Epic Battle Research Articles

Dungeons and Dragons meet PowerPoint: an interactive ICT tabletop experience for EFL learners

Background: While wondering and experimenting with different ways to incorporate creative thinking and students’ interests into my English as a foreign language (EFL) lessons, I developed a Tabletop role-playing game (TRPG) that uses PowerPoint and Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) rules/materials to immerse students in an adventure while at the same time developing their English proficiency and confidence. Aim: To craft a straightforward yet enjoyable TRPG accessible to English learners of all levels, fostering the development of their reading, writing, listening, speaking, and critical/creative thinking skills. Methods: My TRPG, hereinafter referred to as EL Adventures, takes the core rules and concepts of D&D and simplifies them, allowing teachers (the Dungeon Masters) to primarily focus on their students (the players) actively participating and using English. The PowerPoint presentations not only enhance the comprehensibility and fun factor of the story for students through pictures, animations, sounds, and text but also alleviate the teacher’s need to memorize the story text. While dice play a pivotal role in determining certain outcomes, the student’s success in the game hinges on direct communication with the teacher, teamwork, and creative problem-solving as they confront challenge after challenge of varying difficulty levels. Results: EL Adventures provided my EFL students with opportunities to practice reading, writing, and speaking English through intricate storylines, character creation, epic battles, and a variety of challenges. Conclusion: Not all lessons can be taught from a textbook; sometimes they are taught on a noble quest in a fantasy world.

Paradise lost: A classical epi

John Milton's "Paradise Lost" stands as a monumental work in the canon of English literature, embodying the classical epic tradition with its grand scope, profound themes, and poetic mastery. This abstract delves into the quintessential characteristics that classify "Paradise Lost" as a classical epic. The narrative unfolds against the cosmic backdrop of Heaven, Hell, and Earth, exploring the consequences of Adam and Eve's disobedience and their subsequent expulsion from the idyllic Garden of Eden. Milton weaves a tapestry of theological inquiry, grappling with the complexities of free will, theodicy, and the nature of God. The poem introduces a heroic protagonist in Adam, whose choices shape the destiny of humanity. Divine intervention, epic battles, and supernatural elements contribute to the poem's grandeur, while Milton's elevated language and incorporation of classical and biblical allusions elevate it to the status of an enduring masterpiece. "Paradise Lost" serves not only as an epic retelling of the biblical Fall but also as a didactic exploration of moral and spiritual themes, making it a timeless work that continues to captivate readers and scholars alike.

THE MOTIF OF WAR IN TABLETOP ROLE-PLAYING GAMES: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

This article explores the prominent motif of war in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) through the analysis of popular games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer fantasy role playing game. The author argues that the motif of war is a prevalent theme in RPGs due to its ability to prompt players to engage in epic battles and quests and to develop complex storylines. The article draws upon theoretical frameworks such as narratology and ludology to analyze how the motif of war shapes player experiences in these games and how it contributes to the evolution of TTRPGs as a genre. Through the analysis of game mechanics and thematic elements, the author demonstrates that the motif of war serves both as a source of conflict and a means of creating immersive gameplay experiences. The article concludes with a reflection on the implications and potential future directions of studying war in RPGs.

An early intersemiotic translator of Milton in Brazil

This article provides the commented English translation of an ode (“To Milton”, composed of twelve stanzas) by the 18th-century Brazilian poet, Claudio Manuel da Costa. Our interpretation of the translated poem problematizes the fact that da Costa did not translate Milton’s works, but that he wrote an intersemiotic translation of Milton’s contributions to literature as a whole. “To Milton” concentrates and expands on themes related to Paradise Lost (hell and heaven, heavenly muses and earthly glory, civil wars and epic battles). Although there were no translations of Milton’s works into Brazilian Portuguese then, the ode illustrates the principles of intersemiotic translation, through which semantic expansions occur in the exercise of da Costa’s choices to invite Milton to participate in a nascent literary tradition; he approaches Milton as an author comparable to Camões and Torquato Tasso. Furthermore, we address the following questions: what does the commented translation reveal about Milton’s poetry that has not been as readily visible or legible? What was accomplished by bringing Milton into 18th-century Brazilian Portuguese? How is Milton accommodated to 18th-century Brazil and how is this new environment, prospectively or actually, different for having Milton in it?

Cradle of Conservation

Conservation history brings to mind epic battles over national parks, free-flowing rivers, and immense wilderness areas in the West. We should not overlook similar accomplishments in the East, however, where citizens and public officials pioneered the conservation movement well before John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Theodore Roosevelt coined the term. Maine stands as an example. Not only did it establish its conservation credentials early but it also did so under complicated conditions.

Sita: The Hero of Nandini Sahu’s Retelling of Ramayana

Generation after generation has heard the story of Ramayana as the epic battle or dharmayudh between Rama and Ravana. Sita is mostly presented as the damsel in distress whose honour is protected by her husband and who is supposed to prove her chastity in order to find a place in society. However, her life before marriage, her natural gift, resilience, courage, and ability to detach from everything that is close to her are many times overlooked. The hero is Rama, and the villain is Ravana. Sita is the victim. Nandini Sahu’s Sita is not a victim. She is the true warrior of the epic Ramayana who deserves to be called the hero. She is the faithful daughter, wife, and mother who performs all the three roles with devotion and dedication. However, most importantly, she is a woman of substance who never loses hope in adverse circumstances and resiliently faces every challenge that life throws her way. This paper is an attempt to reconstruct Sita’s identity as the warrior of the epic instead of the victim by referring to Nandini Sahu’s rendering of the story of Ramayana from Sita’s perspective. This analysis will be done from the postcolonial perspective in which the story of the subaltern Sita will be the highlight, and her actual contribution to the action of the epic will be brought to the forefront to show that she is the hero and not the victim.

Many Faces of Madness: Mindless Destruction with Snapshots of Preservation

This article is a brief analysis of two contexts of struggles, and also of celebration of the values of preservation of forests. One of the locations is in the Uttarakhand region well known for the emblematic “Chipko” movement of the 1980s, when women fought the epic battle to protect trees by hugging them. We study the documentary film by Deepa Dhanraj, based on the life of Sudesha Devi one of the leaders whose example brought women together to resist and fight the power of the state. The second location is the state of Jharkhand, which has seen ongoing struggles for conservation over decades. The echoes of the steps of the resistance movement can be heard in the powerful voice of Jacinta Kerketta. The life and work of these two activists present a case for reflection on the imbrication of the personal and the political in the context of social movements.

Fibroblasts as Turned Agents in Cancer Progression.

Differentiated epithelial cells reside in the homeostatic microenvironment of the native organ stroma. The stroma supports their normal function, their G0 differentiated state, and their expansion/contraction through the various stages of the life cycle and physiologic functions of the host. When malignant transformation begins, the microenvironment tries to suppress and eliminate the transformed cells, while cancer cells, in turn, try to resist these suppressive efforts. The tumor microenvironment encompasses a large variety of cell types recruited by the tumor to perform different functions, among which fibroblasts are the most abundant. The dynamics of the mutual relationship change as the sides undertake an epic battle for control of the other. In the process, the cancer "wounds" the microenvironment through a variety of mechanisms and attracts distant mesenchymal stem cells to change their function from one attempting to suppress the cancer, to one that supports its growth, survival, and metastasis. Analogous reciprocal interactions occur as well between disseminated cancer cells and the metastatic microenvironment, where the microenvironment attempts to eliminate cancer cells or suppress their proliferation. However, the altered microenvironmental cells acquire novel characteristics that support malignant progression. Investigations have attempted to use these traits as targets of novel therapeutic approaches.

Understanding Ice Cream

What is the root cause of political polarization? In this philosophical short story, Professor Gault is having a rough day. His graduate-level class on the growing polarization in politics is just as heated and polarized as the subject they're discussing. He thinks his students are the bugs trapped in the web of rhetoric, instead of being the spider. In a daze after class, a strange woman strikes up a conversation with him and presents an alternate theory. Perhaps, she argues, the underlying foundation of our time is narcissism. Maybe politics is just fertile ground for those who want to feel like gods in a fantasy world of their own creation, where only they can fight the eternal battle of good versus evil. Perhaps polarization isn't genuine, but merely the result of narcissists attempting to wage epic battles to avoid realizing that, outside of the world they've imagined, they don't really matter.

Hauntologies of Fiction: Reading Roth at the End of History

Hauntologies of FictionReading Roth at the End of History Andy Connolly (bio) It has been over thirty years since francis fukuyama proclaimed that the Cold War victory of western democratic capitalism over communism culminated in an end to class-based ideological conflict as the motor of "History." Drawing upon an interpretation of Hegel's belief "that the evolution of human societies […] would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings" (xii), Fukuyama looked to the imminent spread of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism into heretofore closed-off reaches of the globe as a sign that the long Enlightenment project toward human progress had begun to adopt its peak, finalized form. As a major governing assumption of our neoliberal age, the Fukuyamist belief that we have reached the "end of history" looks to free market capitalism's limitless capacity to enhance individual potential and promote human freedom, while at the same time short-circuiting any serious discussions about the limiting structural conditions of class and poverty, not to mention the influences that other powerful factors such as gender and race have in the uneven shaping of capitalist social relations. Over the past number of decades, what has given particular impetus to this myth of a post-historical, classless society has been the capitulation of effective forms of social, political, and cultural dissent to the neoliberal assertion that "there is no alternative" (assigned the acronym TINA by political commentators) to market-based definitions of democracy and the social good. As such, the radical liberalization of the post-Cold War period has been shaped by a monocular stridency, which forecloses not only on the major social struggles of the past but also on the lessons that such history may present for understanding the present and potentially altering the future. In terms of our historical horizons, then, the end of history has locked us into a kind of endless, monotonous present, from which there appears no relief or interruption. It has taken some time to understand the lasting impact of my early life experience as one of Fukuyama's children. Then again, coming of age at the end of history proves deceptive in such ways, diminishing one's sense of historicity since there's apparently no more epic battles of "History" to live by or suffer from. The significance of history [End Page 50] in such an age is subject to all kinds of denial and delay. Like the repressed, history at the end of history often comes in the shape of uncanny and monstrous returns. No longer the meaty source of experience and identity that it once was, or at least appeared to be, it can take a spectral quality, like a haunting trauma whose presence is yet to be made properly known, but which lurks in wait for us, eager to disrupt our naïve sense of having broken from the past. Over the years, Philip Roth's fiction has helped shape my understanding of the peculiar "hauntological" functioning of history at the end of history. This sense of how the seemingly dead past haunts both the present and the future is not only revelatory in terms of events that have shaped my own "dwarf drama" (Anatomy 106), but also in relation to my understanding of what Roth has to tell us about history and memory. Roth's historical imagination, with its various presentiments of the "unforeseen" (Plot 113), proves highly informative when it comes to thinking about the complex issues of memory and futurity that shape our present times. Such considerations of how history functions as a spectral presence in Roth's work continues to shape my scholarship. I My early adulthood in the mid-90s was colored by a number of local phenomena that reflected the larger post-Cold War experience of a liberalized and rapidly integrating world, disencumbered of the previous two centuries of modernity, made replete with class antagonism, revolution, nationalism, colonialism, and international conflicts. During this period, many young Irish people like myself, particularly within the southern Republic of Ireland, began to experience, in ways that seemed quite sudden, a welcome breach from the drab...

Concerning Science

Concerning Science David K. Hecht (bio) Andrew Jewett,Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. 356 pp. Notes and index. $42.00 Science matters. In his impressive Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America, Andrew Jewett skillfully explores a variety of different critiques of science across twentieth-century United States history. These critiques do not always align in their particulars: some are based in religion, while others are secular. Some come from the political right, others from the left. Some seem to originate from the cultural margins, whereas others were mainstream. Moreover, as Jewett acknowledges, there is no consistent definition of science that runs through all the critiques. What unites them is a sense that there is something amiss in the world—modernity, secularism, amorality, dehumanization, totalitarianism, materialism, technocracy—and that science is to blame. Science matters, for these critics, and in all the wrong ways. Science under Fire can be profitably read as a comprehensive treatment of science skepticism in modern U.S. history. Jewett effectively distills the essences of a staggeringly wide range of thinkers and writers across many decades. “Although a concern with science’s corrupting cultural effects has never been the dominant strain in American thinking about science,” he writes, “it has been persistent, influential, and consequential for nearly a century—above all, in the post-World War II ‘golden age’” (p. 16). Having accelerated after 1945, such skepticism has become entrenched in recent decades and one of its most prominent manifestations—climate change denial—is proving to have planetary implications. However, Jewett, counterintuitively but powerfully, scarcely mentions climate change. While some readers might wish for a greater engagement with our contemporary crisis, I welcomed Jewett’s more historical focus. After all, we have any number of thoughtful analyses concerning the origin and nature of climate change denial.1 What we don’t have is exactly what Science under Fire provides: a synthesis of science skepticism before the current era. Like all good history, this book demonstrates that its subject is far more complicated than we might assume simply by considering its most recent form. [End Page 389] This is an important contribution. But science also matters here in a deeper and more methodologically novel way. Jewett uses “science” as a tool with which to explore American intellectual history more broadly. This is not a history of science, but rather an account of the many ways in which American thinkers, writers, clergyman, and educators mobilized science as a rhetorical concept in defining and pressing their social visions. Jewett explains: “this book explores conceptions of science as a social and cultural force, rather than a method or a subject” (p. 5). Precisely because these actors’ ultimate concerns lay outside of science, the stakes of the debate were monumental. Jewett writes, for example, of the concerns of many American Catholics that teaching evolution was just one more expression “of a materialistic, self-divinizing form of rationalism that had plagued the West for centuries” (p. 61). Similarly, he contends that after World War II “it became a matter of simple common sense for many scholars that the Western world was experiencing an epochal modern crisis and that scientism lay at its root” (p. 123). Few of the critics who populate the pages of Science under Fire saw their concerns in narrow, policy terms; even those who offered political critiques did so with an eye toward epic battles between democracy and freedom on one hand with totalitarianism and repression on the other. Science under Fire is thus an intellectual history of (perceived) cultural and intellectual crisis. As such, it should be read alongside such books as Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America (2015), Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America (2019), or Daniel T. Rodgers’ Age of Fracture (2011). All three of these books—and there are certainly others—are ambitious and impressive syntheses of much intellectual history (and historiography) in the service of understanding the grand sweep of American culture and ideas. Jewett’s contribution to this literature is to focus on science. Of course, he is not the first intellectual historian...

Why Should I Learn Music? It Can Be Good for Your Brain!

Imagine a world without music—no summer concerts, no holiday sing-alongs, no dramatic orchestra music in movies leading to epic battle scenes. Would not that be terrible? Musicians train for a long time to create and play music. Playing music brings us pleasure and connects us to one another. Research shows that playing music also contributes to our overall health and wellbeing and helps our thinking and planning skills. In this article, we will first talk about how various parts of the brain are engaged to make music playing possible. We will also discuss benefits of music learning for the brain, including our thinking abilities and social skills. We hope that this article provides examples and evidence that making music is not only fun, but it can also benefit our overall wellbeing.

“NEW NORMAL” OF POST-COVID AND POST-MODERN WORLD IN THE MIRROR OF THE LANGUAGE

Today humanity is going through a period of radical transformation of the world, the principles of the existence of society, economy, education, traditional values. We are witnessing giant shifts in world politics, epic battles between Good and Evil. It can be assumed that the modern society of the post-covid era is moving in the direction of "new postmodernism" and "post-capitalism".
 The world elite is trying to “recode” sociocultural reality, human existence, linguistic consciousness. With the help of new cultural concepts and linguistic signs, not only the “New Reality” is created and described, but also the “neology” of this reality.
 This article is a study of the actual problem of neologization, in the context of the above-mentioned dynamic processes occurring in the post-covid world. It is aimed at identifying and describing linguistic means reflecting the current trends of the world elite in establishing a "New World Order". To implement a "radical transformation" and to impose a "New World Order" with new values ​​and traditions, the "newspeak" of the post-pandemic era is used.
 The object of our research is new terms and concepts of the actual spheres of social life, as an important fragment of a new conceptual and linguistic picture of the world.
 Keywords: “social puppet”, neologization, New World Order, Great Reset, gender-neutral language, metamodernism,

The Last Christmas (La Última Navidad)

The Last Christmas (La Última Navidad)

Books and Other Reviews

Key Points Dead zones: The loss of oxygen from rivers, lakes, seas, and the ocean — Glenn Suter Desperate: An epic battle for clean water and justice in Appalachia — Glenn Suter Life is simple: How Occam's razor set science free and shapes the universe — Glenn Suter Offshore Situation Room: Enhancing resilience to offshore oil disasters in the Gulf of Mexico — Robert L. Stevenson Impacts of Fukushima nuclear accident on freshwater environments — Louise Stevenson Plastics in the aquatic environment—Part I: Current status and challenges — Temitope O. Sogbanmu Plastics in the aquatic environment—Part II: Stakeholders' role against pollution — Temitope O. Sogbanmu Cumulative impacts: Recommendations for ORD Research: External review draft — Richard Wenning

Castles & Capitalists

Castles & Capitalists Sarah Jones (bio) In 1990, the Christian author James Dobson issued a grave warning about “so-called fantasy roleplaying games.” They masquerade as simple creative exercises for children, but “the fact is, in order to play these games properly, you usually have to use magic and mysticism, things that are clearly not Christian,” he said dolefully. Some former players even said the game had led them into contact with demons, he asserted. Dobson, the founder of the influential organization Focus on the Family, didn’t mention any particular game by name. He didn’t have to: by the time his warning was broadcast, Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop roleplaying game that starred elves, orcs, and other fantasy beings, had become synonymous with the “Satanic Panic” that had gripped the public imagination for the better part of a decade. If anything, Dobson’s warning arrived a little late. The game had malevolent power, evangelist Jack Chick insisted in a famous 1984 tract: it led to suicides and, even worse, goddess worship. Dobson’s warning, which originally aired on a long-running children’s radio show called Adventures in Odyssey, [End Page 11] circulated for years. Hearing it as a child in the late 1990s, I had a reaction Dobson didn’t intend: I was greatly impressed. Now I play in two Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. For each, I created a character who joins a handful of other players to fend off a variety of imaginative evils. The campaigns take place under a system of rules outlined in the Player’s Handbook and the guidance of a dungeon master who plans the sessions. Within those parameters, the creative and collaborative decisions of the players (and the luck of our many-sided dice) reign. Sessions typically last hours and are played around a table to make space for small props. The goal is immersion, a temporary commitment to a fantasy world. Nevertheless, reality tends to creep in. I named one character, an elf cleric, after a pair of Chick’s devil-haunted players. For me, and likely for thousands of others, the Christian right’s alarmism only increased the game’s mystique. Today, the game is almost ubiquitous. People who have never rolled a character have probably heard of its alignment chart, which divvies personalities up into good, evil, or neutral categories along a chaotic-to-lawful axis based on their objectives or background. COVID-19 seems to have only increased the game’s popularity. CNBC reported last March that sales for the game had jumped by 33 percent during the pandemic, which followed a steady six-year growth streak. Though the game’s been around since 1974, in some respects it seems as though its time has truly arrived. Talk of demons helped disguise the more prosaic reality of the game’s growth. As game historian Jon Peterson recounts at length in a new book, Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons, the true history of D&D involves no mystical rituals, just familiar corporate skullduggery. While preachers and parents battled for the nation’s impressionable youth, the game’s architects battled over credits and royalties in a “great war” that would grow more fractious as the game became more popular. The stakes weren’t souls, but something else, something more tangible. Mammon rules all, and spares not even the most creative endeavor. In the 1960s, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson became obsessed with tabletop wargaming. Gygax was a dreamer, ill-equipped for life in the modern world; Arneson had similarly dedicated himself completely to his passion. For both, wargaming was an outlet, if not necessarily a way to make money. At least, not in the beginning. “The honor of working on a set of rules that might become popular in the gaming community was the lion’s share of the compensation,” Peterson observes. “It would take a miracle for a venture like this to end up providing someone with a livelihood—let alone a fortune.” Dungeons & Dragons was that lightning-strike chance. Yet when Gygax and Arneson first wrote the slim rule booklet that would become the most popular tabletop game in the world, their expectations were low: perhaps a...

Guest Editorial: Venting and the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

For more than a century, the oil industry magnificently improved the lives and health of humankind. That fact lies beyond debate. Our industry simultaneously expanded and made profits yet progressively protected water, land, people, and air from its potent products. Those gains help support a moral case to expand some use of fossil fuels but not to release them. Now it is time to lean in to solving the last step of our direct emissions. The oil industry has long lived and grown under tightening demands. In 1919, just a handful of months after Texas empowered its Railroad Commission (RRC) to regulate oil and gas, the agency promulgated its first well-spacing rule. Wells were to be spread apart not on principles of efficient recovery but on protection of groundwater and against fires. Four years later, the same state made it a crime to pollute surface water with oil. It even held corporate officers personally responsible for the pollution. As effects accumulated, so did protections of surface and subsurface—from oil down rivers to oil in dirt pits, in lined pits, in covered pits, and in closed tanks. At this point, any release of oil more than a couple of barrels requires public reporting in most jurisdictions. In Texas, for example, just half a barrel of oil released from an onshore storage tank mandates a public report, and US federal waters require reporting of any release that makes sheen on the water. By the 1950s, most US states required cementing casing through the fresh-water table, and modern plugging regulations date from the 1960s. Perhaps belatedly, the health and safety of workers became a buzz word and then a corporate imperative but now an easy habit. Notwithstanding the pandemic of “temporary” flaring in recent years, decades of both punitive and positive policies aimed to reduce air pollution. Our predecessors often did not welcome the new obligations, but they thrived even as they conformed, cajoled, and adapted. Generations ago, the first serious efforts by the RRC to impose basic regulation on the oil industry sparked an epic legal battle ostensibly and oddly over the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. It seems that all industry, not just oil, lives in strife with regulators. Still, our predecessors’ lack of initiative followed first by resistance then lackluster diligence contributed to public disdain over the decades. Their track record set up kneejerk and passionate distrust when the shale revolution began. Although controversy faded as fracturing contracted, more than 60% of Americans still believe that fracking harms the environment. Among 25 industries tracked by Gallup, the oil industry enjoys the fourth-highest disapproval rating among Americans, down from the number one slot a handful of years ago. College enrollment in fossil fuel programs has plummeted as, among other reasons, the youngest generation eschews our reputation ironically as we have become the cleanest version of ourselves yet. We improved protections for every-thing our products could pollute. Now, our communities’ standards ask us to address the last, smallest, and least visible of our direct releases, namely fugitive natural gas. And there is no reason not to do it aggressively. Venting offers no righteous credit.

Taylor, Stephen. Sons of the Waves; The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail.

Taylor, Stephen. <i>Sons of the Waves; The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail</i>.

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

1 - Epic Battles in Radical Development Theory, Field Research and Praxis: A Celebration of Björn Beckman (1938–2019)

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; This article reviews the contribution of Björn Beckman, the Swedish political economist, in the study of development. It addresses three issues. The first is his engagement in theoretical debates on the political economy of development. These focus on the nature of the African state, capitalist development in poor countries, whether the military can act as a revolutionary vanguard in spearheading democratic and progressive social change, neoliberal theory of macro-economic adjustment, and the dynamics of state-civil society relations in advancing development and democracy. The second is his field research work in Ghana and Nigeria. This examines the role of organised farmers and the state in the production and marketing of cocoa in Ghana in the 1960s; the entrenchment of wheat import dependence and the failed project of wheat import-substitution in Nigeria; and the construction of a union-based labour regime in Nigeria’s textile industry that enhanced the bargaining power of unions even as a worsening macro-economic environment and industrial restructuring impacted adversely on employment and wages. The third deals with his collaborative work on a variety of organised interest groups, including labour movements, scholar activists, the Nigerian student movement, and organised informal sector groups. The last part of the article discusses the costs of Björn’s combative style of scholarship.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Yusuf Bangura, Formerly with the UN Research Institute for Social Development and Professor, Fourah Bay College (2013–2014), University of Sierra Leone, Nyon, Switzerland. Email: bangura.ym@gmail.com&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;