Lines Of Connection Research Articles

The Politics of Anonymity: Foucault, Feminism, and Gender Non-conforming Prisoners

The Politics of Anonymity: Foucault, Feminism, and Gender Non-conforming Prisoners Perry Zurn Throughout the late twentieth century, a number of post-structuralist thinkers put out a relatively sustained call for the practice of anonymity. The idea here was to escape the confines of identity, resist the restraints of administrative bureaucracy, and to become someone new or think something else entirely. Over the years, this call has been thoroughly critiqued by feminists, critical race theorists, and others committed to a politics of difference.1 From their perspective, the call to anonymity belies the intense privilege of those unfamiliar with the inescapable visibility, coupled with deep ignorance, so well known to marginalized people. Michel Foucault is one of these espousers of anonymity. It is my aim in this essay, however, to complicate his account, showing lines of connection or sympathy with a politics of difference. I do so by analyzing his involvement in a 1970s activist cell called the Prisons Information Group. The Prisons Information Group (Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons, the GIP) aimed to “give [prisoners] the floor,” thereby publicizing information about the prison from within it. The GIP utilized anonymity as a tactic of resistance against institutionalized forms of naming. But they equally used naming as a tactical resistance against institutionalized forms of anonymity. By analyzing this group’s use of anonymity, I develop a critical account of anonymity—one sensitive to the differential politics involved in the chosen or forced renunciation of a name. I then use my analysis of the [End Page 27] GIP’s call to tactical specificity to investigate issues of anonymity peculiar to LGBT prisoners. In this way, I aim not only to reinterpret Foucault’s seemingly blanket literary call to anonymity as a tactical resistance to the authorial name, but to contribute to the critical evaluation of anonymity and naming as practices of resistance within and beyond the prison. The Call to Anonymity The post-structural critique of names and its correlate call to anonymity stem from a fundamental destabilization of the subject, authorship, and therefore language. Paradigms here include Derrida’s description of the “endless desertification of language” (1995, 56), Deleuze’s summons to “depersonalization” (1983, 7) or “becoming imperceptible” (2005, 279–83), and Rancière’s endorsement of “becoming-anonymous” (2005, 81–88). Foucault is also a champion of anonymity. Although traceable across his career, it is perhaps best expressed in his 1980 interview for Le Monde, “The Masked Philosopher.” Here, Foucault diagnoses French philosophy as “failing,” because it occurs exclusively under the auspices of “intellectuals,” who tout their individual theories more than they engage critically and creatively with the world. In an attempt to perform this diagnosis, Foucault insists that his name not be appended to Le Monde’s piece. Foucault explains his choice as follows: “Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard” (1997a, 321). Foucault had some faith that, without his then notorious name overshadowing, clarifying, or even explaining away his words, those words might inspire his readers to think differently, and in that sense the activity might rise to the title of “philosophy.” Anonymity, for Foucault then, is a precondition of philosophy. It facilitates the sort of systematic agitation necessary to think differently so as to act diagonally across the social fabric (1997b, 138). Overwhelmingly, Foucault’s references to anonymity are literary in nature. In every period of his work, he proposes to write anonymously. Nevertheless, Foucault’s penchant for anonymity is perhaps memorialized in the popular imagination not by his authorial desires but by his bodily practices of sex, drugs, and the baths. Citing his 1978 interview “The Gay Science” (2011), biographer David Macey notes, “[Foucault] relished the anonymity afforded by saunas and bath-houses where ‘you stop being imprisoned inside your own face, your own past, your own identity,’ where ‘it’s not the assertion of identity that’s important’” (1993, xv). Certainly, Foucault’s literary and physical experiments with anonymity must be placed within the larger context of practices of the self. In his development of these practices, Foucault...

Being Women and Saint (Iberia, 15th-17th Centuries)

A methodological framework is provided for the studies included in the monograph The making of female sanctity form the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, together with a historiographical overview. The articles included are commented, and the lines of connection among them drawn.

The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice. Edited by Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová. London: Routledge, 2014.Queer Visibility in Post-socialist Cultures. Edited by Nárcisz Fejes and Andrea P. Balogh. Bristol: Intellect, 2013.The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe. By Anca Parvulescu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

The volumes discussed in this review take up several inquiries into gender and sexuality coming from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), a region whose production of feminist scholarship is usually deemed marginal when situated against the background of the production and circulation of transnational feminism. Against recurring refutations of CEE’s status as a distinct region, particularly after the marketization of its economies after the fall of the state-communist regimes in 1989, these three new publications assert the value of the regional angle by creating an analytical arc that connects investigations of state-communist gender policies, discursive practices, and lived experiences to explorations of the change in visibility regimes around nonnormative sexualities that occurred after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The volumes also present critiques of the neoliberal moment through a theoretical engagement with newly articulated gender and sexuality regimes, an engagement that maps the exploitation of women’s work and the distribution of women’s precarity and vulnerability onto the former boundaries that separate the old Europeans from newer ones. Moreover, each volume challenges a view that presents the scholarship coming from the region as predominantly practice-oriented and abstracted from current feminist conceptual debates. In doing so, the authors trace multiple lines of connection and continuity between their interdisciplinary inquiries and the larger conceptual, topical, and empirical orientations of the field of women’s and gender studies.

Brain at the centre of the information universe

Insights from the recent wealth of popular books on neuroscience are offered to suggest a strengthening of theory in information science. Information theory has traditionally neglected the human dimension in favour of ‘scientific’ theory often derived from the Shannon-Weaver model. Neuroscientists argue in excitingly fresh ways from the evidence of case studies, non-intrusive experimentation and the measurements that can be obtained from technologies that include electroencephalography, positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and magnetoencephalography (MEG). The way in which the findings of neuroscience intersect with ideas such as those of Kahneman on fast and slow thinking and Csikszentmihalyi on flow, is tentatively explored as lines of connection with information science. It is argued that the beginnings of a theoretical underpinning for current web-based information searching in relation to established information retrieval methods can be drawn from this.

Avances de la neurociencia y sus implicaciones para la ciencia de la información

Insights from the recent wealth of popular books on neuroscience are offered to suggest a strengthening of theory in information science. Information theory has traditionally neglected the human dimension in favour of ‘scientific’ approaches often derived from the Shannon-Weaver model. Neuroscientists argue in excitingly fresh ways from the evidence of case studies, non-intrusive experimentation and the measurements that can be obtained from technologies that include electroencephalography, positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and magnetoencephalography (MEG). The way in which the findings of neuroscience intersect with ideas such as those of Kahneman on fast and slow thinking and Csikszentmihalyi on flow, is tentatively explored as lines of connection with information science. It is argued that the beginnings of a theoretical underpinning for current web-based information searching, as opposed to established information retrieval methods, can be drawn from this. It is proposed that collaborative research programmes between neuroscientists and information scientists could be extremely revealing.

Exploring the role of the wicked in Habakkuk from Malawi socio-economic and political viewpoint

John Saul has qualified decolonisation in Southern Africa (1960 - 1990) as false. This is true for Malawi because despite gaining independence in 1964, attaining multiparty democracy in 1994 and has had three presidents in multiparty era, life for many Malawians continues to be a struggle for survival. This article seeks to explore role of the wicked in book of Habakkuk for purposes of letting text dialogue with Malawi socio-economic and political context, which are both products of internal politics and external forms of imperialism. The theoretical framework relevant to this study is African contextual biblical hermeneutics model. It is a tri-polar approach because it involves three poles : a) African context; b) biblical text; and c) appropriation. In this model, there is a two-way movement between text and context enabling each to interrogate other critically, and constructing potential lines of connection. Since study deals with context of Habakkuk and Malawi context, both of which are substantially shaped by social, economic and political conditions, liberation and post-colonial biblical hermeneutics will serve as sub-theoretical frameworks. Within these theoretical frameworks, a sociological methodology will be used when analysing biblical text and Malawi context.

Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania by Alice Te Punga Somerville (review)

Reviewed by: Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania by Alice Te Punga Somerville Sherrie L. Stewart Somerville, Alice Te Punga. 2012. Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. $67.50 hc. $22.50 sc.288pp. Alice Te Punga Somerville’s recent study Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania invites readers to board her waka, an ocean-going canoe, to journey through waves of time and genres in search of “a kind of regional identification” (xxx) that spans much of the Pacific region. Somerville’s artful use of painting and poetry, fiction and physical spaces, along with contemporary media and music, all enhanced by her insider perspective of Māori material culture, draw lines of connection on the South Pacific chart from Aotearoa to Samoa, from the Cook Islands to Tahiti, extending all the way to Hawai‘i, and then returning to Wellington Harbor in New Zealand. Critical yet imaginative, formalist, and specifically indigenist, the analyses throughout this work are informative, entertaining, and engaging. Somerville begins this journey in search of regional identity by analyzing a painting by Tupaia, a Ra’iatea Islander voyaging with Captain James Cook during his explorations of the Pacific islands in the 1760s. The image depicts an exchange of goods between a Māori man and an officer of Captain Cook’s vessel, the Endeavour. The English officer offers a piece of tapa, paper or cloth brought from Tahiti, that Somerville recognizes as a rare and valuable part of Māori material culture. This author uses the painting and tapa to explore strands of connection between the Māori of New Zealand, their “presence and position” (5), and the peoples of the expansive Pacific region. Even though the regional connection of tapa in the Tupaia painting underpins this work, Somerville reinforces the lines of cultural connection with analyses of works by several Māori writers. Throughout her literary choices, Somerville makes regional identity connections with the use of historical, rhetorical, and literary devices employed by Māori writers. She begins with poems by Māori poets Vernice Wineera, Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan, and Robert Sullivan. “All write about and demonstrate journeys in which Māori start at Aotearoa and venture out into the [Pacific] region” (37). After acknowledging other Māori authors in the literary canon, Somerville selects for direct comparison and criticism two works whose authors “turned their attention to the politics of the region” (61): Witi Ihimaera’s 1987 novella The Whale Rider and Hinewirangi’s 1990 collection of poetry Kanohi ki te Kanohi. These two authors provide waka journeys to Papua New Guinea and [End Page 199] Hawai‘i, respectively, articulating “innovative contributions” (62) of colonial and cultural connection between Māori and other Pacific Islanders. Along those lines of connection, Somerville concludes part 1 of Once Were Pacific with the Tahitian protagonist Tetiare from Jean Anderson’s translation of Chantal Spitz’s L’Ile Des Reves Ecrases (or Island of Shattered Dreams), “the first novel published by an Indigenous writer from Polynesie Francais (French Polynesia)” (81), and voyages to the island where the tapa of the Tupaia painting originated. Throughout this section of the book, Somerville gleans articulations of literary connection between Māori and other Pacific peoples. Moving into the second section of the book changes the scope of this conversation of connection from regional to national and “emphasizes the national context within which Māori articulate a connection with the Pacific” (95). In part 1 of Once Were Pacific, Somerville focuses on the tapa offered for trade by the English officer, emphasizing the Oceania and Pacific regional lines of connection. In part 2, she changes the focus to national, represented by the koura, or crayfish, offered for trade by the Māori man in the painting. This section concentrates on Māori and Pacific, or “Pasifika,” relationships within the physical boundaries of the nation-state of New Zealand. This section begins with three works from different genres: Apirana Taylor’s short story “Pa Mai” from his multigenre literary collection He Rau Aroha: A Hundred Leaves of Love published in 1986; Patricia Grace’s children’s book Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion...

Des Teufels Lug und Trug: Nikolaus Magni von Jauer: Ein Reformtheologe des 15. Jahrhunderts gegen Aberglaube und Götzendienst by Krzysztof Bracha (review)

Reviewed by: Des Teufels Lug und Trug: Nikolaus Magni von Jauer: Ein Reformtheologe des 15. Jahrhunderts gegen Aberglaube und Götzendienst by Krzysztof Bracha Michael D. Bailey KEY WORDS Krzysztof Bracha, Nikolaus Magni, Reformation Theology, superstition, late medieval belief, Nikolaus Magni von Jauer, De superstitionibus Krzysztof Bracha. Des Teufels Lug und Trug: Nikolaus Magni von Jauer: Ein Reformtheologe des 15. Jahrhunderts gegen Aberglaube und Götzendienst. Trans. Peter Chmiel. Quellen und Forschungen zur Europäischen Ethnologie 25 . Dettelbach: J. H. Röll, 2013. Pp. 272. Late medieval superstition has received a fair amount of attention recently. In 2010, Euan Cameron’s expansive Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 considered it at some length before moving on to later periods, and in 2013 my own Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe dealt with it exclusively. Krzysztof Bracha’s detailed study of a single late medieval author and a major (arguably the major) late medieval treatise on superstition is both the latest and also earliest important study in this area. The book is a German translation and updating of Bracha’s 1999 Polish publication Teolog, diabel i zabobony:Świadectwo traktatu Mikolaja Magni z Jawora De superstitionibus (1405 r.). In the intervening years, he has produced a number of valuable articles on superstition, several in German and a few in English, but it is wonderful to have his major study finally made available in a language that far more Western European and American scholars will be able to read. Nikolaus Magni was born in Jawor (German: Jauer) in what is now Polish Silesia around 1355. He studied and then taught at the University of Prague for over two decades, until he moved to the University of Heidelberg in 1402. He was an important theologian and academic leader at both institutions, and his movements to some extent illustrate the lines of intellectual connection and influence that criss-crossed Central Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, stretching from Prague, Krakow, and Vienna in the east to Cologne and Heidelberg in the west. The first part of Bracha’s book consists of two substantial chapters that trace Nikolaus’s life and career and situate him and his work in the context of late medieval efforts to promote religious reform among both the clergy and laity. Also in Part I is a shorter, more technical chapter detailing the origins and manuscript circulation of his great work De superstitionibus. The second part of the book examines that treatise in detail, with five chapters grouped around major aspects of superstition that it addressed. [End Page 224] As Bracha readily admits, the importance of this treatise does not lie in any great originality on its part. On almost every point, Nikolaus relied on standard patristic and scholastic authorities like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and William of Auvergne. What distinguishes his work is its encyclopedic nature and its astonishing circulation. More than a century ago (in the only other book-length study of Nikolaus), Adolph Franz identified 58 surviving manuscript copies of De superstitionibus, an enormous number for a theological treatise (Magister Nikolaus Magni de Jawor [1898]). Bracha has expanded this list by almost 100 additional manuscripts, bringing the total count to 152, listed in an appendix. Almost all of these manuscripts originated in Central Europe, meaning that Nikolaus’s influence was somewhat confined geographically, but it was all the more intense for that concentration. Also remarkable is that his influence basically did not extend past the fifteenth century, nor did his treatise ever find its way into print. I will return to this point below. Bracha’s book performs two important tasks that should give it a resonance beyond what its seemingly narrow focus might promise. First, in Part I, it provides a short but valuable study of Central European intellectual and religious currents through the lens of a major but now little-remembered and understudied figure. Then, in Part II, it presents a detailed exploration of late medieval superstition via the most extensive and widely circulated Central European exemplar of an antisuperstition treatise. Precisely because Nikolaus Magni was not startlingly original on any point, Bracha’s study gives background information...

A Novel System Splitting Scheme Based on the Identification of Weak Connection

In this paper, a new system splitting scheme based on the identification of weak connection is proposed. This paper firstly claims that if two nodes in a transmission line are related to two different generator groups or irrelated to any generator group, the transmission line is regarded as weak connection. And matrix R is presented to reflect the relevance between load nodes and generator groups after faults are cleared. The candidate strategy space is composed of these transmission lines of weak connection. Secondly, the procedure of searching the splitting surfaces is listed to illustrate how the splitting scheme works. Finally IEEE 39-bus system is used to verify the feasibility of this splitting scheme.

Creating Stories of Hope: A Narrative Approach to Illness, Death and Grief

A narrative approach allows psychosocial teams to stand alongside children who have cancer, or life‐threatening illnesses, and their families at critical times and to create stories of agency. Rather than dwelling on stories of loss and despair that potentially enfeeble families, a narrative approach builds on stories of strength that engender hope by asking questions that separate the person from the problem. Developing such stories supports people in taking action against the effects of cancer. It also facilitates the formation of a legacy that can sustain family members, even after the death of a child. This legacy serves as the foundation for remembering the dead, folding their stories into the lives of the living, and constructing lines of relational connection that can transcend physical death. Not only do families benefit from this approach, but the psychosocial team that provides professional and medical services can be uplifted through witnessing practices of strength and love in the face of hardship.

Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture by W. Jason Miller (review)

Miller, W. Jason. 2011. Hughes and American Lynching Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. $44.95 hc. $19.95 sc. 168 pp.W. Jason Miller's Hughes and American Lynching Culture opens with this observation: Langston Hughes never lived in an America where the very real threat of did not exist (1). Despite this fact, an in-depth study of Hughes's relationship to these gruesome events that marked his lifetime has not been undertaken until now. While often acknowledged as a prevalent theme, no one has previously shown how the violence of fundamentally shaped this titanic twentieth-century writer. Miller's argument is similar to Abdul R. JanMohamed's Death-Bound Subject (2005), which analyzes how the constant imminent threat of death determined the work of Richard Wright. Miller, however, employs different methodologies. With thick descriptions of social contexts and nuanced close readings, he combines studies, biography, and textual criticism in order to trace the lines of connection between Hughes's literary production and the formations engendered by lynching. result not only illuminates a (if not the) defining aspect of Hughes's oeuvre but also offers a model for analyzing the relationship between violence and the literary arts.Miller's is a tightly constructed study that draws on a range of fields to tell the story of Hughes's lifelong commitment to singing out against lynching convincingly (67). It builds on recent work on culture in American modernity. For instance, it is indebted tojacqueline Goldsby'sH Spectacular Secret (2006), a work that brilliantly details the cultural logic of lynching, and Adam Gussow's Seems Like Murder Here (2002), which examines the intimate relationship between racialized violence and African-American expressive forms. However, aspects of Miller's conceptual framework could have been more fully articulated in order to flesh out how Hughes negotiated culture. Some key terms- such as passing, to discuss Hughes's work during the 1950s, and topophobia, to discuss the relationship between race and the environment-were highly suggestive but would have benefited from more sustained engagement. At times, this study also moves too quickly. For instance, in the third chapter, Miller begins to examine the relationship between jazz and violence in Hughes's poetry, but then the focus suddenly shifts to the idea of photographic montage. jazz- violence relationship is never fully explicated. Despite these slippages, Miller successfully demonstrates the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the intersections of violence and production.Proceeding chronologically, the book opens with Hughes's first published poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, reconsidering it as part of a swirl of concerns-personal experience, news-media messages, and a bloody social landscape-overdetermined by lynching. This canonical poem, as Miller explains, is a meditative lyric about how African Americans have survived on and near rivers (38). Miller crucially establishes as the larger context for this meditation. He recontextualizes this standard reading, showing how Hughes reclaims riverscapes where took place and battered Black bodies were displayed from bridges. With careful attention to historical records, this chapter convincingly reimagines this poem's scene of composition in the wake of the Red Summer of 1919 while Hughes passed through the South on a train, crossing river after river. Hughes traveled through Texas shortly after a young man about his age, Lige Daniels, was brutally murdered. chapter includes a photograph of this horrifying event, reminding us that images of mutilated black people freely circulated in the media throughout Hughes's lifetime. In fact, as Miller explains, from a very young age Hughes regularly encountered such images and reportage of the perverse spectacles that often accompanied lynching. …

‘Too Frivolous to Interest the Public’?: Walter Scott, Richard Polwhele and Archipelagic Correspondence

The Cornish writer Richard Polwhele and Sir Walter Scott corresponded on matters literary and social for a period of 25 years at the start of the nineteenth century without ever meeting. This article examines the published traces of this epistolary acquaintance and establishes what it might tell us about the lines of connection and dissemination it was possible to establish in Romantic Britain between what might otherwise be thought of as outlying areas of the nation. The article contributes to a number of recent archipelagic attempts to better understand the distributed or devolved nature of print culture within the nations and regions of Britain, in this case through a focus on the interconnections between them.

Transnational citizenship, dissent and the political geographies of youth

This paper brings a relational perspective to studies of citizenship beyond national borders. Analysing the responses of 16 to 19‐year‐old young people in Bradford (UK) to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we demonstrate the complex entanglements of young people's lives with international politics and develop a relational conceptualisation of citizenship. Departing from the scalar logics and universalising assumptions upon which many definitions of cosmopolitan citizenship are based, we show that youth citizenship across and beyond national borders evolves from specific lines of connection and disconnection that are actualised and modified in performances of citizenship identities, giving rise to diverse political positions and dissent, both with the state and between young people. We conclude with some suggestions for translating these ideas into youth citizenship practices.

The Human Brain and Information Science: Lessons from Popular Neuroscience

Insights from the recent wealth of popular books on neuroscience are offered to suggest a strengthening of theory in information science. Information theory has traditionally neglected the human dimension in favour of 'scientific' theory often derived from the Shannon-Weaver model. Neuroscientists argue in excitingly fresh ways from the evidence of case studies, non-intrusive experimentation and the measurements that can be obtained from technologies that include electroencephalography, positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and magnetoencephalography (MEG). The way in which the findings of neuroscience intersect with ideas such as those of Kahneman on fast and slow thinking and Csikszentmihalyi on flow, is tentatively explored as lines of connection with information science. It is argued that the beginnings of a theoretical underpinning for current web-based information searching in relation to established information retrieval methods can be drawn from this.

Soziologie and Lebensanschauung: Two Approaches to Synthesizing ‘Kant’ and ‘Goethe’ in Simmel’s Work

Contrary to common perceptions of Simmel’s work as dividing into three stages of Darwinism, Kantianism, and Goethean/Bergsonian Life-Philosophy, consideration of the full scope of the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe demonstrates Simmel’s concern with both Kant and Goethe as life-long, just as was his engagement with core principles respectively associated with them: Form and Life. What changed in his mind over time was how those two principles were construed and related. In this view, Simmel’s Soziologie can be read as a treatise on the properties of social forms that emerge out of vital processes – following a dynamic akin to Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb, whereas the Lebensanschauung puts more emphasis on the ways in which forms channel, constrain, and inspire the streams of life. This opens the door for creative work pursuing lines of connection between the two disciplines – a sociology of authentic individuality and a kind of existentialized sociology – and, beyond that, to a unified theory of action and evolution.

Mediterranean Exchanges: A Response to Seth Schwartz’s Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society?

If YOU have THE OCCASION to read Seth Schwartz's most recent book, don't make the mistake that I did and assume that the word refers to a body of water. There is nothing here about seafaring, trade routes, or piracy. The term as Schwartz uses it is a reference not so much to a specific locale but to a certain way of doing history, an approach associated with Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of ? h 'dip II (Paris, 1949). The scholarship inspired by Braudel's work seeks to understand the history of the various peoples living around the but what has come to distinguish it is not its focus on the Mediterranean Sea per se but an ecological/anthropological approach that stresses the factors that held otherwise diverse peoples together in a shared transethnic, transreligious culture - the ethos and social practices they held in common, and the lines of connection that cut across their linguistic, geographical, and religious differences. Schwartz is really asking through his title is: What can Mediterraneanbm tell us about ancient Jewish society? - a question that may make this book less appealing for those readers hoping for another book about Jewish pirates or port Jews, but which gives Schwartz an opportunity to explore early Jewish sociology, how Jews in the Second Temple period and Late Antiquity related to one another and to others they encountered in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean.To understand Schwartz's project, then, we have to understand what he means by Mediterraneanism. The term Mediterranean, as the classicist Susan Alcock has noted, has become fashionable in academic circles of the last two decades - a number of serials now bear it as a title or subtitle - and it bears a variety of meanings and connotations.1 Schwartz has in mind is the approach exemplified by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell in the The Corrupting Sea (2000), an ambitious eighthundred-page effort to establish the unity of premodern Mediterranean culture prior to the period that Braudel covers.2 Much of The Corrupting Sea is engaged in historical ecology, a description of landscape, vegetation, flood patterns, and other environmental variables that helped to shape Mediterranean culture, but that part of their approach is largely irrelevant to Schwartz's study, which makes only a few perfunctory references to the climate and geography of the Mediterranean; for him, the Mediterranean isn't really a place but a heuristic model, and the question of how its distinctive topography and ecology might have shaped early Jewish culture is almost completely irrelevant to what he is trying to do. Schwartz does take from Mediterranianism is its preoccupation with Hordern and Purcell's term for the pathways, literal and metaphorical, that linked the peoples of the Mediterranean across distance and cultural difference. Connectivity often refers to the roads, navies, and other conduits that directly connect far-flung places, but it also encompasses what Alain Bresson calls virtual connectivity, international, transcultural behaviors that facilitate trade, diplomacy, and other kinds ol interaction and exchange. 3 The locus ol Were the Jeu\The form of connectivity of most interest to Schwartz is what classicists refer to as euergetism, a very rough equivalent to what we refer to as philanthropy, private liberality for the public good, in the words of the classicist Paul Veyne. The term is a neologism of modern scholarship, derived from the wording of Hellenistic decrees honoring persons who do good to the city (euergetein ten polin) through some donation of resources or act of public service. …

Dangerous spaces: threatening sites for social justice

There is nothing natural about space as it is understood here. Spacing is an act that constructs relationships, intervals, separations and thus boundaries. The earth has no territories other than those imagined and enforced through acts of territorialisation. A city has its private spaces closed to open access and open spaces that are inscribed with what can or cannot be done. As individuals pass by, stop and talk, or do such mundane things such as meet for coffee, interactional spaces are constructed and de-constructed. There are lines of legitimate connection and passage just as there are lines that cannot be crossed, or can only be crossed under certain conditions. In this special edition, each paper, in its different way, focuses on the spaces that emerge as off-limits, margins, edges, no-places; or on what happens when boundaries become indeterminate, shifting or shifty.

Dangerous spaces: threatening sites for social justice

There is nothing natural about space as it is understood here. Spacing is an act that constructs relationships, intervals, separations and thus boundaries. The earth has no territories other than those imagined and enforced through acts of territorialisation. A city has its private spaces closed to open access and open spaces that are inscribed with what can or cannot be done. As individuals pass by, stop and talk, or do such mundane things such as meet for coffee, interactional spaces are constructed and de-constructed. There are lines of legitimate connection and passage just as there are lines that cannot be crossed, or can only be crossed under certain conditions. In this special edition, each paper, in its different way, focuses on the spaces that emerge as off-limits, margins, edges, no-places; or on what happens when boundaries become indeterminate, shifting or shifty.

Application of multi-objective genetic algorithms to two case studies of reliability efficiency analysis and optimal expansion of electrical transmission networks

Two applications of multi-objective genetic algorithms to the analysis and optimization of electrical transmission networks are reported to show the potential of these combinatorial optimization schemes in the treatment of highly interconnected, complex systems. In a first case study, an analysis of the topological structure of an electrical power transmission system in the literature is carried out to identify the most important group of elements of different sizes in the network. The importance is quantified in terms of group closeness centrality. In the second case study, an optimization method is developed for identifying strategies of expansion of an electrical transmission network by addition of new lines of connection which are optimally identified with respect to the objective of improving the transmission reliability, while limiting the investment cost.

IThe Complexity of Intention

Ruth Leys starts with accounts that reduce emotion to a few simple states and emphasize the degree to which it is genetically wired (see Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect,” Critical Inquiry 37 [Spring 2011]: 434 –72). She then argues that other cultural theorists who emphasize the role of affect are driven in this direction, too, even when they wish to avoid such a trajectory. Much of the argument revolves around the charge of “antiintentionalism” against us. Because of limitations of space, my response concentrates on my own thinking in this domain, though I suggest some lines of connection to other theories of affect. I will not always try to unpack Leys’s views but will focus more on where mine deviate from her account of them.