian universities, I take a materialist perspective on the idea of refusal within academic librarianship. To do so, I draw on the work of Audra Simpson, Kyle Whyte, Eve Tuck, Mario Tronti, and Rinaldo Walcott to examine the sites of impossibility of refusal in the practice of academic librarianship within contemporary neoliberal education institutions. Then, I analyze the totality of capitalism in setting the limit for the practice of refusal through case studies of direct action, including the Icelandic Women’s Strike of 1975 and the 2020 Scholar Strike Canada. Finally, I identify private property and history as key frames for understanding the contradiction at the heart of refusal of crisis. As such, any refusal that does not address the centrality of labour and private property relations can thus be understood as harm reduction rather than emancipation. Ultimately, I argue that for librarians to refuse would require an abandonment of liberalism as librarianship’s guiding philosophy, and a redefinition of librarianship as such.

Resisting Crisis Surveillance Capitalism in Academic Libraries

In this paper, we consider what we identify as crisis surveillance capitalism in higher education, drawing on the work of Naomi Klein and Shoshana Zuboff. We define crisis surveillance capitalism as the intersection of unregulated and ubiquitous data collection with the continued marginalization of vulnerable racial and social groups. Through this lens, we examine the twinned crisis narratives of student success and academic integrity and consider how the COVID-19 pandemic further enabled so-called solutions that collect massive amounts of student data with impunity. We suggest a framework of refusal to crisis surveillance capitalism coming from the work of Keller Easterling and Baharak Yousefi, identifying ways to resist and build power in a context where the cause of harm is all around and intentionally hidden.

Black Cultural Capital, Resistance, and Leadership among Black Male Collegians

AbstractGiven the deficit and crisis narratives that dominate the discourse on Black males’ educational experiences and trajectories, more work is needed that attends to their strengths and assets and that also reveal new stories about their possibilities. The current study examines the college experiences of 65 Black men who participated in a Black Male Initiative (BMI) program at three different colleges. In particular, I use cultural capital as a frame to investigate how they made meaning and benefited from their BMI engagement. I discuss three specific ways that the men express and embody cultural capital: investing in self, uplifting the collective, and embodying leadership. Findings from this study provide empirical evidence for the importance of expanding and supporting alternate types of cultural capital for Black men, especially in the form of resistance capital and leadership capital, and better appreciating how these contribute to their collegiate experiences and personal development.

Editor’s Introduction

The Journal of Minority Achievement, Creativity and Leadership (JMACL) is a window seat, an intellectual space for academics, policymakers, practitioners, researchers, students, and scholars to view the terrain in its variegated form and structure, especially those extant landmarks positioned at the intersection of achievement, creativity, and leadership. JMACL attempts to provide rhythmic syncopation to the cacophony of voices speaking to the complexities that diverse populations in general, and minoritized populations in particular, experience across the P–20 educational continuum and beyond. Through their collective and individual wisdom, contrib utors share best practices, conceptual models, and theoretical frameworks that illuminate asset-based approaches related to the achievement and success of minority populations. In this issue our authors include:Sharon LaVonne Fries Britt, PhD, and Felicia Onuma, in “The Role of Family, Race, and Community as Sources of Motivation for Black Students in STEM,” argue that understanding the sources of motivation that Black students identify as contributing to their persistence offers invaluable insights into ways to support student success in physics. Knowing the determinants of their commitment to remain in the major provide departments, faculty, advisors and mentors additional areas to reinforce and affirm.Jase Kugiya, Jorge Burmicky, PhD, and Victor B. Saenz, PhD, in “High-Achieving Latino Men and Men of Color Programs: Perspectives from Community College Program Staff,” explore two Men of Color (MoC) programs located at two Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) community colleges in Texas. Using two rounds of qualitative semi-structured interviews, a participant intake form, and an institutional questionnaire, this research applied Schreiner’s (2010) Thriving Quotient and Garcia’s (2018) Organizational Frameworks for Decolonizing HSIs to understand how MoC program staff define high-achievement and how MoC programs support high-achieving Latino men.Derrick Brooms, PhD, in “Black Cultural Capital, Resistance, and Leadership among Black Male Collegians,” examines the college experiences of 65 Black men who participated in a Black Male Initiative (BMI) program at three different colleges. Given the deficit and crisis narratives that dominate the discourse on Black males’ educational experiences and trajectories, more work is needed that attends to their strengths and assets as well as reveals new stories about their possibilities.Nicholas D. Hartlep, PhD, Daisy B. Ball, PhD, Kevin E. Wells, PhD, Hannah M. Wilk, and Brandon O. Hensley, PhD, in “An Exploratory Analysis of Scripps Spelling Bee Winners, 1925–2019: Is There Evidence of Asian American Overrepresentation?,” analyze the demographic and geographic characteristics of the winners of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Included in the analyses are responses to questions such as: Are Scripps National Spelling Bee winners more likely to be males or females? Asians or non-Asians? And, what is the average age of winners?Frank Tuitt, PhD, in “More than a Hashtag: Nurturing Black Excellence in Traditionally White Institutions,” provides some direction as to how traditionally white institutions (TWIs) can move away from superficial enactments of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and instead adopt a racial equity strategy that nurtures and values Black Excellence.Patricia E. Literte, PhD, in “Mobilizing Beyond Black and White: Coalition Building and Identity Formation Among Students of Color at a Public and a Private University,” examines coalition building between Black, Latinx, and Asian Pacific American students, as well as the construction of a panracial “people of color” identity, on two university campuses in California.Our desire is for JMACL to serve as a forum that provides practitioners, researchers, scholars, and individuals in contexts external to the Academy with dialectical space to explore achievement, creativity, and leadership across diverse communities. This issue, with its diverse array of contributors is emblematic of the type of transgressive scholarship that pushes boundaries and evokes new paradigms of thought. We encourage our readers to deconstruct the theoretical approaches and problematize the conceptual frameworks presented here. Hence, as JMACL helps us to know better, it is incumbent upon us to use this knowledge to do better.

From the Editor’s Gable

The fall 2021 issue is an interesting assortment of essays, the themes of which interconnect and overlap, even though this is not a special issue. In the first essay, “‘To continue their illustrious breed’: Aristocracy, Democracy, and the Search for Dignity in The House of the Seven Gables,” Martin J. Groff examines power structures in Hawthorne’s second novel—contrasting the traditional aristocracy of the Colonel and the Judge with the more liberal capitalism of Hepzibah and Holgrave—to ascertain Hawthorne’s views on the possibility of a true democracy. In “A Somewhat Wilder Grace: Hawthorne, Humboldt, and Withstanding the Collapse of Nature into Symbol in The House of the Seven Gables,” Evan Manzanetti also examines The House of the Seven Gables, but through the lens of a burgeoning sense of ecological thinking, as he examines Hawthorne’s views of nature in that novel with the environmental philosophy of Humboldt. In “‘No Such Fairy Land, so like the real world’: Miles Coverdale’s Performance of the Utopian Spectacle,” Ashley Rattner looks at the demise of the Brook Farm utopia (1841–1847) and Hawthorne’s short-lived stay (April–November 1841) to analyze the relationship between Hawthorne and his reader; Hawthorne attempts to provide a corrective to the audience who would equate the narrator with the author. In “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Reframing of That ‘which Milton tells about’: Literary Influence and Blithedale’s Queer Masque,” Matthew Joseph Helm offers another view of The Blithedale Romance by analyzing two modes of influence. He illustrates how some critics seeking to establish a national literature saw the novel in a positive light, but that other more conservative readers questioned his unorthodox depiction of marriage. Helm also shows how Hawthorne’s romance recasts characters from Milton in order to sub-vert ideas about hetero-patriarchal lineage. In the final essay, “‘A Deeper and More Conscious Silence’: Aurality in Thoreau and Hawthorne’s Journals and Later Works,” Michael S. Martin examines Hawthorne’s journalistic writings (in his Notebooks) and his novels in terms of his interest in silence and then aligns those ideas with Thoreau’s own commentary about silence; by making these comparisons, Martin shows how distant the twen-ty-first-century audience has become in their own attitudes toward silence. These interesting essays about capitalism, environmentalism, author-reader relationships, radical views of marriage, and provocative silences reveal a Hawthorne less conservative than critics have often made him out to be. The issue ends with a review by Ariel Clark Silver of David Diamond’s recent book, Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation (2021), Diamond’s upbeat character analysis invites the reader to see happy endings to Hawthorne novels, often read as culminating in dark conclusions.I would like to thank my Dean, Dr. Peter Kingstone, and my chairman, Dr. Jonathan Greenberg, for their continued support of my editorship.

Pre-emptive memories: Anticipating narratives of Covid-19 in practices of commemoration

This article explores the narratives of the Covid-19 crisis in Italy, in the ways that they intersect with cultural memory processes. Moving from the hypothesis that the Covid-19 crisis, in Italy, has undergone two distinct narrative phases, we focus on the comparison between the forms taken, during the first lockdown, by an important (but also somehow divisive) memory ritual: the celebration of 25 April (the day that Italy was liberated from Nazi-Fascism) and the newly established commemorations of Covid-19 casualties. The aim is to observe the osmoses between two discursive domains (memory discourse vs emergency discourse). To do so, we propose the concept of “pre-emptive memory,” which can be defined as an act of—unwitting—anticipation, pre-figuration, and re-combination of the future cultural memory of an ongoing event in the present.

Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation

Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation

The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind, by Courtenay Raia

Reviewed by: The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind by Courtenay Raia Christine Ferguson (bio) The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind, by Courtenay Raia; pp. ix + 424. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019, $105.00, $35.00 paper. In her introduction to The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind, Courtenay Raia asks, "Can investigators who gave positive testimony regarding telepathy, telekinesis, spirit communication, or other such phenomena really be taken seriously?" (8). For almost fifty years now, historians of science and cultural studies scholars have answered this question with a resounding yes. In the early 1970s, George Stocking and Malcolm Jay Kottler produced complex, archivally situated examinations of the spiritualist investigations of Alfred Russel Wallace and E. B. Tylor, their efforts fueling a groundswell of spiritualism and science studies that would later manifest in landmark monographs by Janet Oppenheim, Alison Winter, and Roger Luckhurst. Interest in psychical research has intensified and diversified since the millennium's turn, its history pursued by Peter Lamont, John Warne Monroe, Egil Asprem, Jason Josephson-Storm, Richard Noakes, and others. If by "taking seriously," Raia means subjecting historic scientific investigations of spiritualist phenomena to rigorous academic inquiry, paying careful attention to their scientific, religious, cultural, and biographical dimensions, and refusing to patronize, ridicule, or simply debunk their subjects, then psychical research has been taken very seriously for quite some time. Indeed, the onus of proof seems now to lie with anyone who wishes to claim otherwise. Raia shows some awareness of this extensive precedent in her endnotes, but never fully acknowledges it in her central argument. Instead, The New Prometheans insists that the psychical pursuits of its Victorian professional subjects remain marginalized because [End Page 580] it is "hard for academics to see psychical research as a genuine scientific effort" (x). Of convinced psychical researchers, she writes, "we dismiss out of hand what they are saying and wonder, instead, why they are saying it: are they duped, delusional, dishonest? … Psychical activity is thus immediately deflected away from scientific considerations and captured by interests of a more biographical, cultural, or even occult nature" (8). The term "we" is made to do quite a lot of heavy lifting, and readers might well begin to wonder who it describes. If it is historians of science or spiritualism, then this allegation of ignorance is demonstrably untrue. Has even a single of the academic studies of psychical research produced over the last two decades been written with the primary intention to prove that its champions were "duped, delusional, or dishonest"? And if it is dismissive for scholars to focus on the topic's biographical and cultural dimensions, then why does so much of The New Prometheans do exactly that? It is not, after all, Raia's intention to authorize the psychical convictions of her subjects. Even if it were, such an endorsement would not necessarily represent a more ethical approach to the early work of the Society for Psychical Research than a more neutrally agnostic historiographical position. The Victorian psychical research community was a broad church whose members advocated, if unevenly, a healthy skepticism in their investigations; they did not always agree, and their work could just as easily debunk as credit spiritualist phenomena. Such problematic rhetorical gestures undermine an otherwise engaging account of the psychical research of four "New Prometheans": William Crookes, F. W. H. Myers, Oliver Lodge, and Andrew Lang. Raia's first chapter contextualizes their work in light of the so-called crisis of faith narrative, arguing that this narrative, if by no means culturally ubiquitous, was very much real for the individuals she studies. Chapter 2 focuses on Crookes's notorious investigative séances with the medium Florence Cook, providing a fascinating account of his potential motivations for entering the psychical fray and of his shifting relationship to spiritualism, one far more equivocal than the movement's frequent and unilateral declaration of his allyship suggests. The next two chapters are devoted to Myers. The first examines the spiritual struggles and youthful romanticism that marked his early career at Cambridge, and the second shows how his formulation of an optimistic theory of human psychological evolution drew upon his ongoing interactions...

EU Public Diplomacy Transformation: From the Crisis of Narrative towards External Threat

he paper deals with the recent transformation of EU public diplomacy. Changes in EU public diplomacy organizational structure are considered as well as programming documents, funding, statements of EU leadership, and expert evaluations. The problem of EU self-representation and positioning has exacerbated after the crisis of 2008. It is concluded that EU public diplomacy is in the midst of significant changes: emphasis on unique, multilateral, and peaceful nature of EU is being sidelined by the issue of external threat and securitization of EU communications. This is being carried out in expectation of consolidation of support for the integration project as well as expanding the authority of EU institutions. It is argued that financing plans for 2021‒2027 period, planning documents of European Commission, and general directorates for the next 5 years map out expansion of external threat messages within EU framework programmes. Implementation of such plans will highly likely lead to increased confrontation between the EU and Russia.

Fire and Climate: Connecting the Dots in British Columbia News Media

Background: Extreme weather events are intensifying with climate change, offering opportunities to raise the public urgency of this issue. The media’s role in communicating this connection is crucial. Analysis: This article analyzes media coverage of wildfires over a nine-year period in British Columbia focusing on how they are linked to climate change, in particular, during the 2017 and 2018 record-breaking fire seasons. Conclusion and implications: In media coverage in British Columbia, there is a marked absence of a link between climate change and wildfires and a tendency for connections to be tokenistic, decontextualized, and normalizing. More provocative narratives developed by various public figures that locate wildfires within broader narratives of climate crisis offer more compelling accounts.

Environmental Displacement in the Anthropocene

This intervention invites more substantial scholarly attention to human displacement in and of the Anthropocene—this current epoch in which humans have become the primary drivers of global environmental change—and sets out an initial framework for its study. The framework is organized around three interrelated contributions. First is the recognition that displacement is driven not just by climate change but also broader forms of environmental change defining the Anthropocene, including biodiversity loss, changes to land and water resources, and the buildup of nuclear debris, along with their intersections. Second, the framework parses out three distinct moments of displacement in the Anthropocene: displacement as a consequence of, prerequisite to, and active response to environmental change. Third, the framework rejects environmental (neo)determinism by showing how displacement across these distinct moments and drivers is more than environmental: It is the articulation of environmental and sociopolitical–economic factors, which are routinely shaped by inequality and play out within a broader series of crises and crisis narratives that drive displacement and hinder viable solutions. We ground these interventions in examples of political conflict, anti-immigrant politics, the posttruth and colonial politics of knowledge production, and the Anthropocene itself as crisis requiring displacement to clean up its mess. Although each example is quite distinct, a common thread stitched across them is colonialism, highlighting a recurring extra-environmental driver of displacement. Taken together, these dynamics underscore that displacement is not an unfortunate by-product of the Anthropocene but woven into its very fabric.

Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping

Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping

Reimagining Early Childhood Classrooms as Sites of Love: Humanizing Black Boys through Head Rubs and “ Playin’ the Dozens ”

Black boys in American schools are often subjected to crisis narratives that negatively impact teacher-student relationships. However, two Black male early childhood teachers in New York City have reimagined teacher-student relationships which can be used to inform the future education of Black boys post-pandemic. Central to their reframing of teacher-student relationships between Black male teachers and Black boys is a focus on the importance of nurturing social and emotional health. This manuscript highlights how these two Black male teachers foster positive relationships with their young Black boys, empowering Black boys to see themselves as capable learners.