Lines Of Connection Research Articles

Mahogany: a historical geography of a lasting commodity of 18th-century enslavement

ABSTRACT It might be assumed that the commodities produced by enslaved labour in the British colonies in the 18th century were consumed long ago. Mahogany wood, however, endures and challenges this assumption. Slave labour was used to cut mahogany trees and prepare the timber for transporting to European and North American markets. When made into fine furniture and fittings this same mahogany has been admired and preserved through to the present day. We explore how mahogany was part of the geography of colonial trade and wealth-making by drawing on research focused on Lancaster in north-west England, the UK’s fourth largest slave trading port. We trace the extended geographies and lines of connection that were produced by the interlinked trades in enslaved African people and mahogany wood, and, through this focus on Lancaster, we provide an example of how colonialism shaped the economy and narrative of places in Britain. Contemporary responses within heritage settings and the implications for the continuing trade in antique mahogany furniture are also considered.

Integration of ADEI Competencies in the Specialized Practice of Social Work Students and in the Act of Professionalization of Social Work

Considering the set of key competencies supported by social work organizations in the development of the social work profession at the global level, we aim to analyze from a theoretical point of view those competencies that presuppose the involvement in professional practice of attitudes and behaviors that support non-discrimination, cultural diversity, equity and inclusion in the training of social work students. The student in the field of social work here can be both the one who benefits from training and continuing education, and the one who in turn perpetuates future practices and balanced client-professional relationships, after being integrated into specific social work organizations. The analysis starts from how the professionalization of future social workers is correlated with their guidance and involvement in practices based on anti-racism/non-discrimination, equity, equal opportunities, cultural diversity and inclusion. The objective of this paper is to draw, at a theoretical level, lines of connection between professionalization practices at the international level - as formulated by the Boston University School of Social Work in agreement with the Council on Social Work Education, the national association that represents education of social work from the United States, with Romanian national norms - adopted from European and international practices - the National College of Social Workers in Romania (NCSWR/ CNASR - the acronym in Romanian language), in agreement with UNICEF and ISCO.

A Meta-Analysis on Democracies in Indonesia

This research intends to describe the map of the progress of democracy studies in Indonesia. The study was performed by searching the Scopus database using the keyword “Democracy in Indonesia.” The search results are then descriptively analyzed based on the year of publishing, the number of publications, the most regularly published writer, source of the article, country of publication, and association. Data is exported in the RIS format to receive a research-creation diagram. The exported data is then interpreted and evaluated using the VOSviewer program to classify the bibliometric map and the Nvivo 12 plus software to determine the most general categorization of themes and topics. Via network visualization, lines between nodes represent the relationships (edges) between inter-nodes. The other lines of connection between nodes, the closer the relationships with records are. Meanwhile, with the visualization of density, it was seen that if the color visualized was getting redder, the subject had been researched a lot, although the topic was only barely researched if it was getting greener. Indonesia's R&D maps on democracy are grouped into six key themes: democracy, politics, social, political, local, and electoral, while political, democracy, politics, social, and growth are the most dominant themes.

TRENDS OF THE MICROWAVE PHOTONIC RADARS

Today, the world's leading countries are intensively working on the development of new generation radars - microwave photonic radars. Microwave photonic radars make it possible to significantly reduce the mass and size characteristics of radar stations, to increase the information capability and range of target detection due to the reduction of losses in long communication lines when using optical fiber, to ensure high immunity due to the significantly lower sensitivity of optical-electronic equipment and fiber-optic lines of communication connection to external electromagnetic influences. Microwave photonics provides wide bandwidth, flat response, low loss transmission, multi-dimensional multiplexing, ultra-fast analog signal processing and immunity to electromagnetic interference. Radar implementation in the optical domain can provide better resolution, coverage, and speed performance, which would be difficult to implement with traditional electronics. The review article examines the state of development and system architectures of such photonic radars as optoelectronic hybrid radars, all-optical radars, multifunctional microwave photonic radar systems, distributed microwave photonic radars, software-defined radars, and cognitive radars. New technologies in this field and possible future directions of research are discussed. As an example, a broadband microwave photon radar reproduced on the basis of a microcircuit is considered. The broadband signal generator and receiver are built into the silicon crystal on the insulator. A high-precision distance measurement with a resolution of 2.7 cm and an error of less than 2.75 mm was obtained. Visualization of multiple targets with complex profiles has been implemented. But the performance of most integrated microwave photonic chips is not yet satisfactory for practical radar applications. Monolithic integration of key microwave photonic subsystems is also not mature enough for practical applications, so hybrid integration of devices fabricated on their optimal integration platforms is of practical interest. At present, indium phosphide, silicon nitride and silicon on insulator are the three leading platforms for photonic integration

Global world change: a philosophical area

The article analyzes the global changes that occurred in the second half of the 20th century, which led to the need to anticipate changes in the world through the prism of posing problems and putting forward certain priority philosophical categories, based on the property of philosophy to be the quintessence of the thought of the era. At a time when the concept of unshakable truth has given way to relative truths as ways of varying in the context of ongoing events, the importance and necessity of higher truth as an unattainable illusion has been lost. In accordance with this, the primacy of the cultural-historical context brought to the fore the concept of a multitude of truths. With the transition to postmodernism, the previously stable philosophical concepts that defined being and man as the subject of this being have undergone significant changes. Accordingly, the renewal of philosophical interpretations of the justification of the world and of man himself directly affects on the specifics of the development and functioning of all areas of human activity, including moral and legal norms, art and culture, science and technology. The most important context for the development of mankind was the disintegration of the ontological unity of the world, which once served as the unshakable foundation of existence. Another equally significant change seems to be a shift in emphasis from reason as such to the coexistence of political minds. This intensifies the phenomenon of alienation. The implosion of consciousness, which J. Baudrillard spoke about, led to the fact that human consciousness became torn, as a result of which fragmentation became the norm for perceiving the world and reproducing it in value orientations. The author believes that the first quarter of the 21st century reveals the essence of the reformatting of all existing lines of life connection – the relationship of man and nature, man and society, man and man, which is necessarily reflected in the interpretation of philosophical categories.

The contribution and motivation of faith-based volunteers in a UK antislavery partnership: a case study

ABSTRACT Modern slavery and human trafficking are crimes impacting local communities with the most vulnerable being exploited. As such, there is a need for communities to partner towards slavery-free communities. Faith communities are encouraged to partner in these responses. The article presents a small-scale case study of one UK antislavery partnership (AP) and interviews participants of Christian faith, who volunteer within it. The study asks, to what extent does the AP benefit from volunteers of faith? And what motivates the volunteers’ involvement within that AP? The findings indicate that APs can benefit from the skills and experience of faith volunteers. The study highlights that the volunteers’ Christian faith and previous experiences of working with vulnerable individuals motivate their present praxis. Through reflection relating to lines of connection between life and faith, the common good, public faith and spirituality, the study explores how faith communities and APs can develop mutually beneficial partnerships.

On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c. 1830–1890 by Philip Gooding

Since the publication of Kirti N. Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (New York, 1985), historical studies of the Indian Ocean World (iow) have grown exponentially. Coming to grips with this vast oceanic space has challenged subsequent generations of historians to think creatively about how best to address its great diversity in both time and space. An important feature of this recent scholarship is its interdisciplinarity. In the volume under review, Gooding takes an innovative approach to what, in some hands, might have been limited to a regional East African study of this historiographically neglected zone by locating Lake Tanganyika as a frontier of the iow. By defining the Indian Ocean littoral as the core of this watery world, he boldly proposes that this great African lake lay at its frontier. Specifically, in this analysis, he depicts a dynamic interaction that links the Swahili coast and the lakeshore littoral through the integrating element of the ivory trade. As he writes, “This book is about how these physical lines of connection developed and the roles that littoral and inland populations around Lake Tanganyika had in shaping them” (3).The book opens with an introduction discussing “Lakes, Oceans and Littorals in History” in which Gooding makes his case. The body of the text is divided into two parts. The first, entitled “Demarcations of Space,” includes three chapters—“The Growth of Emporia,” “Changing Land Use in a Changing Climate,” and “Traversing the Lake.” Part II is divided into four chapters—“Competition and Conflict on the Western Frontier,” “Global Commodities in East African Societies,” Structures of Bondage,” and “An Islamic Sea.” In each of these chapters, Gooding strives to demonstrate the numerous ways in which the changes wrought by the expansion of the ivory trade worked to connect the Swahili coast to the lakeshore and to transform the lakeshore’s society and culture, especially after about 1860.Some of Gooding’s assertions are more speculative than demonstrable—an evidentiary challenge that is familiar to historians of precolonial Africa—but his thesis nonetheless demands serious attention. That said, although he sets his study in a wide East African context and relates it to parallel examples from the broader iow, he misses the opportunity to consider the comparative possibility of an earlier interior African frontier of the iow—the auriferous region of the Zimbabwe plateau in its relationship to the Sofala coast (today, southern Mozambique). He might also have contrasted the evolution of the town of Ujiji into the main entrepôt for coastal links on the eastern side of Lake Tanganyika with the development of Nkhotakota on the western side of Lake Malawi, given their contemporaneous chronologies.The author draws from a wide range of sources, including archaeology, anthropology, oral history, and environmental studies, but he admits that the bulk of his evidence comes from reading the classic nineteenth-century European explorer and missionary accounts, whether published or located in various archives. Nevertheless, he recognizes the biases of his European sources and is meticulous in his reading of them. He is also careful in his use of oral sources, where he points to the problems of feedback and the positions of his informants (172–176).Gooding brings these elements together in each chapter of the book, but his most interesting discussions concern slavery and Islam. His most vigorous use of interdisciplinary sources and methods, however, is in his chapter about the effect of climate change (rainfall and lake levels) on what he defines as an agricultural “revolution” during the nineteenth century. As he argues, “Climate and climatic change are crucial for contextualizing this agricultural revolution” (65). Thus, he reveals the important intellectual influence of his academic home at the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University, where a major thematic focus is on “Appraising Risk, Past and Present” in the iow. Readers of this journal will find that chapter especially valuable.

Queer Sinophone Media across Asian Regionalism

Queer Sinophone Media across Asian Regionalism Alvin K. Wong (bio) In March 2022, in the midst of a fifth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong that generated more than 10,000 new cases per day, two colleagues invited me to take a short weekend trip to Tai O, a fishing village located on the western side of Lantau Island. At first, I was not very excited about the trip: I had already been to Tai O several times, and in recent years the fishing village has been overtaken by tourists. It's just another village that is commodified for its traditional and exotic appeal, I thought. My colleagues soon proved me wrong by taking us on a hiking trail that overlooks the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge. While pleasantly rejuvenated by the breathtaking view, I was also struck by how regionally integrated Hong Kong is with the rest of mainland China within the spatial imaginary of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. After the hike, we decided to take a rest at a local café. Our server was a talkative, middle-aged, sporty-looking woman who gave off queer vibes. Once she found out that one colleague was from Taiwan, she shared her own experiences of working in Taipei and how much she missed Taiwan. On our way out, I spotted a postcard of Anson Lo and Edan Lui, the protagonists of the latest hit Boys' Love (BL) television series Ossan's Love (ViuTV, 2021), which is adapted from the highly successful 2018 Japanese BL television drama of the same name. As we passed by the Tai O Heritage Hotel, another lesbian butch-femme couple passed us by. I half-jokingly told my friends, "Tai O is becoming a gay Mecca of Hong Kong!" I recount my trip to Tai O to focus three ideas that might not appear related to one another at first glance: queer media, the Sinophone, and [End Page 159] regionalism. What kind of regional imaginary comes into view when we name Tai O as the new gay Mecca of Hong Kong? How does the critical framework of queer regionalism disrupt the conventional narrative of Hong Kong as a capitalist Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (PRC)? To tackle these questions, I deploy queer Sinophone media as a critical concept that tracks the circulation and mediation of queerness within both Sinitic-language communities in the Sinophone worlds and across regional connections in Asia. In recent years, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have revived the concept of regionalism for different ends. Prasenjit Duara perceptively distinguishes several historical formations of regionalism, including the imperial regionalism of the British Empire in the nineteenth century; anti-imperial regional blocs of the early twentieth century among advocates of Asianism; economic regionalism and securitization via entities such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); and, finally, the economic polarity of regional migration resulting in the large flow of both professional expats and underpaid workers to the capitalist cities of Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.1 While Duara mentions that "there is increased sojourning by women employed as domestic workers, nurses, entertainers, and prostitutes," issues of women and feminism seem like an afterthought to his theorization of regionalism.2 If dominant frameworks of Asian regionalism marginalize women, sexuality, and queerness, recent work in transnational queer studies offers some promising directions. For instance, queer theorist Gayatri Gopinath has coined the term queer regional imaginary to demonstrate "the possibility of tracing lines of connection and commonality, a kind of South–South relationality, between seemingly discrete regional spaces that in fact bypass the nation."3 Expanding on Gopinath's theory of queer regionalism through Sinophone studies, which is defined as "the study of Sinitic-language cultures on the margins of geopolitical nation-states and their hegemonic productions," in this short essay I invoke the term queer Sinophone media to show how queer medial forms produced in Sinophone locations are inflected through regional formations.4 Specifically, I first examine how the Hong Kong media enterprise ViuTV's adaptation of the Japanese TV series Ossan zu Rabu (Ossan's Love, TV Asahi, 2018) gains popularity...

Theorising racist hate speech on UK university campuses through a CRT lens

ABSTRACT Racist hate speech on UK university campuses remains an increasing concern. This article examines the widespread problem of racist hate speech through a multilayered theoretical approach; and suggests that a fuller appreciation of the problem can only be gained through a race-centred analysis. Drawing on Fraser’s work on the problematics of misrecognition and identity-reification, the article extends Levine-Rasky’s theoreticisation of power dynamics in the intersectionality between whiteness and middle-classness to intersections of whiteness with both middle-classness and working-classness as a contributing factor to mobilisation of lad cultures which is termed as white-laddism. The article advances the understanding of racist hate speech through a conjoined analysis of these concepts through a Critical Race Theory (CRT) lens. The conjoined analysis is informed by the Deleuzian ‘rhizomatic’ approach in order to examine the process by which multiple, diverse and non-hierarchical lines of connection between the concepts shape, dislocate, modify each other in variable ways. The detail behind the bigger picture helps further our understanding of the inadequate nature of equality policies and strategies that often look at issues in isolation, and thus fail to address the inequality and injustice being perpetuated on campuses.

Live Art

Typically expressed as beats per minute (or bpm) the sound of the heartbeat while drawing becomes an aid – a way to experience, absorb and measure time. In considering the body as a drawing tool, it is the sound of blood and the concept of blood as a marking material that introduces the role of the artist’s body. In introducing a performance-based practice that is engaged in the landscape, the writing also is an investigation into how movement and environmental references, like the earth’s riverbeds and mountainous structures, can offer an understanding of the body and can form a particular relationship to the land. In reference to Iceland, the artist Carali McCall suggests ways to look at measurements of time and the nature of colour to make associations. The article describes artworks by Roni Horn and Barry Le Va and texts by Donna Haraway. Prompted by the troubling matters confronted when making work today, such as climate change and the polarisation of social and economic upheaval, the paper aims to adopt, acknowledge and encourage native and indigenous philosophies and land acknowledgements – to support a kinder, sustainable attitude to making and addressing things both subjectively and objectively. Interpreted through the artist’s practice and the body as a drawing instrument, the artworks Circle Drawing and Performing Rock are both described; the first being a series of large-scale drawings made on paper and compressed graphite with blood as a result of the repetitive action. And the other, a work made by performing both ‘in’ and ‘of’ the landscape – holding a rock as an act of endurance. Documented as a live performance, both address the weight of things and the longing for lines of empathy and connection.

Anton Webern and the Renaissance Tradition

The composers of the postwar avant-garde trend in music perceived Anton Webern’s music primarily as a brilliant expression of a break with tradition. Nonetheless, what was perceived upon first glance as a manifestation of innovatory radicalism, upon more careful examination revealed to a greater degree its obvious historical genesis. Entirely different ideas and values disclosed themselves beyond Webern’s serial precepts — a profound symbolism permeated with mysticism and elements of developed Medieval and Renaissance traditions of ‘‘parametric’’ musical thinking. This article demonstrates in a thesis manner observations tracing out the lines of connection between the new elements of structural compositional logic of certain oeuvres by Webern and the traditional ideas of the polyphonic works by the Renaissance composers, primarily the ‘‘Great Flemish Masters,’’ the most sophisticated artists of counterpoint, giving special attention in their musical compositions to the architectonic organization of form, in whose music Webern experienced an indelibly profound interest during the course of his entire life. In the opinion of many researchers, certain aspects of Webern’s music become more visible, if they become connected to his profound knowledge of and fondness for such composers from the Netherlands as Dufay, Josquin, Ockeghem, Isaac, etc. The concept of tradition in the context of this article is not exhausted by the technological aspects of polyphony, but also presumes a mystical philosophical constituent connected with a particular system of symbolic encoding which plays a substantial role in both cases.

“Tokowa po ya ekolo”: The Military Body Within the Congolese Army

This article explores the conceptualization of the body among former Congolese soldiers living as refugees in Johannesburg. The article draws on extensive fieldwork in Johannesburg, South Africa and employs the concept of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to explain the bodies of those who have decided to join the Congolese Army. The article reveals the complex ways in which the army manipulates soldiers’ bodies to generate diverse lines of connection, coalition, and removal (or disconnection). We support that the soldiers’ bodies are not necessarily owned by the country, but that soldiers’ bodies become owned by military institutions, who employ nationalist rhetoric to justify their existence and actions. The act of joining the army could be considered a way of cutting ties with civilian life and joining a new world in which the individual is socialized into military culture. Through initiation, the soldier’s body is reterritorialized; it becomes a national asset. While this study focuses on former Congolese soldiers, it has broader relevance, giving insight into how soldiers perceive their body shifting from individual possession to be reterritorialized as the body of the nation.

Charaxes and Collaborative Becoming in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat

This article focusses on Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006 [2004] trans. Michiel Heyns) and its fabulation of the magical Overberg of the south-western Cape. While the mother–child bond has received much scholarly attention, what deserves closer examination is the tentacular imbrication of the creaturely world into this dynamic. Adopting a posthuman, ecocritical lens, this article highlights the intermediary role played by creatures in these complex intimacies. In particular, I focus on Agaat’s ‘kin-making’ with the Emperor Butterfly which serves as a mediator between Milla and Agaat. Elucidating the chthonic themes in the novel, I turn to Haraway’s Living with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), which calls for making “kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (2016: 1). I argue that the multispecies kinship practices presented in Agaat provide a “response-able” approach to living on a damaged earth, planting seeds for “worldings committed to partial healing, modest rehabilitation, and still possible resurgence” in these hard times of planetary crises (71).

Rebecca West's ‘Seamed Red Hand’

The political commitments of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918) have proven hard to define. More subdued in its tone and telos than her volleys against patriarchal capitalism in publications such as The Freewoman and The Clarion, some argue that Return undermines West's socialist-feminist pronouncements, while others contend that the novel engages subtler modes of critique. Deepening and extending the latter vein of scholarship, this essay reveals uncharted lines of connection between West's early fiction and nonfiction by performing a ‘palm reading’ of Return: an examination of the work of hands in the text – particularly Margaret's ‘seamed red hand’, which ties her to the women workers West extols in her ‘Hands That War’ article-series (1916). Although West's foreclosure of Margaret's disruptive potential at the end of Return might seem ideologically suspect, I argue that this manoeuvre, rather than betray quietism, indexes West's burgeoning recognition of the difficulty of achieving the kind of social change she called for in her nonfiction.

Codes of Intimacy: Love, Chance, and Masculinity in Henry James's Confidence

Codes of IntimacyLove, Chance, and Masculinity in Henry James's Confidence Karin Hoepker (bio) Setting aside older quarrels over the boundaries of a naturalist canon, this essay argues for a more comprehensive understanding of post-Civil War literary production which traces lines of connection between realism, naturalism, and sentimental fiction. I read Henry James's Confidence (1879), a novel disregarded by critics for more than a century, as a complex text that programmatically investigates codes of intimacy and familiarity against the background of a transatlantic economy of risk, globalization, and uncertainty. As a story of male friendship and romance, jealousy, miscommunication, and a social experiment gone wrong, Confidence explores the late nineteenth-century semantics of love that paradoxically demands both serendipity and inevitable necessity. The novel's often overlooked sharp satirical humor dissects a psychosocial construct of masculine individualism which struggles to maintain a sense of agency within an emerging "age of capital" (Levy 189). Nancy Walker and Donna Campbell have long made convincing arguments for a reevaluation of literary production in the late nineteenth century that revises the lines of distinction drawn between realism, naturalism, and sentimental writing as both heavily gendered and sustaining a prejudice against literature as a marketable commodity. Along similar lines of traditional canonization and bias against the popular and sentimental, Henry James's critics have ignored Confidence as one of his lesser works. Written for profit, tailored to please the tastes of a broader readership, it has, almost by default, been deemed devoid of artistic value. I propose to suspend such categorization and focus on the cultural work of the novel instead. I am interested in what Confidence might tell us about the function of fiction in a late nineteenth-century socioeconomic paradigm of increased social complexity, functional differentiation, and [End Page 1] what kind of impact a pervading logic of market speculation has on contemporaneous codes of familiarity and intimacy. The social system of a capitalist market casts subject relationships in a new light; mutual assessments of value dominate and threaten to overwrite previous narratives of intimacy, familiarity, and ideational values of friendship with a transactional agenda. Speculative capitalism becomes part of the field of invisible forces to which the human subject is exposed and thus also forms one of the "insults" (as Freud had famously called them) to human self-perception and individualist fantasies of control, which naturalism eventually comes to highlight.1 Nineteenth-century literary production centrally engages in an exploration of coping mechanisms, in strategies of complexity reduction, and in efforts of managing the emerging threats of uncertainty and social change. Literary texts address the increasing sense of fragmentation of reality as it is individually and collectively experienced and, more specifically, respond to a crisis of knowledge production and masculinity.2 In this context, Henry James's Confidence engages with issues of masculinity within a broader field of complexity and uncertainty. The novel employs a seemingly conventional sentimental plotline of love and romance to reframe problems of subjectivity, intimacy, and knowledge production. To that end, Niklas Luhmann's discussion of love and trust in modern societies as increasingly differentiating socioeconomic systems provides a conceptual frame for a new reading of Confidence. Luhmann's reflections on the semantics of love help foreground the cultural work of James's text as a forerunner of "naturalist sentimentalism" (Sawaya 56); they highlight how Confidence uses an aesthetics of the sentimental to dismount narratives of individualism and autonomous agency and rejects simplistic ideas of causality and determination. Tapping into the rich resources of sentimental aesthetics and the novel of manners, James employs codes of intimacy at the core of romantic love to question predominant discourses of individualism that are an intricate part of novelistic writing of his time. Confidence targets capitalist fantasies of entrepreneurial individuals as well as realist narratives of individual agency and experience. It humorously exposes the latent sentimental economies of such narratives and the gendered and classist rhetoric that primarily serves the economically privileged figure of the male dilettante. As Confidence pairs romantic narrative and marriage plots with the specters of lost friendship and divorce, it highlights themes of speculation, uncertainty, and confidence as part of a broader engagement with systemic...

The adventure of responsive teaching: lessons from Cora and Julie Diamond

ABSTRACT This essay has several related goals. The first is to contribute to the philosophy of education literature on Cora Diamond while introducing the work of her sister, Julie Diamond, to the field. I introduce Julie Diamond’s work by connecting it to the work of John Dewey, and a secondary goal of the paper is to test lines of connection between Dewey and Cora Diamond. Finally, by developing Cora and Julie Diamond’s thinking on teaching and the moral life, I hope to contribute to conversations in teacher education, especially ongoing conversations about the meaning of responsive teaching. The first half of the paper discusses and engages Cora Diamond’s thinking on the moral life drawing on a range of her published work, the middle of the paper builds a bridge from Cora Diamond to Dewey as a way of introducing Julie Diamond, and the final part of the paper offers an engagement with Julie Diamond’s work. I discuss teaching throughout the paper, and my hope is that a vision of responsive teaching, one grounded in the work of Julie and Cora Diamond, emerges that allows teachers to come alive to aspects of their work that can disappear in the rush and whirl of classroom life. The paper begins with a personal story as a way of connecting with the style of Cora and Julie Diamond’s approach to teaching and the moral life.

Embodied Aporia: exploring the potentials for posing questions through architecture

Through shifts in scale, as illustrated in creative spatial practices, affinities can be drawn out between persons and architectures that lead to encounters with forms and materials as both familiar and strange. Such encounters hold potential for developing sensitivity to the forces at play between body and surroundings, and the identification of separate bodies can be shifted to identification with, and as part of, an ecology of bodies. Using examples from artist-architects Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins alongside art historical examples of Minimalist sculpture, lines of connection are drawn between disparate practices in order to illustrate a continuity of questioning the body directly through the construction of environments. These spatial practices evidence that certain questions are best posed by architecture, as questions which cannot be posed through language can be posed through other methods. Strategies for increasing this sensitivity are parsed out towards the identification of a particular form of embodied doubt, a lived puzzlement felt body wide.

The Gnostic in Us All: Thinking from the Macrobiotics of Michio Kushi

Abstract Around 1970 in graduate school, I wrote a paper on the Gospel of Thomas, one of the documents discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. The debate over its gnosticizing elements was alive and well, and I weighed in with an argument that its thorough oblivion to history rendered it Gnostic—in the capital-“G” sense. I published a revised version of the paper in an academic journal in 1976. Then in 1986, I began to practice macrobiotics. As I studied the teachings of Michio Kushi, its foremost American teacher, I began to suspect religion. With longtime political interests in world government, Kushi elaborated on a cosmological spiral, with humans descending from a “unique principle” as it divided into yin and yang. Finding balance with yin and yang energies through diet and lifestyle would lead to alignment and peace, even as the earth itself wobbled on its axis through cycles that lasted thousands of years—the earth’s particular location influencing humans for good or ill. Even so, if macrobiotic principles were followed, what lay ahead was “one peaceful world.” Somewhere on the road to one peaceful world, Kushi discovered the Gospel of Thomas. He began to use it regularly in his popular “spiritual” seminars. This article leverages an account of the gnostic (here small-“g”) content of macrobiotics on Michio Kushi’s commentary on the Gospel of Thomas—The Gospel of Peace (1992)—and also on related works. The paper explores the gnosticism of macrobiotic foodways and a peaceful world in terms of American culture, looking for lines of connection and viewing them as encrypted signs—in the twenty-first century still—of the gnostic in us all.

Institutional kung fu: on the arts of making things happen

ABSTRACT With its emphasis on establishing lines of connection between the multiple localities, historical experiences and social movements traversing and forming our region, the methodology of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies has always emphasized the need for intellectual work to engage in a serious way with activities and situations that initially lie “outside” our own immediate concerns. Today, however, the conditions of precarious labour and the brutal performance imperatives imposed by neo-liberal management in universities make it hard for academic workers in particular to risk any experiments that are not prescribed by their jobs. Arguing that it is possible to learn fighting skills that can help us find ways, at times, to get around these limitations, this article asks what practical measures might be able to help scholars thrive as well as survive in university contexts today. To explore this question it draws on Eleanor H. Porter’s novel Pollyanna, on Chan Koonchung’s discussion of “kung fu smarts,” and on the collective wisdom of colleagues.

Introduction

Introduction Vanessa Ochs (bio) No so long ago, I would meet Jewish Studies scholars working on feminist projects face to face in such settings as the Association for Jewish Studies annual conference, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton and the Oxford Seminars in Advanced Jewish Studies. We shared ideas not just on panels where papers were formally presented, but in hallway conversations, over rushed meals and on stolen walks. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic shifting our lives to Zoom, I replay those treasured encounters, the formal and informal ones, especially those that jump-started precious "long-distance" relationships that merged personal and intellectual selves, with colleagues, junior and senior, from all over the world. In the past few years, I was particularly interested to hear many colleagues—often ones I had just met—describing ethnographic or autoethnographic projects that considered matters of Jewish women's lives and gender from decidedly feminist perspectives. I could see lines of connection between their projects across diverse fields, including anthropology, sociology, folklore, religious studies and other related disciplines. The gracious invitation extended to me to serve as Consulting Editor of this issue of Nashim offered an opportunity to gather exemplars of the new work I had been hearing about, and to ask the authors to specify how they understood the impact of "feminist sensibilities" (a term I take from Michal Kravel-Tovi's article herein) in their choices of topics, research methodologies, modes of interacting with informants, or genres of writing. As you will see, the authors whose work is collected in this issue (which is by no means intended as a representative sampling of the much larger variety of work being done in the field) describe methodologies that are particular to their disciplinary or interdisciplinary training, their topics and their frames of reference. No one single style or even definition of "new Jewish feminist ethnography" emerges, but there are indeed significant overlaps in their work, all of which, by the way, eschew gender essentialism, especially in comparison with much second-wave Jewish feminist scholarship. I do draw your attention to one robust connector: the presence of pressing feminist agendas, expressed in attention, for example, to intersectionality in women's lives, systemic inequalities of power, and the movement from marginalization to empowerment. [End Page 7] In-person fieldwork, long a hallmark of ethnographic research technique, characterizes four of the articles. In "The 'Vulnerable Hero' and His Wife: PTSD and Shifting Dynamics of Gender and Care in Contemporary Israel," Keren Friedman-Peleg chronicles her research as a participant-observer in a support group for Jewish-Israeli women whose husbands had been diagnosed with security-related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Friedman-Peleg discovers that the women's therapists, there in principle to help them, unwittingly turn out to be agents of the state, by enforcing the national expectation that women must care for their husbands who have suffered security-related traumas. But Friedman-Peled discovers a twist—the women use the psychological tools they have learned in the group sessions to analyze their own emotions, to resist gendered national and cultural expectations of caregiving, and even to consider leaving stressed marriages. Complicating her analysis further, Friedman-Peleg examines the taken-for-granted gendered moral/ethical implications of caregiving for victims of trauma. Further still: She brings our attention to political ramifications. As she writes: "The biomedical label of PTSD has been utilized not only as an ideological means to emphasize Jewish-Israeli suffering, while portraying the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories as perpetrators of terror, but also as a tool to valorize sufferers of mental injuries as a result of their active participation in the conflict." Amy K. Milligan draws upon feminist folkloristics in "Creating Jewish Mothers: A Feminist Ethnographic Investigation of the Mothers Circle of Coastal Virginia and the Interfaith Parents Circle." Milligan observed the mutual support generated in peer-facilitated educational groups of non-Jews and Jews-by-choice raising Jewish children in a community in the American South. By focusing her gaze and empathetic listening upon mothers who are transmitting "Jewish identity in ways that...