Space Of Refuge Research Articles

A Space of Discovery and Refuge

Olivia Baker and Baker Rogers on drag performance and gender identity.

Survival, Sustenance, and Self-Sufficiency in a Tale of Two Sisters: Plant Geographies in Jean Hegland’s "Into the Forest"

As evidenced by its title, Into the Forest (1996) by Jean Hegland traces the movement of two adolescent girls ever further into the forest in a post-apocalyptic account of the near future. Set in Redwood, California, it depicts a world where trees are gigantic and long-lasting while humans are diminutive and diminishing, while contemporary human technological society has fallen apart. Plants, trees, and the forest, and an increasingly intimate and Indigenous knowledge and relationship with these, play a key and ever-growing role in the novel and illuminate its otherwise dark vision of the future. Ultimately, the sisters’ taking of an increasingly plant-based perspective offers an alternative trajectory and path toward survival, sustenance, and self-sufficiency for the two young women. Although not necessarily written for young adults exclusively, the novel, whose international impact is evidenced by the fact that translated into over a dozen languages, made into a film in Canada, and adapted as a graphic novel in French, focuses on young adult protagonists and tells a post-apocalyptic tale that is both dark and inspiring in its vision of self-sufficiency and reintegration with nature, forest, and plants. It thus shows itself to be a work of young adult literature in many respects, as well as in its implied ecofeminist critique of capitalist society and a more sustainable vision of the future represented by the young. This article examines various plant geographies in Into the Forest and the way in which the forest represents a space of refuge from mankind and society; provides healing and sustenance; serves as an alternative abode; and represents a birthplace of the future. It argues that an increasingly plant-based perspective figures centrally in the book’s narrative arc from beginning to end, from its title and setting to the trajectory of its unfolding plot, and in its conclusion and vision of the future.

An investigation of the parameter space in a tri-trophic food chain model with refuge

Aside from humans, the instinct to run and hide from dangerous situations is ingrained in individuals of many other species. Taking refuge is a very common precautionary strategy among prey species to avoid direct contact with their predators. In this article, we investigate a three-species food chain model where the logistically growing basal prey seeks refuge to avoid the middle predator. To assess the impact of varying levels of refuge, we explore the system dynamics in the biparametric space of refuge and another important system parameter related to the half-saturation constant of the basal prey. The isospike diagrams along with the largest Lyapunov exponent diagrams show a stabilizing role of refuge. Apart from this, we observe an abundance of organized periodic structures embedded inside the chaotic zone of the biparametric space. The most notable ones include the shrimp-shaped structures and an “elliptic disc” shaped structure. The article also explores the coexistence between multiple pairs of coexisting attractors and one instance of spike-bubbling phenomena. The basins of attraction for the coexisting attractors also have a self-similar pattern. We also modify the present model by replacing the density-dependent prey refuge with constant proportion of prey refuge, and then explore the dynamics of the modified model within the same biparametric space and find similar complexity in its dynamics. We compare the effects of both types of refuge on the density variations of all three species when they show stable coexistence and observe that density-dependent refuge is more beneficial to the system from the standpoint of species conservation.

Weaving a Queer Space of Refuge, Resistance and Autonomy in Mexico City

La Comune Lencha-Trans is a unique women-only space that combines the functions of a home, a shelter, and a cultural center. It was established in January 2020 with the intention of hosting poetry events and serving as a public kitchen. In this conversation Miranda Amatista shares the history of the space, which is organized and led by a group of lesbian, trans, and queer women, deeply connected to other feminist, trans, prisoner-rights, women vendors, and anti-capitalist political and social movements.Miranda emphasized their belief in the power of creating alternative spaces and ways of life as a form of resistance against the system. The commune is one such alternative, where they strive to foster a sense of community, empowerment, and solidarity.

Pussy Hats, Politics, and Public Protest

Pussy Hats, Politics, and Public Protest

:World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture

:<i>World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture</i>

Label Noir's Heimat, bittersüße Heimat : A Transgressive and Transformative Text

Label Noir's <i>Heimat, bittersüße Heimat</i> : A Transgressive and Transformative Text

“Connecting With Good People and Good Plants”: Community Gardener Experiences in New York State During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Community gardens are collective projects in which participants collaborate to maintain a garden. They provide many biophysical and cultural ecosystem services, contributing to individual and community resilience and wellbeing. These benefits may be even more appreciated during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, since community gardens require efforts from multiple gardeners in shared spaces, the pandemic also exposed some of their vulnerabilities. This study focuses on the benefits community gardens have offered during the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenges the pandemic posed to sustaining community garden activity, and recommendations to address these issues moving forward. We conducted our study in four cities in New York representing a gradient of socioeconomic and biophysical characteristics: Binghamton, Buffalo, Ithaca, and New York City. We collected data from surveys and semi-structured interviews with community gardeners and analyzed them using mixed models and thematic coding. The primary benefits gardeners derived from their community garden experiences were: a sense of connection with other gardeners, their communities, and nature; mental and physical wellbeing; and a safe space of refuge. In addition to material shortages (e.g., seeds), the biggest challenge gardeners faced due to the pandemic was the limited degree of socializing in the gardens resulting from personal behavioral changes and rules imposed by gardens. Despite the challenges, gardeners reported enjoying the 2020 garden season. The pandemic also created opportunities for gardens to serve their communities, such as organizing programs for composting, food donation and distribution, and home gardening. Our findings suggest that community gardens can be resilient sites of reprieve during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, providing essential benefits for gardeners and local residents. To sustain community garden resilience, we recommend community gardens and gardeners cultivate connections and diversity, within and between the biological and human communities of their gardens.

STANDING OUTSIDE ONESELF: TRANSGENDER GAZING IN ANTJE RÁVIK STRUBEL'S KÄLTERE SCHICHTEN DER LUFT (2007) AND IN DEN WÄLDERN DES MENSCHLICHEN HERZENS (2016)

ABSTRACTExpanding upon early feminist discussions of the ‘male gaze’ of classic Hollywood cinema, scholars have theorised the multiple modalities of a ‘transgender look’ or ‘gaze’. This involves considering trans(*) or transgender perspectives not just in terms of identity, but as a way of seeing that refuses to privilege the real over the figurative, and that can enable characters to envisage alternative futures. This article draws on discussions of trans and queer gazing, embodiment and temporality, to argue for a trans reading of Antje Rávik Strubel's 2007 novel Kältere Schichten der Luft, set in a canoeing camp in Sweden, and her 2016 episodic novel In den Wäldern des menschlichen Herzens. It argues that the transgender gaze is cultivated as a space of both refuge and possibility for the protagonists of these two works, with the later novel pushing beyond the temporary glimpses of queer and trans utopias in Kältere Schichten toward more permanent, although never fixed, representations of trans embodiment. These works invite readers to look with rather than at trans and genderqueer characters. In doing so, they renegotiate understandings of pasts and futures, embodiments and desires.

The Convulsive European Space of Mobilities

Alarmist reactions to an ostensible “migrant” or “refugee crisis” in Europe have inadvertently lent an unprecedented prominence to the veritable and undeniable autonomy of (transnational, cross-border) migrant and refugee mobilities, replete with their heterogeneity of insistent, disobedient, and incorrigible practices of appropriating mobility and making claims to space. Between an asylum system predicated upon suspicion and a border regime ever increasingly dedicated to intensifying the purview of detention and deportation, on the one hand, and the increasing virulence of anti-immigrant racist populist movements, on the other, Europe—rather than a space of refuge or freedom—has become a space of rejection for most migrants and refugees. This dialectic of autonomous human mobilities and the forces arrayed to alternately govern, discipline, punish, and repel them render Europe a convulsive space, a space of convulsions.

Streams of Consciousness: The Downriver Narrative in Young Adult Fiction

This article draws on adaptation and genre theory to argue that the downriver narrative constitutes a distinct genre in literature for youth. This genre is characterised by a repertoire of narrative elements including alternations between the river as a space of reflection and refuge, social interactions that occur on land, and the social and political commentary voiced by the river travellers. These patterns appear in diverse cultural and historical contexts, as exemplified by Auguste Lazar's Jan auf der Zille [Jan on the barge] (1934/1950), Richard Scrimger's Into the Ravine (2007), and David Almond's Heaven Eyes (2000). Published in Germany, Canada, and the UK, these novels deploy episodic accounts of journeying downstream to perform a range of cultural work, including articulating discourses about citizenship and nationhood, raising critical awareness about questions of difference, and promulgating Romantic models of childhood.

Mobile sanctuary: Latina/o Evangelicals redefining sanctuary and contesting immobility in Fresno, CA

ABSTRACT Scholars have examined how illegality operates spatially to constrain immigrants’ movements and how immigration laws spark new tactics for immigrants’ survival and resistance. This paper examines how undocumented Latina/os strategically enact their religious practices to spatially navigate illegality. Building on ethnographic research and interviews conducted across two Latina/o Evangelical religious organisations in Fresno, California, I advance the concept of mobile sanctuary to capture the process of how immigrants embody, perform, and negotiate their religious commitments and practices to mitigate the ongoing threat of deportation. Taking a new direction towards theorising sanctuary, this paper shows how religious organisations enable a mobile sanctuary that immigrants carry within their bodies and psyches as a strategy to disperse anxieties and fears related to deportability. In the process of enabling mobile sanctuary, I argue that Latina/o Evangelical immigrant churches reinforce and socialise immigrants into problematic ideologies about immigration law, deportation, and spatial mobility. Ultimately, mobile sanctuary intervenes in recent scholarship on social illegality, crimmigration, and deportability by documenting how the US deportability regime influences Latina/o immigrants’ spiritual practices, and by theorising sanctuary beyond a static space of refuge, and instead, as an embodied and collective process of surviving spatial captivity and immobility.

Ludwig Lachmann and the Austrians

AbstractLudwig Lachmann looked to the Austrian School of economics as an intellectual space of refuge from the sterile formalism that constituted the academic work of the mainstream economics establishment. From an early interest in capital-theory, he moved to broader epistemological, methodological, and institutional concerns – specifically, from the subjectivism of values to the subjectivism of expectations and the implications thereof for human action. Human action in disequilibrium was his central focus. This paper examines the relationship of Lachmann’s views to the Austrians, those who preceded him, those of his time, and those who have come after him. During his lifetime his views sometimes provoked controversy. I examine this from the perspective of 2017 and the concerns of the modern Austrian intellectual community and find that Lachmann’s views are surprisingly much more complementary to those of his contemporary Austrians than has perhaps hitherto been realized.

Refuge and Security Panics

The discourse of humanitarianism presumes that the resettlement of refugees into a space of permanent refuge by humanitarian organizations and host country governments represents the end of their experience of loss, displacement, and forced mobility. But many Black Muslim refugees in the u.s. inhabit a prism in which they are targets of misinformation, scrutiny, surveillance, and suspicion that refract gender, race, and faith through security panics. The refuge of resettlement, for the Black Muslim refugees discussed in this paper, is not something given; it is something made, by them, in difficult and even dangerous circumstances. Through a series of vignettes that illustrate the felt and lived effects of racism and surveillance at the gender/race/faith-security nexus on Somali refugees in Maine, the paper explores one context in which refuge is made.

Space of refuge, space of war: reshaping territorial order in the Lake Chad area

The purpose of this contribution is to frame the role and significance of borders and national space in the Lake Chad area in the wake of the expansion of the so-called “Boko Haram” insurgency. Since 2011, the forced repositioning of entire communities in neighboring states, the spread of refugee camps and the coordinated military effort conducted by the Multi-National Joint Task Force (a transnational army created by Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Benin) have led to a re-think in the relationship between mobility and territory, violent conflicts, and political entrepreneurship. Renewed political attention has mostly translated into a massive military-coordinated operation and in a series of emergency and development measures, which in turn have supplied the area with the basic social services that have traditionally been neglected by the central government. The gradual process of securing, militarizing, and policing the area is testing the resistance of communities that have already endured cycles of economic and political marginalization, while increasing violence from “Boko Haram” and its affiliates is further destabilizing a weakened social balance. This work aims to study how terrorist violence and the militarization of public life in the region have reshaped the relationship between communities and their territory, while offering reasoning on concepts of territoriality, governmentality, and social identity.

The Perception of Paintings as a Space of Spiritual Refuge and Healing for “Gyosan” Heo Gyun(1569～1618)

The Perception of Paintings as a Space of Spiritual Refuge and Healing for “Gyosan” Heo Gyun(1569～1618)

A Plea for Emigration by Mary Ann Shadd

Reviewed by: A Plea for Emigration by Mary Ann Shadd Jennifer Harris (bio) A Plea for Emigration mary ann shadd Edited by phanuel antwi Calgary: Broadview Press, 2016 96 pp. Almost twenty years have elapsed since Richard Almonte's critical edition of Mary Ann Shadd Cary's A Plea for Emigration; or, Notes of Canada West (1998) made the work central to the study of nineteenth-century black Canadian studies. The new Broadview edition, produced under advisory editor Phanuel Antwi, will be celebrated for making the text readily available to a new generation of students and scholars. Shadd Cary's 1852 work, composed as its extended title states "for the information of colored emigrants," provides an overview of living and working conditions in Canada, covering a variety of social, economic, legal, and environmental matters of interest. Hardly impartial, Shadd Cary stages a reasoned argument for the superiority of Canada over other possible sites of emigration including Mexico, South America, the West Indies, and Africa. While popular mythology forwards a narrative of black Canadian settlement by destitute refugees from slavery, Shadd Cary's publication draws attention to those settled African Americans in the North who, post–Fugitive Slave Law, might arrive under different circumstances. While most contemporary readers are probably less interested in soil quality and crop yields in Canada, it is noteworthy that Shadd Cary expected her readers to study this information and weigh it against their existing knowledge of US agriculture and costs. Indeed, her thorough delineation of Canadian conditions highlights the seriousness with many such individuals, families, and communities researched and debated relocation and its potential benefits and drawbacks. Humorously, Shadd Cary is not above countering the misinformation about Canada spread in southern states with statements equally driven more by ideology than exactness—I doubt many natives of Virginia, having survived a winter in the Dawn Settlement, would agree with her claim that the "climate is healthy and temperate." The edition includes a short unsourced introduction, providing a brief biographical sketch of Shadd Cary, touching on her career as publisher [End Page 212] and editor of the Provincial Freeman. Her text itself is positioned within the genre of settler guides, highlighting the historical circumstances that made a pamphlet explicitly directed to African Americans a viable prospect. The author has chosen to avoid the impassioned debates of the period that weighed Canada as a space for black settlement against other possible locations, instead letting Shadd Cary's own words on the matter stand. Her conflicts with other black Canadian leaders, which motivate some of her commentary, are referenced in the introduction, though not expanded on significantly. Crucial supplementary information about Shadd's contemporaries and debates is also glossed in the footnotes. However, an overview of the wider black population in Upper Canada and its operations is absent, with the edition again defaulting to Shadd Cary as the expert on such matters. Secondary materials are organized in the "In Context" section, including accounts of African American life in the United States by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Martineau, demonstrating why Canadian emigration might be desirable. A section of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, without which Shadd Cary's pamphlet would not have been produced, is also included, inviting readers to reflect upon the stakes for many of those whom Shadd Cary is addressing. Excerpts from the Provincial Freeman usefully document Shadd's editorial stance on a variety of issues. That the Provincial Freeman is now open access might facilitate additional teaching and learning activities for those wishing to further position the text within Shadd Cary's oeuvre. There's no doubt that Shadd Cary's text is important, imagining Canada as a space of ongoing black settlement, and attempting to articulate what black Canada might be beyond a space of refuge. This idea of Canada as a home complicates many understandings of the nation as simply an antechamber for African Americans, and should resonate with those students and scholars interested in transnational black studies and migration. Shadd Cary's discussion of education, discrimination, and various settlements of African Americans will be of interest to historians, while scholars of print culture will appreciate renewed attention to Shadd Cary's career. [End Page...

Stillness and Temporality in the Work of Louis MacNeice

This essay brings into focus letters and poems by Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) that engage with the museum as a place of silence, stillness, and refuge. From memories of the British Museum formed in his youth to encounters with art institutions in Britain and the USA, it looks afresh at four poems reflecting on the intense immobility of the museum experience: “Museums” (1933), “The British Museum Reading Room” (1939), “Picture Galleries” (1940), and “The National Gallery” (1945). These poems are read here in literary critical terms in relation to the history and theory of ekphrasis, and museology. The aim in so doing is to pursue these references as a poetics of stillness and refuge in the face of upheaval, both personal and societal. The essay shows how MacNeice offered both a critique of the immobility such retreat engendered, and an appreciation of its space of refuge, indicating that the museum was for him a layered or deeply resonant trope. Themes to emerge include voices of silence in the museal space, idleness and temporality in the ekphrastic encounter, enargeia and, ultimately, inspiration and Pentecost. In his words from “Autumn Sequel, Canto VIII”, MacNeice put the issue succinctly: “So to the galleries: to escape mankind / By rediscovering it” (MacNeice 2007, 409, l. 77).

‘Space of Refuge’: Negotiating Space with Refugees Inside the Palestinian Camp

‘Space of Refuge’ is a spatial installation directly addressing issues of inhabitation within Palestinian refugee camps in different host countries. It does so by illustrating the various modes of spatial production and subsequent evolution of Palestinian refugee camps, with particular focus upon unofficial acts of “spatial violation” that have emerged because of the increasingly protracted nature of the refugee situation.

Resignifying Shame and Abjection: A Queer Cultural Sovereignty in Manuel Ramos Otero's Short Stories

Resignifying Shame and Abjection:A Queer Cultural Sovereignty in Manuel Ramos Otero's Short Stories Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo For colonial, non-sovereign nations, such as Puerto Rico, nationalist literature plays a key role in forging what could be considered a cultural sovereignty. Yet, the nation that this literature constructs must be questioned, especially considering how, in this artistic iteration, the nation and heteronormativity become bounded. I'm interested in exploring how Manuel Ramos Otero writes short stories that work through and against the nationalist literature, that is, stories in which queer sexuality functions as a space of creative refuge where the abject discover alternative narratives of their country and of their ancestors. This effort can be further understood by taking into consideration Ramos Otero's biography. Many critics, such as Juan Gelpí, Jossiana Arroyo, and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes have discussed how Ramos Otero's biography and writing reflect the issue of "sexile" or sexual exile, that is, an individual's need to leave their country in order to fully express themselves and their sexual identity or to protect themselves from being targeted because of their sexual preferences. Ramos Otero, who left Puerto Rico in 1968 because of the discrimination he faced, uses his writing to look critically at Caribbean culture, focusing particularly on the white, patriarchal and homophobic bourgeoisie. His writing style and the topics he chooses position him overtly outside the tendencies of the national literature. Furthermore, he expresses discomfort and suspicion of Puerto Rico's national imaginary. Gender and sexuality, as literary tools, provide Ramos Otero with a fluidity that allows him to move past national constraints. Arnaldo Cruz Malavé attributes Ramos Otero's rejection of foundational national poetics and its aesthetics with his use of the abject: "nobody like him insisted on founding his writing on what could destroy it, on abjection" ("What a Tangled Web!" 377).1 According to Malavé, Ramos Otero does not merely try to find ways for the abject—the homosexual—to articulate identity or to resist abjection, but he uses abjection itself as a form of expression. From the position of the abject, Ramos Otero is able to critically study not only Puerto Rico, but also the city, in particular New York. Not always a space of jubilant diversity, the city is also a place of ruins, solitude, and disconnection. Even though the Caribbean may be unmentioned or only alluded to as a faraway land, in some instances it is invoked through symbols of abjection, mainly [End Page 64] women and the sea (as a metaphor of female eroticism). Although critics have discussed Ramos Otero's privileging of the female in isolated cases, it is useful to see this tendency unfolding across multiple works and, more importantly, how these evocations provide a path for the protagonists' queer sexual expression. In other words, although Ramos Otero's protagonists are living in cities far from the Caribbean, different women (who enact Puerto Rican history and culture) and frequent images of the sea (which represent the Caribbean landscape), are essential to the protagonists' sexual pleasure. Taking this into consideration, Ramos Otero's writing challenges the traditional discourse of sexile in which his writing is usually framed by critics. Furthermore, by working outside the confines of nationalist literature, Ramos Otero is re-writing the nation as a place where there is an alignment of Puerto Rico's "queer", in between, political status, of subversive sexualities, and of the abject. Frances Negrón-Muntaner, in her book Boricua Pop, provides a useful background to Puerto Rico's nationalist literature, whose aesthetics and topics Ramos Otero conspicuously contests. As she explains, an essential aspect of this nationalist literature is its effort to combat the shame from which Puerto Rican identity has emerged. The source of this shame is the historical and current colonial domination and the ways boricuas have negotiated it. For instance, unlike many subordinated groups, Puerto Ricans have not organized and taken up arms, neither in the form of military insurgency nor through the destruction of infrastructure, in order to gain freedom. The ELA (Estado Libre Asociado, 'Commonwealth') has been the closest Puerto Rico has gotten to the founding of a nation, but Negrón...