Passive Objects Research Articles

The Femme Fatale in Text and Image: Analyzing Gender, Power, and Representation in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Vampire” and Philip Burne-Jones’s Painting

This paper examines the connection between Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire” (1897) and Philip Burne-Jones’s painting of the same title, focusing on their portrayal of femininity and the interaction between text and image. Kipling’s poem, often viewed as a response to Burne-Jones’s depiction of actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, presents a warning about the destructive allure of female beauty, highlighting themes of male disillusionment and betrayal. Burne-Jones’s painting emphasizes the femme fatale figure, portraying a sexually dominant woman overpowering a helpless man. Both works suggest that beauty conceals danger, leading to male ruin. Using Foucauldian and feminist frameworks, the paper critiques the politics of representation, arguing that the portrayal of women often reflects patriarchal anxieties, reducing them to passive objects in male-dominated visual culture. Critics like Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock are cited to challenge these depictions. The paper concludes that the female vampire theme reflects cultural fantasies rather than truths about femininity, contributing to ongoing discussions on how art and literature shape gender perceptions.

Обобщенные модели фитомассы деревьев ивы (род Salix L.): мета-анализ

Climate change has a negative impact on the environment, including forest ecosystems. However, forests are not only passive objects affected by climate change, but also, due to their ability to absorb and accumulate carbon, they themselves can significantly influence this process. Carbon sequestration by forest ecosystems plays an important role in mitigating the effects of climate change. Therefore, it is necessary to know about the amount of carbon stored in forest phytomass, and it is becoming increasingly important to accurately determine the phytomass of forest trees. Due to the absorption of carbon dioxide during plant growth and its release during wood burning, forests are a carbon-neutral energy source. The idea of using phytomass as an energy source to replace fossil fuels is most promising for fast-growing species. These include willows (genus Salix L.), native to Europe, Asia, America and Africa and found from the tundra to the tropics. Willow is successfully used as fuel in many countries, showing excellent growth and productivity even at juvenile stages and, under certain climatic conditions, having the highest capacity among woody plants to convert solar radiation into phytomass. Short-rotation willow plantations represent an ecologically promising energy resource for reducing greenhouse gas levels. Since the development of phytomass models is a laborious process, so-called “generic meta-models” are used. The aim of this study has been to construct generic models of both aboveground phytomass and phytomass fractions (foliage, branches, stem, roots) of willow trees based on meta-analysis of data. In the course of the work, the models have been constructed for assessing the aboveground phytomass of trees both in diameter at the stem base and in diameter at breast height, the information content of which is close to functional, and the biases are only about 2 %. Since each fraction of phytomass has a specific carbon-sequestering capacity and makes a different contribution to the carbon balance, generic models have been developed to estimate the mass of foliage, branches, stems and roots in relation to the aboveground phytomass of trees, explaining from 82 % (for foliage) to 99 % (for stems and roots) of the total variability of phytomass.

Enhanced Diffusion and Non-Gaussian Displacements of Colloids in Quasi-2D Suspensions of Motile Bacteria

In the real world, active agents interact with surrounding passive objects, thus introducing additional degrees of complexity. The relative contributions of far-field hydrodynamic and near-field contact interactions to the anomalous diffusion of passive particles in suspensions of active swimmers remain a subject of ongoing debate. We constructed a quasi-two-dimensional microswimmer–colloid mixed system by taking advantage of Serratia marcescens’ tendency to become trapped at the air–water interface to investigate the origins of the enhanced diffusion and non-Gaussianity of the displacement distributions of passive colloidal tracers. Our findings reveal that the diffusion behavior of colloidal particles exhibits a strong dependence on bacterial density. At moderate densities, the collective dynamics of bacteria dominate the diffusion of tracer particles. In dilute bacterial suspensions, although there are multiple dynamic types present, near-field contact interactions such as collisions play a major role in the enhancement of colloidal transport and the emergence of non-Gaussian displacement distributions characterized by heavy exponential tails in short times. Despite the distinct types of microorganisms and their diverse self-propulsion mechanisms, a generality in the diffusion behavior of passive colloids and their underlying dynamics is observed.

PARADIGMA PENDIDIKAN KRITIS PAULO FREIRE DAN RELEVANSINYA DALAM PENGEMBANGAN PENDIDIKAN HUMANIS DI INDONESIA

Education is the main sector in human resource development. So that education becomes an important part of human life. Through education humans can also find identity, hone potential, and improve the quality of life. This is inseparable from human desires that are free and independent in determining what kind of education they need. However, this seems to be a paradox by looking at the educational phenomenon which actually hinders the potential possessed by students with various dehumanization practices. Therefore, this study traces the thoughts of Paulo Freire with the idea of ​​critical education. The method used in this study is a qualitative method with a philosophical hermeneutic approach. The results of this study indicate that Paulo Freire is a critical education figure, who succeeded in dismantling the conventional educational model which tends to dehumanize. Conventional education actually views students as passive objects, each empty and must be regulated. Freire calls it the banking of education system. Notes from Freire's thoughts can be used as a reference in developing a humanist education system in Indonesia, namely by prioritizing students as the center of learning and recognizing students have diverse characters and potential. A teacher in humanist education acts as a facilitator by guiding students to be themselves.

Turning into a Potted Plant: A Plant Studies' Approach to Han Kang's Short Story "The Fruit of My Woman"

Plant studies, a recent branch of cultural studies, is taking a new look at the ontological status of plants and, implicitly and explicitly, redefining the status of the human in the larger web of life. Scientists have discovered that plants are not merely passive objects, but active agents with amazing capabilities: they are mobile and intentional, capable to make intelligent choices, to communicate with each other and with their environment, they are a "who and not only a what" (Michael Marder). This essay takes a look at these major claims of plant studies and argues that using anthropomorphic terms for the newly discovered capabilities of plants is a philosophical choice with serious consequences for our understanding not only of the vegetal world, but also of our position within it. It allows us to step beyond our hierarchical and zoocentric attitude and understand ourselves as part of the larger web of relations. The essay then demonstrates the role of plant studies for literary studies by interpreting Han Kang's short story "The Fruit of My Woman."

A Feminist Reading on the Exploration of Female Identity and Sexuality in Sri Lankan Cinema: A Case Study of Asoka Handagama’s Selected Works

Since the emergence of the feminist movement, the distortion of feminine identity and sexuality is profoundly discoursed in relation to literature and other genres of art. This research has endeavoured to articulate how female identity and sexuality is portrayed in Sri Lankan cinema with reference to selected work of veteran filmmaker, Asoka Handagama. The sample comprises of the award-winning movies, “Thani Thatuwen Piyambanna” (Flying with One Wing, 2002), “Aksharaya” (A Letter of Fire, 2005) and “Aege Aesa Aga” (Let Her Cry, 2016) which features three significant female characters and their plight in patriarchal society. The researcher has deployed Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory which examines the voyeuristic and scopophilic representation of women in media along with the Lacanian and Freudian concepts of gaze as the theoretical approach of the study. The research was predominantly conducted utilizing the qualitative approach while textual analysis and interviews focusing on the director of the selected films, critics and academics were the major tools of primary data collection. The secondary data was collected through research publications, newspaper articles, the internet and magazines. The hermeneutic approach was deployed in interpreting the sample and the collected data focusing on the connection between the selected sample and the broader discourses. Even though Laura Mulvey exemplifies that women are always being projected as passive objects in cinema, the findings of the study reveal that the selected sample represents the female figure as a more assertive and emphatic entity regardless of the persistent patriarchal norms.

YS-SLAM: YOLACT++ based semantic visual SLAM for autonomous adaptation to dynamic environments of mobile robots

Aiming at the problem of poor autonomous adaptability of mobile robots to dynamic environments, this paper propose a YOLACT++ based semantic visual SLAM for autonomous adaptation to dynamic environments of mobile robots. First, a light-weight YOLACT++ is utilized to detect and segment potential dynamic objects, and Mahalanobis distance is combined to remove feature points on active dynamic objects, also, epipolar constraint and clustering are employed to eliminate feature points on passive dynamic objects. Then, in terms of the semantic labels of dynamic and static components, the global semantic map is divided into three parts for construction. The semantic overlap and uniform motion model are chose to track moving objects and the dynamic components are added to the background map. Finally, a 3D semantic octree map is constructed that is consistent with the real environment and updated in real time. A series of simulations and experiments demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The Space of the Stylite

For scholars and students of Late Antiquity, the stylite’s column exerts a special appeal. Scholars have examined literary representations of stylites and sought out visual parallels for the phenomenon of column-standing. This article shows that topographical contexts were central to establishing the potency of the column as a holy object and the trajectory of stylitism in history. I employ the term topography broadly to encompass the physical characteristics of an area, the ways in which humans augmented physical characteristics through the built environment, and specific architectural organizations. I examine three topographical contexts and make three interconnected arguments. By selecting the hill adjacent to Telanissos as the location for his columns, the premier stylite Symeon (d. 459) participated in a long-standing regional tradition of activating the numinous power of high places and stone through cultic activity. The monumental pilgrimage complex built after Symeon’s death made the column a relic and integrated veneration of Symeon into liturgical ritual. The incorporation of stylites into northern Syria’s cenobitic communities circumscribed stylitism as a distinctly monastic vocation. These three contexts illustrate that the significance of the column was located in processes of production and reception. At the same time, stylite columns were not passive objects. They faced the gods of old; they enriched ecclesiastical rituals; they molded the bodies of those who activated them; they proclaimed the ascendancy of monastic institutions. As both products of their topography and agents within it, stylite columns constructed a distinctive Christian landscape in Syria’s limestone massif.

'My Advocacy is Not About Me, My Advocacy is About Canadians': A Qualitative Study of how Caregivers and Patients Influence Regulation of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada.

Medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was legalised federally in Canada after the Supreme Court decision in Carter v Canada (Attorney General) [2015] 1 SCR 331. The federal legislative framework for MAiD was established via Bill C-14 in 2016. Caregivers and patients were central to Carter and subsequent litigation and advocacy, which resulted in amendments to the law via Bill C-7 in 2021. Research has primarily focused on the impacts of regulation on caregivers and patients. This qualitative study investigates how caregivers and patients influence law reform and the operation of MAiD practice in Canada (ie, behave as 'regulatory actors'), using Black's definition of regulation. We found that caregivers and patients performed sustained, focused, and intentional actions that influenced law reform and the operation of MAiD in practice. Caregivers and patients are not passive objects of Canadian MAiD regulation, and their role in influencing regulation (eg, law reform and MAiD practice) should be supported where this is desired by the person. However, recognising the burdens of engaging in regulatory action to address barriers to accessing MAiD or to quality care, and MAiD system gaps, other regulatory actors (eg, governments) should minimise this burden, particularly where a person engages in regulatory action reluctantly.

Portraying people with disability in Indonesian online news reports: a corpus-assisted discourse study

This article investigates representations of individuals with disabilities in Indonesian news media by drawing on corpus-assisted discourse study, social actor analysis, and news models of disability. The data comprises news articles which refer to disability published on popular Indonesian online news platforms over a ten-year period (2011–2020). The findings reveal prevalent portrayals of disabled people as passive beneficiaries and objects of representation, which implies a tendency to diminish their active involvement in society, supporting the social pathology model of disability. The progressive models, including the civil rights and consumer models, which highlight the active participation of disabled people, are limited. The article concludes by emphasising the need for a more balanced portrayal of disabled individuals by incorporating more news articles that underscore their agency. It also recommends the integration of diverse viewpoints from individuals with disabilities to attain a more comprehensive understanding of their challenges and perspectives.

Koncesjonowana rewolucja seksualna? Przemiany obyczajowości w dyskursie medialnym późnego PRL

A constrained sexual revolution? The transformation of sexual mores in the media discourse in 1980s Poland The author of the article analyses the media discourse of late socialist Poland through the lens of eroticised images. By doing so, the author puts forward a framework for understanding the media discourse of that period as a form of a constrained sexual revolution. The source base consists of the contents of two men’s magazines published between 1987 and 1989 (Pan [Gentleman] and Playboy) as well as the TV show Sexcesses produced in 1985. Such sources allow us to critically analyse the key features of the discussions about sexuality in 1980s media. On the one hand, the article highlights the notable liberalisation of visual discourse that took place in the 1980s and the profound impact it had on Polish society. On the other — it points to several constraints of this project. While in 1980s Poland heterosexual men were increasingly able to perform and reaffirm their sexual identities, the sexual revolution abetted by the official media did little to question the patriarchal social norms and left no room for emancipation outside this heteronormative framework. Women were portrayed as passive objects of the male gaze, while any suggestions of homoeroticism were dismissed outright. The article contains a critical analysis of such approaches, with the author arguing that the Polish sexual revolution had an inherently heteronormative and gendered character.

Generalised Jeffery's equations for rapidly spinning particles. Part 1. Spheroids

The observed behaviour of passive objects in simple flows can be surprisingly intricate, and is complicated further by object activity. Inspired by the motility of bacterial swimmers, in this two-part study we examine the three-dimensional motion of rigid active particles in shear Stokes flow, focusing on bodies that induce rapid rotation as part of their activity. In Part 1 we develop a multiscale framework to investigate these emergent dynamics and apply it to simple spheroidal objects. In Part 2 (Dalwadi et al., J. Fluid Mech., vol. 979, 2024, A2) we apply our framework to understand the emergent dynamics of more complex shapes; helicoidal objects with chirality. Via a multiple scales asymptotic analysis for nonlinear systems, we systematically derive emergent equations of motion for long-term trajectories that explicitly account for the strong (leading-order) effects of fast spinning. Supported by numerical examples, we constructively link these effective dynamics to the well-known Jeffery's orbits for passive spheroids, deriving an explicit closed-form expression for the effective shape of the active particle, broadening the scope of Jeffery's seminal study to spinning spheroids.

Moroccan TV Advertising in 2023: Towards a Gender- Transformative Agenda

This study examines the contemporary landscape of Moroccan TV advertising in 2023, specifically focusing on its evolutionary trajectory towards the adoption of a gender-transformative agenda. Against the backdrop of heightened societal consciousness regarding gender equality and the imperative of inclusive representation across various domains, including the realm of advertising, this article delves into the concerted efforts undertaken by the Moroccan advertising industry to challenge entrenched gender norms and cultivate a more transformative paradigm. Traditionally, advertising has been culpable of reinforcing and perpetuating gender stereotypes, constraining men and women within narrowly defined roles. However, catalyzed by social movements advocating for equality and inclusivity, advertisers find themselves compelled to reevaluate their approaches, embracing a more encompassing and diverse framework. Given this, this paper employs qualitative content analysis to scrutinize a curated corpus of five Moroccan advertisements, investigating how they challenge prevailing gender portrayals and deviate from perpetuating stereotypical representations. The analysis of the findings reveals the extent to which the selected advertisements actively engage in the transformative representation of gender by challenging rather than nurturing gender stereotypes. It unveils the way the selected advertisements demonstrate a deliberate departure from the stereotypical depiction of women in domestic roles or as passive objects, to portraying them in diverse and empowered positions. Similarly, men are depicted beyond conventional masculine stereotypes, showcasing a broader spectrum of roles and expectations. Accordingly, this study not only provides insights into the current state of Moroccan advertising with regard to gender transformative practices but also contributes to the broader discourse surrounding the role of advertising in promoting gender equality and in

Effect of passive particle shape on effective force in active bath

<sec>In active matter, the effective force between passive objects is crucial for their structure and dynamics, which is the basis for understanding the complex behaviors within active systems. Unlike equilibrium states, the factors such as the surface configuration, size, and confinement strength significantly influence the effective forces between passive particles. Previous studies have shown that the shapes of passive particles affect the aggregation of active particles, leading to different forces experienced by passive particles with different shapes. However, recently, a long-range attractive force between passive platelike particles, caused by the bacterial flow field instead of the direct bacterium-plate collisions in active bacterial suspensions, has been found. This raises an intriguing question: how does hydrodynamics affect the forces on passive particles of different shapes in different ways?</sec><sec>In this work, we investigate the effective forces exerted on passive spherical and plate-like particles immersed in bacterial suspensions by optical-tweezers experiments. The effective force between passive particles can be calculated from the formula, <inline-formula><tex-math id="M1">\begin{document}$ {F_{{\text{eff}}}} = {\text{ }}k\left\langle {\Delta d} \right\rangle /2 $\end{document}</tex-math><alternatives><graphic specific-use="online" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="15-20240650_M1.jpg"/><graphic specific-use="print" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="15-20240650_M1.png"/></alternatives></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula><tex-math id="M2">\begin{document}$ \left\langle {\Delta d} \right\rangle $\end{document}</tex-math><alternatives><graphic specific-use="online" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="15-20240650_M2.jpg"/><graphic specific-use="print" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="15-20240650_M2.png"/></alternatives></inline-formula> represents the difference in distance between the passive particles in the bacterial bath and those in the solution without bacteria, <inline-formula><tex-math id="M3">\begin{document}$ k $\end{document}</tex-math><alternatives><graphic specific-use="online" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="15-20240650_M3.jpg"/><graphic specific-use="print" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="15-20240650_M3.png"/></alternatives></inline-formula> is the effective stiffness of optical traps. The <inline-formula><tex-math id="M5">\begin{document}$ {{{F}}}_{{\mathrm{e}}{\mathrm{f}}{\mathrm{f}}} > 0 $\end{document}</tex-math><alternatives><graphic specific-use="online" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="15-20240650_M5.jpg"/><graphic specific-use="print" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="15-20240650_M5.png"/></alternatives></inline-formula> indicates a repulsive force between passive particles, and the <inline-formula><tex-math id="M6">\begin{document}$ {F_{{\text{eff}}}} \lt {\text{ }}0 $\end{document}</tex-math><alternatives><graphic specific-use="online" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="15-20240650_M6.jpg"/><graphic specific-use="print" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="15-20240650_M6.png"/></alternatives></inline-formula> represents an effective attractive force between passive particles. Our results demonstrate that the passive spherical particles experience short-range repulsion, while plate-like particles are subjected to long-range attraction. This highlights the substantial effect of particle shape on their effective forces.</sec><sec>The forces on passive particles are mainly attributed to two factors: direct bacterium-particle collisions and the bacterial flow field. The analysis of the bacterial concentration and orientation distribution around passive particles reveals that for spherical particles, the concentration of bacteria between particles is higher than that outside the particles, but there is almost no difference in the orientation order between bacteria inside and outside the particles. This suggests that the effective repulsion between spherical particles is mainly due to the direct bacterial collisions. Conversely, for plate-like particles, the long-range attraction is primarily influenced by the bacterial flow field rather than their direct collisions, which is evidenced by the higher bacterial density and orientation order inside the two plates compared with those outside the two plates. This study provides strong evidence that the effective force between passive particles is shape dependent in active bath, and offers new insights into controlling active-directed assembly.</sec>

주민 중심 지역문화축제와 주체성 변천과정 연구

In 2014, the Korean government and parliament enacted the Local Culture Promotion Act, creating a law to systematically promote local culture beyond the existing piecemeal laws on culture and arts. The purpose of the Act is to enhance the cultural enjoyment rights of local residents through voluntary cultural activities, thereby forming a modern community and creating added value for local competitiveness by using local culture as a resource.
 Even statutory cultural city policies based on the voluntary and original local culture of local residents have been introduced, but even now, there is a strong movement to try cultural policies and projects as economic value creation tools such as tourism and experience products from the perspective of individual leisure and welfare or art and industry. Either way, it is based on the premise that residents are passive and passive objects from the perspective of the administration or producers and suppliers, which misses the basic point that local culture is a way of life formed and shared by local members, and eventually turns into a state that claims to be a cultural city but goes against it. Not only does it not fulfill the purpose of the Local Culture Promotion Act and local self-governance, but it is also distorted into an adverse effect that harms the possibility that it could have been formed naturally due to unilateral and unreasonable intervention.
 In this study, we will analyze local cultural contents in the process of discovering and sharing local unique cultural resources with the community as a mediator as the main actors of local culture at the urban community level, and local festivals, which are the most commonly encountered, as a case study. Currently, most festivals are organized by a few people, such as the local government or an expert or agency working on their behalf, to mobilize residents to participate in the festival. In contrast to this phenomenon, this study examines the evolution of the Ulsan Residents' Representative Festival, which, until relatively recently, was organized by the residents themselves as a community feast. This study will shed light on how the festival, which was organized by the residents of Ulsan, a newly formed region in the modern era, was able to create regional harmony and unique values in the same context as the previous traditional festivals.
 This study examines the 57-year evolution of the newly created Ulsan Residents' Representative Festival in the modern era and the changes in the position of residents by system in relation to the management of the festival. By examining how residents have created a relationship with the new area, we hope to draw out what the changes in residents' identity and agency mean for Korean society and the festival today. A community and organization starts with one person, and the character of a community depends on what kind of people it consists of, so as part of communication and integration, we need to think together about how local festivals should be created and why and how residents should be reintroduced as subjects. This is because local cultural contents are rooted in local culture, and this uniqueness is accumulated and shared over time by voluntary actors.

Positioning Secondary School Teachers as Passive Actors During School Quality Assurance Policy Implementation in Dodoma, Tanzania

While the impact of the School Quality Assurance (SQA) policy on students’ learning outcomes is well-documented, there exists a limited understanding of how its implementation influences teachers’ power and identity. This study analysed how teachers were positioned during the SQA policy implementation in four purposefully selected secondary schools in Dodoma Region, Tanzania. Data gathered from 19 participants, including heads of schools, department heads, subject teachers, WEOs, and SQAOs through policy documents and semi-structured interviews, unveil a critical observation. Despite teachers being pivotal to school functioning, the SQA policy positions them as passive objects lacking the knowledge to evaluate school quality based on proposed domains. This study contends that such positioning aligns with previous top-down school inspection models, which had limited impact on enhancing secondary school quality. To address this, the study suggests a radical shift towards teacher empowerment through collegial supervision rather than conventional external quality assurance visits.

TextureSight

Objects engaged by users' hands contain rich contextual information for their strong correlation with user activities. Tools such as toothbrushes and wipes indicate cleansing and sanitation, while mice and keyboards imply work. Much research has been endeavored to sense hand-engaged objects to supply wearables with implicit interactions or ambient computing with personal informatics. We propose TextureSight, a smart-ring sensor that detects hand-engaged objects by detecting their distinctive surface textures using laser speckle imaging on a ring form factor. We conducted a two-day experience sampling study to investigate the unicity and repeatability of the object-texture combinations across routine objects. We grounded our sensing with a theoretical model and simulations, powered it with state-of-the-art deep neural net techniques, and evaluated it with a user study. TextureSight constitutes a valuable addition to the literature for its capability to sense passive objects without emission of EMI or vibration and its elimination of lens for preserving user privacy, leading to a new, practical method for activity recognition and context-aware computing.

Data-Driven Childhoods: Settler Colonialism and Numeracy in the Boys’ Literature of Francis La Flesche and Francis Rolt-Wheeler

The turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century marked a time of intensified data collection in the United States focused especially on childhood. This article explores how two children’s narratives, Francis La Flesche’s The Middle Five (1900) and Francis Rolt-Wheeler’s The Boy with the U.S. Census (1911), reflect and respond to this conjunction of boyhood, settler colonialism, and official surveillance. Read together, these texts provide a window into the ways that data collection mediated between the everyday lives of children and the bureaucratic machinations of US colonial governance, marking those data as a site at which governance could be asserted or contested. The colonizing discourse with which these texts engage treats numeracy (rather than the more common literacy) as the threshold for citizenship and reduces Indigenous people, in particular, to the passive objects of measurement and administration. More surprisingly, though, these books also display the role that children’s literature played in placing children themselves in a relationship with numerical data collection, either as enthusiastic and active participants or wary counteragents. While Rolt-Wheeler portrays bureaucracy as an imperialist adventure in which white boys should joyfully partake, La Flesche offers a portrayal of the harm that this incessantly quantitative thinking did to Native children, but he also adds a nuanced critique of the epistemologies underlying such thinking.

Riding against patriarchy

Equestrian portraiture has historically upheld gender norms by depicting powerful men and excluding women artists. 17th and 18th-century equestrian portraits of women depicted them as passive objects, often overshadowed by their male counterparts. These portraits reinforced traditional gender roles and upheld the patriarchal hierarchy prevalent during that time. This paper examines how Ghanaian contemporary artist Sarfowaa challenges patriarchal traditions through feminist self-portraiture in appropriated historical equestrian paintings. Through visual analysis of composition, techniques, symbols and contextualize selected artworks, this article explores how Sarfowaa subverts the equestrian genre by inserting herself into these male-dominated paintings. Her self-portraits provide a powerful statement of resistance that reclaims authority and agency for women. By contextualizing Sarfowaa's work within feminist art movements and theory, this paper analyzes how her art dismantles traditional gender roles and norms. The results demonstrate that Sarfowaa's portraits further the aims of feminist portraiture through their bold questioning of patriarchal power structures. This research expands current scholarship on the intersections of art, portraiture, feminism, and political resistance. It appeals to academics, artists, and audiences interested in the capacity of contemporary art to drive social change.

Colonization of minds: Ukraine between Russian colonialism and Western Orientalism.

This article focuses on investigating how Russian colonialism has re-invented Ukrainian identity and framed its perception both in Ukraine and in Western societies. Although postcolonial approaches to studying power hierarchies have contributed a lot to our understanding of global inequalities, Ukraine has long been excluded from this interdisciplinary, complex discussion. Such exclusion has created a knowledge gap, which this study aims to address by analyzing the evolution of gender identities and roles in Ukrainian society and critical rethinking of the existing body of knowledge. This article demonstrates the degree to which European societies perceived Ukrainians as Orientalized passive objects, which went in line with the Russian imperialistic ideology of russkii mir, examines its influence on gender identities in Ukraine and, finally, proves that the strengthening of Ukrainian civil society as well as women's and LGBTQ+ rights is a part of the decolonial processes that were instigated by the Russian war against Ukraine.