Critical Letter Research Articles

A critical love letter to my ancestors: perhaps a therapeutics of recognition?

Preface: Part memoir, part Chinese history, part theoretical reckoning with settler positionality of my lineage as an immigrant on Turtle Island from Hong Kong, this article is a critical self-study and creative nonfiction experiment that dialogues with colonial recognition and with the abjection method to the self and ancestry, to wrestle with generational failures and what it means to honor my ancestors. I walk through the lens of Kristeva, Fanon, Muñoz, and Coulthard, using their frameworks to understand my distance and relationship with my ancestors and to speculate on their contexts, mindset, and behavior with the colonizers and as the colonizing others, engaging from a place of critical love. This article aligns with the mode of “depth education” as discussed by Andreotti (2021), as an inquiry to expand the researcher’s capacities and dispositions to observe our own affective responses and to hold space for complexities and paradoxes within and around us, without feeling immobilized or demanding to be rescued from discomfort. The writing uses a performative writing approach to interrupt conventional scholarly texts and discourse and seeks to generate curiosity and responses in knowledge-creation spaces.

Nice for Whom? A Dangerous, Not-So-Nice, Critical Race Love Letter

In this article, I critically analyze and respond to empirical data in the form of racialized discourse—specifically, racist messages sent directly to me as a result of my previously published article entitled, “A Love Letter to Educational Leaders of Color: CREWing UP with Critical Whiteness Studies”. Being informed by a robust racial analysis of acts that reinforce white supremacy, this article will likely be perceived as not nice by those who benefit from and work to protect white supremacy. Likely, I will be the one accused of being hateful, divisive, and even racist. In order to interrogate the weaponization of this conception of “niceness”, my analysis will be driven by Critical Race Hermeneutics with white emotionality and whitelashing used as interpretive lenses. As this article’s engagement with these critical race frameworks poses a threat to those who benefit from racism, this is a dangerous, not-so-nice critical race love letter.

Critical Letter Writing and Deliberation During the Brezhnev Era

This article analyses letters sent by Soviet citizens to newspapers and authorities during the Brezhnev era, supposedly a period of political stagnation. Citizens wrote critical letters, individually and collectively, signed and anonymously, to have problems solved. Authorities responded to citizen concerns, which were mostly very specific and non-systemic, and also used the letters to monitor public opinion. The practice of letter writing in the Soviet Union in this period enabled citizens to hold authorities to account while also providing leaders with the opportunity to legitimise their authority by taking action.

Lost in Translation in 1666. A Translation Dispute Between the Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des Sçavans

The Journal des Sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions were the first two academic periodicals, and in their early years each frequently translated items taken from the other. In one such case, an item in the Journal des Sçavans which was a translation of a piece from the Philosophical Transactions, provoked a critical letter subsequently published in the French periodical. This letter produced a virulent response from the Philosophical Transactions’ editor, Henry Oldenburg. Study of a number of linguistic features, including process types and thematic structure shows that while there are a number of small differences between the source text and its translation, none of them are particularly significant. It is likely that Oldenburg’s riposte fits into a pattern of defending members of the Royal Society against foreign criticism.

EcoGothic: An Interview with Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland

Elizabeth Parker is the author of the monograph The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination, published by Palgrave Gothic in March 2020. She is the founding editor of the open-access journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothicand television editor for The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. She has co-organised several conferences on space, place, and the relationship between the Gothic and the more-than-human, has published her work in various titles such as Plant Horror!: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film and Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on the Environment, and is co-editor of Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place. She has taught English Literature and courses on Popular Culture at a number of universities across the UK and Ireland, and currently works in Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion at St Mary’s University Twickenham.
 
 Michelle Poland is the Research Impact Manager at Nottingham Trent University, a role which involves supporting researchers across the institution to identify ways than can enable their research to make a meaningful difference in the world. Michelle is a passionate advocate for the role research plays in enhancing our prosperity, health, and quality of life and is currently working towards developing impact from her own research on the Gothic, ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene. She received her PhD in English from the University of Lincoln in 2019, is Co-Editor of the open-access peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal Gothic Nature, and has published work in Critical Survey and Green Letters.

Discharge Documentation and Follow-Up of Critically Ill Patients With Acute Kidney Injury Treated With Kidney Replacement Therapy: A Retrospective Cohort Study.

Leading organisations recommend follow-up of acute kidney injury (AKI) survivors, as these patients are at risk of long-term complications and increased mortality. Information transfer between specialties and from tertiary to primary care is essential to ensure timely and appropriate follow-up. Our aim was to examine the association between completeness of discharge documentation and subsequent follow-up of AKI survivors who received kidney replacement therapy (KRT) in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). We retrospectively analysed the data of 433 patients who had KRT for AKI during ICU admission in a tertiary care centre in the UK between June 2017 and May 2018 and identified patients who were discharged from hospital alive. Patients with pre-existing end-stage kidney disease and patients who were transferred from hospitals outside the catchment area were excluded. The primary objective was to assess the completeness of discharge documentation from critical care and hospital; secondary objectives were to determine cardiovascular medications reconciliation after AKI, and to investigate kidney care and outcomes at 1 year. The development of AKI and the need for KRT were mentioned in 85 and 82% of critical care discharge letters, respectively. Monitoring of kidney function post-discharge was recommended in 51.6% of critical care and 36.3% of hospital discharge summaries. Among 35 patients who were prescribed renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system inhibitors before hospitalisation, 15 (42.9%) were not re-started before discharge from hospital. At 3 months, creatinine and urine protein were measured in 88.2 and 11.8% of survivors, respectively. The prevalence of chronic kidney disease stage III or worse increased from 27.2% pre-hospitalisation to 54.9% at 1 year (p < 0.001). Our data demonstrate that discharge summaries of patients with AKI who received KRT lacked essential information. Furthermore, even in patients with appropriate documentation, renal follow-up was poor suggesting the need for more education and streamlined care pathways.

The mirror reflects more for genial than for casual: right-asymmetry bias on the visual word recognition of words containing non-reversal letters

Soares, Lages, Oliveira, and Cabrera-Hernandez (2019) recently showed that the mirror-letter interference effect observed for words containing reversal letters was reliable for words containing left-oriented mirror-letters as ‘d’, but not for words containing right-oriented mirror-letters as ‘b’, thus indicating that the directionality of the reversal letters cannot be disregarded when examining the cost of suppressing the mirror-generalization mechanism at the early stages of visual word recognition. Here we examined whether this bias can also be observed for left-oriented non-reversal letters such as ‘g’, ‘j’, and ‘z’, which just as ‘d’ are also prone to errors in writing in left-to-right orthographies as European Portuguese (EP). Thirty-six EP skilled readers performed a lexical decision task combined with a masked-priming paradigm in which target words containing either left-oriented (e.g., ‘g’, genial) or right-oriented (e.g., ‘c’, casual) non-reversal letters were preceded by 50 ms primes that could be the same as the target (genial–genial, casual–casual), nonword primes in which the critical letter was replaced by the mirror-image of the left- or right-oriented non-reversal letter ( enial–genial, asual–casual), or nonword primes in which the critical letter was replaced by the mirror-image of another left-oriented or right-oriented non-reversal letter as control ( enial-genial, asual-casual). Results showed that the amount of priming produced by identity primes and mirror-image primes was virtually the same for words with left-oriented (e.g., genial–genial = enial–genial), but not for words with right-oriented non-reversal letters (e.g., casual–casual > asual–casual), hence extending the right-oriented bias observed for words containing reversal letters to words containing non-reversal letters.

Yaroslavl Regional Elite Bureaucratic Practices in Working with Citizens’ Letters in the USSR of the 1960s

This article examines processes that took place in regional centers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Issues of interaction between the regional party apparatus and ordinary citizens became particularly acute by the end of the Khrushchev era. This study is connected with the analysis of the problem of bureaucratic practices of the Yaroslavl regional elite in working with citizens’ letters in the USSR in the 1960s. We perform an analysis of a diverse source base: official regulatory documents, archival materials, sources of personal origin, including memoirs and interviews through a prism oral history. The context of the study is presented by the analysis of official documents revealing problems of the regional elite of the late socialist era: registry, forgery in state reporting, careerism. Consideration of various complaints took a serious place in the work of the regional bureaucracy. Critical letters in the absence of sociological institutions allowed the authorities to present the real moods and demands of the population. Complaints allowed us to identify the negative aspects of reality and respond to them. The materials contained in the letters were checked, and not always the facts they contained were confirmed. The regional nomenclature sought to protect its interests and not to give a reason for the center to perceive critical letters in its address as objective.

British public opinion and the Vietnam war

This article discusses the widespread opposition to the Vietnam war in Britain during the period 1964–1968. Focusing on the years of escalation, it covers the period when Lyndon Johnson occupied the White House and Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was in 10 Downing Street. Although Johnson was keen for a British troop deployment in South East Asia, Wilson steadfastly refused to provide one, although he did offer British diplomatic support to the war effort. Wilson often used his domestic situation, including dissent on the British support for the war, as a reason why he could not do more for the Americans. The article shows that, in the UK, there was never a majority in favour of US action in Vietnam and that the British public made their thoughts on the immorality and illegality of the war abundantly clear to those in high office in a variety of ways—from a consistent indication in the polls that Britain should not get involved militarily to impassioned and highly critical letters sent directly to President Johnson.

COVID-19 & the Residency Match: The Added Importance of Mentoring.

COVID-19 & the Residency Match: The Added Importance of Mentoring.

Jalapeno or jalapeño: Do diacritics in consonant letters modulate visual similarity effects during word recognition?

AbstractPrior research has shown that word identification times to DENTIST are faster when briefly preceded by a visually similar prime (dentjst; i↔j) than when preceded by a visually dissimilar prime (dentgst). However, these effects of visual similarity do not occur in the Arabic alphabet when the critical letter differs in the diacritical signs: for the target the visually similar one-letter replaced prime (compare and is no more effective than the visually dissimilar one-letter replaced prime Here we examined whether this dissociative pattern is due to the special role of diacritics during word processing. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in Spanish using target words containing one of two consonants that only differed in the presence/absence of a diacritical sign: n and ñ. The prime-target conditions were identity, visually similar, and visually dissimilar. Results showed an advantage of the visually similar over the visually dissimilar condition for muñeca-type words (muneca-MUÑECA &lt; museca-MUÑECA), but not for moneda-type words (moñeda-MONEDA = moseda-MONEDA). Thus, diacritical signs are salient elements that play a special role during the first moments of processing, thus constraining the interplay between the “feature” and “letter” levels in models of visual word recognition.

Avaliação de Acessibilidade Digital para Pessoas com Deficiência Motora em Repositórios Educacionais Abertos

In the age of the information society, it has become imperative to consider the importance of actions aimed at digital accessibility as a way of dealing with the barriers that impact on the digital inclusion of people with disabilities. The purpose of this study is to evaluate two Open Educational Repositories, namely “Portal Domínio Público” and “Portal do Professor”, to verify if they meet the recommendations of the eMAG - Accessibility Model in Electronic Government. In particular, only those recommendations concerning persons with motor disabilities are considered. In relation to the research method, an exploratory study was carried out, divided in three stages: study of the eMAG model, which is the basis of the assessment; selection of repositories, the objects of this study; and, finally, assessment of the repositories. It was verified that both repositories do not comply with all the recommendations of the Federal Government. A letter of suggestions and constructive criticism was sent to each of the repositories.

Can letter position encoding be modified by visual perceptual elements?

A plethora of studies has revealed that letter position coding is relatively flexible during word recognition (e.g., the transposed-letter [TL] pseudoword CHOLOCATE is frequently misread as CHOCOLATE). A plausible explanation of this phenomenon is that letter identity and location are not perfectly bound as a consequence of the limitations of the visual system. Thus, a complete characterization of letter position coding requires an examination of how letter position coding can be modulated by visual perceptual elements. Here we conducted three lexical decision experiments with TL and replacement-letter pseudowords that manipulated the visual characteristics of the stimuli. In Experiment 1, each syllable was presented either in a different colour or monochromatically (e.g., vs. ) with the transposition occurring across syllables. In Experiment 2, the critical letters had a consistent contrast or not (e.g., vs. ). In Experiment 3, the stimuli were presented either simultaneously or serially, letter by letter (i.e., as occurs in braille reading). Results showed that whereas colouring differently each syllable only produced a small nonsignificant reduction of the TL effect, the other two manipulations-presenting the two critical letters with an altered contrast and presenting the letters one at a time-reduced, but did not eliminate, the magnitude of the TL effect relative to the regular format. Although these findings are consistent with models that postulate an early perceptual locus of the TL effect, the robustness of the TL effect suggests that letter position coding also has an orthographic abstract component.

Letter to Editor: Effectiveness of Hope Therapy Protocol on Depression and Hope in Amphetamine Users

Regarding the article published in 04 December, 2015 entitled “effectiveness of hope therapy protocol on depression and hope in amphetamine users”(1), negligence of some research requirements in the paper made us submit a letter of criticism to the editor-in-chief. We hope this criticism is published in the next issue of the journal.-The first principle in the human studies is the informed consent. Consent should be written in clinical trials.

Exploring the relationship between letter recognition and handwriting in early literacy development

Previous research has demonstrated correlation between letter-naming and letter-writing fluency, and a relationship between letter-naming fluency and successful reading development. Awareness of critical features of letters has received less attention as a part of handwriting development, but it is theorized to also play a role in letter-writing fluency. This study sought to delineate possible components of letter-writing fluency using four related tasks with kindergarten students. Results confirm the correlation between letter-naming and letter-writing fluency and indicate that recognition and manipulation of critical letter features correlate with letter-writing fluency. Findings suggest that awareness of critical features could be a part of early literacy instruction.

Do Diacritical Marks Play a Role at the Early Stages of Word Recognition in Arabic?

A crucial question in the domain of visual word recognition is whether letter similarity plays a role in the early stages of visual word processing. Here we focused on Arabic because in this language there are various groups of letters that share the same basic shape and only differ in the number/location of diacritical points. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in which a target word was preceded by: (i) an identity prime; (ii) a prime in which the critical letter was replaced by a letter with the same shape that differed in the number of diacritics (e.g., ); or (iii) a prime in which the critical letter was replaced by a letter with different shape (e.g., ). Results showed a sizable advantage of the identity condition over the two substituted-letter priming conditions (i.e., diacritical information is rapidly processed). Thus, diacritical marks play an essential role in the “feature letter” level of models of visual word recognition in Arabic.

Religious morality (and secular humanism) in Western civilization as precursors to medical ethics: A historic perspective.

In discussing bioethics and the formulation of neuroethics, the question has arisen as to whether secular humanism should be the sole philosophical guiding light, to the exclusion of any discussion (or even mention) of religious morality, in professional medical ethics. In addition, the question has arisen as to whether freedom or censorship should be part of medical (and neuroscience) journalism. Should independent medical journals abstain from discussing certain issues, or should only the major medical journals — i.e., the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) or Lancet — be heard, speaking with one “consensual,” authoritative voice? This issue is particularly important in controversial topics impacting medical politics — e.g., public health policy, socio-economics, bioethics, and the so-called redistributive justice in health care. Should all sides be heard when those controversial topics are discussed or only a consensual (monolithic) side? This historical review article discusses those issues and opts for freedom in medical and surgical practice as well as freedom in medical journalism, particularly in opinion pieces such as editorials, commentaries, or letters to the editor, as long as they relate to medicine and, in our special case, to neuroscience and neurosurgery. After answering those questions, and in response to a critical letter to the editor, this review article then expounds comprehensively on the historical and philosophical origins of ethics and religious morality. Necessarily, we discuss the Graeco-Roman legacy and the Judeo-Christian inheritance in the development of ethics and religious morality in Western civilization and their impact on moral conduct in general and on medical and neuroscience ethics in particular.

Meta-analyses of antiepileptic drugs for refractory partial (focal) epilepsy: an observation

Meta-analyses of antiepileptic drugs for refractory partial (focal) epilepsy: an observation

SP0196 What to Expect from your Mentor and how to Optimize the Mentoring Process

What to expect from your mentor and how to optimize the mentoring processMentorship refers to a developmental relationship between a more experienced mentor and a less experienced partner referred to...

Moyes, Menzies, and the Vietnam War: New Insights Into the Public Correspondence Between the Prime Minister and the Bishops

In March 1965 a group of Anglican bishops signed an open letter to the prime minister of Australia, Sir Robert Menzies, expressing its concerns about the rapid deterioration of the situation in Vietnam. The letter had been composed by the retired Bishop of Armidale, John Stoward Moyes. The bishops urged Menzies to use his influence with the United States Government to ensure that the possibility of a negotiated settlement of the conflict could be explored to the full. The letter, and the prime minister's public response, thrust John Moyes and his episcopal co‐signatories into the centre of a national debate on Vietnam. Following Menzies's brusque reply, Moyes composed a second and more critical open letter. The prime minister then issued a more detailed response one week before he committed Australian combat troops to the Vietnam War. The initiative taken by Bishop Moyes constituted the first major instance of public debate in Australia concerning the wisdom and morality of the government's policy on Vietnam.