Specific Narrative Research Articles

On Indigenous Refusal against Externally-Imposed Frameworks in Historic Palestine

The article attempts to empirically identify how the concept of Indigenous refusal helps us understand growing Palestinian political discourse and practices. It aims to develop Critical Indigenous Studies’ potentialities vis à vis the study of historic Palestine. The article puts a particular emphasis on new visions of Palestinian resistance that take aim at the different ways the Global North has tried to impose specific models and narratives on the Palestinian cause through liberal politics of recognition. Those spatio-political arrangements are enmeshed in the so-called ‘Oslo paradigm’ but also concern the portrayal of Israel as a liberal multicultural society, as well as the neoliberal dynamics that continuously shape the different fragments of the Palestinian people. In this regard, Indigenous Palestinian refusal also presents an international dimension that has progressively led to the articulation of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist imaginaries that would contribute to shaping radical Palestinian – and transnational – futures.

‘Uncertain Voyages of Signification’: Salvage Poetics of the Caribatopia

This essay considers how two comic books, Nalo Hopkinson’s House of Whispers (2018–2020) and Matthew Clarke and Nigel Lynch’s Hardears (2021), use a poetics of salvage to produce visually and textually rich speculative narratives that problematize Eurocentric versions of futurity. My argument is that the comic books conserve and preserve, through salvage, a diverse racial, spatial and historic archive from narratives that constantly remake bodies (human, animal, plant, metaphysical) alongside places and cosmologies within their larger imaginative geographies. They entangle nature, technology and ritual, and give rise to a Caribbean atopia, or what I term as ‘the Caribatopia’, the paradoxical qualities of an unconfined utopia or an inhospitable place marked by unusualness. These comic books by Caribbean creators augment the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the region, allowing these narratives to become allegorical and political sites producing fantastic atopic settings for representations of resistance and worldbuilding in Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic life.

Reframing “the most holy spot in Ireland”: an analysis of the narratives from and around Kilmainham Gaol

Prisons play a prominent role in Irish imagination and collective memory, because their wings and cells bore witness to many turning points in the country’s recent history. Kilmainham Gaol, often called ‘the Bastille of Ireland’, is no exception: from 1796 to its closure in 1924, it held the leaders of nineteenth-century agrarian and nationalist revolts as well as the Easter Rising rebels in 1916. Given the Gaol’s importance in nationalist history, it has been argued that a specific narrative came to be constructed around it by its restorers: one aimed at elevating the Gaol to a symbol of the separatist struggle, and which deliberately downplayed the fact that the prison had been a place of detention also for non-political prisoners and the opponents of the Free State. Scholars contend that this narrative long dominated over stories of ordinary penal history, and, only recently, brief mentions of ‘ordinary’ prisoners and the Civil War have entered the dominant narrative. My article questions these assumptions and is divided into two parts to outline such ‘reframing’ of Kilmainham Gaol: first, drawing on archival documents, I discuss the intention of the authorities to redesign Ireland’s past as a monolithic history of struggle against the enemies of the nation in their narrative of the Gaol, and I argue for the need to consider their reasons to do so; second, I resort to Witcomb’s methodological approach to highlight how today’s curators respond to the representational challenges posed by the Gaol and aim at incorporating into the narrative of the site the dissonant voices of those who had been previously neglected.

Modelowanie pandemii w narracjach spekulatywnych: «„Andromeda” znaczy śmierć» (1969) Michaela Crichtona i „The Andromeda Evolution” (2019) Daniela H. Wilsona

Covid-19 pandemic has brought public attention to digital methods of modeling contagion, which have been used not only to predict the future of the infection, but also assess its scope of impact on population and the chances for achieving herd immunity. As a result new outbreak narratives come into being in which algorithmic data processing gains agency in shaping the dynamics of contagion. His unprecedented reliance on modeling tools has decidedly changed the way we think about epidemic, conceptualized now as a phenomenon which to an equal extent is shaped by natural, cultural and technological factors. He paper argues that the major outlet for these new metaphors of contagion, which Milton Singer termed syndemic, are speculative narratives combining fiction with scientific and medical data as well as insights into the functioning of the digital modeling apparatus. His aspect of the current pandemic provides a good vantage point for taking a closer look at a handful of speculative narratives which bring to the foreground the relationship between modeling and social impact of contagion. By reading Michael Crichton’s technothriller The Andromeda Strain (1969) and its sequel, Daniel H. Wilson’s The Andromeda Evolution (2019), I intend to demonstrate how speculative fabulations engages and contests methods of contagion modeling, bringing into play other forms of non-scientiIc knowledge and practices of survival.

The American psychological Association's practice guidelines for men and boys: Are they hurting rather than helping male mental wellness?

Introduced in 2018, the American Psychological Association's (APA) Practice Guidelines for Men and Boys was intended to provide helpful direction for practitioners when seeing male patients. This followed in the tradition of other practice and clinical guidelines for clinical work with specific identity populations. However, the practice guidelines for men and boys quickly became controversial given concerns that the guidelines were disparaging of men and boys, particularly those with traditional values and sought to impose progressive or feminist gender norms and ideologies rather than remaining focused on clinical wellness and empathy. This review finds that, though the guidelines were offered in good faith, many of the critiques are likely valid. Specifically, the guidelines failed to acknowledge significant evidence for biological influences on gender (e.g., hormonal, and hypothalamic influences on gender identity and gendered behavior), were unintentionally disparaging of traditional men and families, and were too closely wedded to specific sociocultural narratives and incurious of data not supporting those narratives. It is concluded that there are reasonable concerns that the current guidelines may do more harm than good by dissuading traditional men and families from seeking counseling.

Reconciling field-level logics and management control practices in research management at Austrian public universities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how Austrian public universities (APUs) respond to the challenge of maintaining academic freedom while complying with legal requirements and enhancing competitiveness by using Management Control Systems (MCSs). Specifically, it examines how APUs respond to the co-presence of academic, government and business logic.Design/Methodology/ApproachThe perspective of institutional logics as a theoretical lens and the framework of MCSs by Malmi and Brown (2008) serve to analyse how APUs respond to the existence of different institutional field-level logics. In-depth expert interviews from the perspective of APUs’ research management are conducted to identify the applied management control practices (MCPs) and APUs’ responses to the different institutional field-level logics.FindingsThis study identifies how academic, government and business logic are represented in field-level-specific MCPs and field-level-specific corresponding narratives. Reflecting upon APUs’ responses to the co-existence of academic and government logic, compliance or rather, selective coupling with government logic or decoupling from government logic became obvious.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study at higher education institutions representing academic, government and business logic in the applied MCPs in research management. The study reveals that APUs have developed specific responses and narratives regarding the existence of different institutional field-level logics.

Kígyókultusz Cheju szigetén a ponp’uri-k tükrében

Korean religion and folklore are abundant in legends and beliefs about the serpent. Cheju island is a particularly precious source of information about snake-worship, not only because its relative isolation from the mainland enabled it to preserve certain beliefs longer than the peninsula, but also because its distinctive, indigenous culture gave rise to a peculiar belief-system by adopting elements from the outside world. We also have more information on the snake-lore in Cheju due to the accounts of Confucian officers delegated to the island and, more importantly, the body of specific shamanic narratives, the ponp’uris. Ponp’uris – origin stories of the worship of certain deities or shrines, recited during shamanic rites (kut) – are invaluable sources for research. Not only do they reflect historical and religious events, but also the endeavour of Cheju people to interpret and come to terms with these tendencies. Through ponp’uris and rituals associated with them people could respond to these situations, and even if only symbolically, restore order: they could release suppressed resentment and pain, and overcome Confucianist oppression by expressing their cultural identity, or adopt elements of other beliefs in order to survive.

The music of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the sublime object of cinema

A notable stylistic element of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is the innovative use of classical music, which, isolated from dialogue or sound effects, possesses an autonomous dimension of meaning. Borrowing Michel Chion’s concept of “anempathetic music”, we posit that two musical pieces—the Also sprach Zarathustra fanfare and the Blue Danube waltz—have very specific narrative and formal functions, to be analyzed here in terms of Lacan’s concepts of the imaginary and the symbolic, the gaze, suture, spectatorship, and the Kantian sublime. We aim to address and build on Annette Michelson’s formulation, in her seminal criticism, that 2001 is a film of cognitive restructuring and redefinition of cinema’s “shape of content”, through the role of music.

The Egalitarian Sublime: A Process Philosophy

The Egalitarian Sublime: A Process Philosophy

Kinship, Migration, and the Chinese American Immigrant Family Narrative

AbstractThe Asian American immigrant family narrative has been extensively discussed in relation to white domesticity and assimilation by critics who emphasize the unique conditions of Asian racialization in North America. Departing from this approach, this essay considers how the immigrant family narrative depicts kinship structures that were instrumental in sustaining the lifeworld of Chinese migrants during and in the aftermath of the exclusion period (1882–1943). Drawing on theories of racial capitalism, I argue that the appropriation of pre-existing kinship structures played a crucial role in the exploitation of Chinese migrants by sustaining a transnational remittance economy that tied migrants to their locations of origin. Through an extended reading of the opening chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975), I trace how the text depicts the communal and intimate consequences of this social structure. Kingston’s detailed knowledge of migrant kinship relations stands in contrast with her professed confusion about Chinese culture and identity, a tension that underscores the text’s combination of speculative narrative and historical realism.… the immigrant family narrative conveys the global operations of capital even if, or more precisely because, it subordinates depictions of recognizably “economic” tropes—labor, wages, remittances, and so on—to the ostensibly private realm of family relations.

Artificial Intelligence Predictive Models of Response to Cytotoxic Chemotherapy Alone or Combined to Targeted Therapy for Metastatic Colorectal Cancer Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Simple SummaryMetastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) has high incidence and mortality. Nevertheless, innovative biomarkers have been developed for predicting the response to therapy. We have examined the ability of learning methods to build prognostic and predictive models to predict response to chemotherapy, alone or combined with targeted therapy in mCRC patients, by targeting specific narrative publications. After a literature search, 26 original articles met inclusion and exclusion criteria and were included in the study. We showed that all investigations conducted in this field provided generally promising results in predicting the response to therapy or toxic side-effects, using a meta-analytic approach. We found that radiomics and molecular biomarker signatures were able to discriminate response vs. non-response by correctly identifying up to 99% of mCRC patients who were responders and up to 100% of patients who were non-responders. Our study supports the use of computer science for developing personalized treatment decision processes for mCRC patients.Tailored treatments for metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) have not yet completely evolved due to the variety in response to drugs. Therefore, artificial intelligence has been recently used to develop prognostic and predictive models of treatment response (either activity/efficacy or toxicity) to aid in clinical decision making. In this systematic review, we have examined the ability of learning methods to predict response to chemotherapy alone or combined with targeted therapy in mCRC patients by targeting specific narrative publications in Medline up to April 2022 to identify appropriate original scientific articles. After the literature search, 26 original articles met inclusion and exclusion criteria and were included in the study. Our results show that all investigations conducted on this field have provided generally promising results in predicting the response to therapy or toxic side-effects. By a meta-analytic approach we found that the overall weighted means of the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) were 0.90, 95% C.I. 0.80–0.95 and 0.83, 95% C.I. 0.74–0.89 in training and validation sets, respectively, indicating a good classification performance in discriminating response vs. non-response. The calculation of overall HR indicates that learning models have strong ability to predict improved survival. Lastly, the delta-radiomics and the 74 gene signatures were able to discriminate response vs. non-response by correctly identifying up to 99% of mCRC patients who were responders and up to 100% of patients who were non-responders. Specifically, when we evaluated the predictive models with tests reaching 80% sensitivity (SE) and 90% specificity (SP), the delta radiomics showed an SE of 99% and an SP of 94% in the training set and an SE of 85% and SP of 92 in the test set, whereas for the 74 gene signatures the SE was 97.6% and the SP 100% in the training set.

Can’t stop thinking aboutStar WarsandThe Office: antecedents of retrospective imaginative involvement

AbstractRetrospective imaginative involvement (RII) is a concept that encapsulates how audiences reflect back on a narrative’s characters and events after the story has ended. The current study aims to explicate the antecedents of RII in order to provide initial steps toward creating a theory of RII. Through two studies, we tested the role of familiarity, traits (e.g., curiosity), entertainment experiences broadly (e.g., parasocial relationships), and content- or exposure-specific experiences (e.g., boundary expansion). Results suggest that RII plays an important role in self-regulation through repeated asynchronous engagement with specific narratives. This demonstrates a further mechanism by which narratives impact our lives even after the exposure. Further results and implications are discussed.

The Cruel Optimism of Anthropocene Technologies: Suspicion and Fascination of Technology in Okja, What Happened to Monday, and Geostorm

The Cruel Optimism of Anthropocene Technologies: Suspicion and Fascination of Technology in <i>Okja</i>, <i>What Happened to Monday</i>, and <i>Geostorm</i>

Kohapärimuse roll keskkonnakonflikti diskursuses: Paluküla hiiemäe juhtum

This article is a critical study of how local place-related narratives, i.e., place-lore, is integrated into environmental discussions. Place-lore reflects the cultural and ecological dimensions of collective environmental experience; for example, what kind of species grow in a specific place, what are the characteristics of the landscape, what kind of activities and usages certain environment allows, etc. Place-lore is culturally and ecologically highly contextual and refers to the environment it represents. However, when including these kinds of contextual and environmental-related narratives in conflict communication, the narratives may become disconnected or decontextualised from the environment represented. Combining the frameworks of ecosemiotics, environmental communication studies, and place-lore research, the article explores how a new storytelling context, ideological choices, and the logic of conflict communication influence the interpretation of place-lore. The theory is applied to an empirical examination of the public discussion of Paluküla sacred hill in central Estonia. The conflict surrounding the plan to build a ski resort near Paluküla sacred hill is one of the longest place-centred environmental conflicts in contemporary Estonia. A larger opposition broke out in 2004 and discussions are still ongoing. Moreover, Paluküla is a good model conflict for studying the role of place-lore in similar conflicts. Since the beginning of the conflict, it has been characteristic of the debate to involve references to and discussions of folklore, and also to question, compare, and use specific place-related vernacular knowledge and narratives as part of the argumentation. Tracking references to the previous place-lore about Paluküla Hill in the media coverage of the conflict allows a demonstration of how the contextuality and referentiality towards an extra-narrative environment that are originally present in place-lore are often overlooked or ignored in conflict discourse. When part of practices, activities, or ways of relating with the place are ignored or diminished in the discussion, the possible semiotic relationships with the environment also become neglected. This, in turn, leads to socially and ecologically disconnected discussion.

The Positive Impact of Pandemics in Two Selected Speculative Narratives

This article examines Stephen Soderbergh’s film Contagion (2011) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) as a critique of the uncivilized culture of our modern society, which depends on fragile connections and lack of solidarity. Although global pandemics annihilate the world and shatter families, this study demonstrates how they are depicted as a positive tool of change, serving as a force that exposes then undermines the deep-rooted cultural flaws in society and finally offers lessons that help in rebuilding a new civilized world based on human values. Such representation of pandemics in these selected narratives is allegorical, functioning as a mirror that reflects our COVID-19 reality, teaching moral lessons, and contributing to our understanding of the crisis and how we think and act in response.

Quartering as an aspect of Italy’s post-unification urban development: the case of Milan’s parade ground

ABSTRACT This work addresses the relationship between the Italian city-making process following Unification (1861) and the development of military settlements up to the 1920s. The hypothesis presented here is that the building of military settlements and the redevelopment of spaces with new functions, arguably, shaped Italian cities over this period by implementing urban renewal processes and city expansion. Through my analysis, I claim that defence planning had an amenable effect upon the decision-making process of urban planning schemes. In addition, this paper claims that this process has impacted the location of military settlements in ways that boosted the economic and urban images of the city. I do this through a detailed case study of Milan’s parade ground. Here, I found that the parade ground dismantling and relocation from the urban centre towards the periphery happened twice, relied on a specific narrative, and was catalysed by two mega-events. I demonstrate that defence planning plays a secondary role in boosting these operations aimed both at replacing military settlements with newly emerging functions and displacing the unwanted functions in the periphery.

Haunting Memories and Haunted Landscapes: Reading the EcoGothic in Apichatpong’s Cemetery of Splendour and Pitchaya’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain

Amid the quietness of ecological awareness in the general Thai artistic circle rise two rare gems: Palme D’Or Thai film maker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and a Thai cli-fi writer, Pitchaya Sudbanthad. A middle-aged housewife, stuck in an in-between landscape between a modern urban city where she lives with her American husband and a supernatural world of dreams where she falls in love with the sleeping sickness suffering soldier, watches her field hospital being excavated to reveal the ancient ruins underneath with eyes wide open in Apichatpong’s Cemetery of Splendour (2015). A teak mansion in Bangkok built by the family's fortune in teak trade and haunted by memories drenching in family’s and nation’s traumas manifesting as tree spirits, eventually transforms and sinks with the drowned capital in Pitchaya’s Bangkok Wake to Rain (2019). This research paper aims to explicate their representations of social-ecological memories and their subversion of the nationalist and environmental discourse in Apichatpong’s magical-realist mise-en-scènes and film language and Pitchaya’s speculative narrative. This paper also enquires into the nature and critical applicability of EcoGothic in Thai context.

The Connectivity Bridge – A Clinical Understanding: Postcolonial Therapy with Latinx Women Living in the United States

The negative effects brought by intergenerational trauma affecting Latinx women that transmits across generations has not received the appropriate attention that recognizes the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding brought by the experience of migration associated with the legacies of colonialism, political violence, and related stressors. Intergenerational trauma can be recognized and ameliorated with the application of postcolonial psychotherapy modalities that endorse the relevance of cultural representation, identity, and location, with specific reference to migration, gender, race, and ethnicity that focus on promoting liberation and healing. This article will address the interconnections (The Connectivity Bridge) between gender specific cultural values and/or national narratives that perpetuate the colonial thinking of superiority vs inferiority, based on gender and/or ethnicity, and the creation of negative self-identifications evidenced by many Latinx women. A clinical application will briefly illustrate the existing relationship between postcolonialism, ancestry, feminism, and the migration experience that can affect Latinx women living in the United States. Four cultural expectations of gender specific behaviors with ties to colonialism endorsed by Latinxs will be discussed, namely machismo, marianismo, attitudinal familismo or the feeling of support one expects from family, and simpatia, a cultural relational script that also carries gender specific behavioral expectations. An application of a liberation/decolonization healing approach will also illustrate and challenge the assumptions that gender specific expectations of behavior are antiquated and no longer relevant to modern Latinx women with a history of migration, born or residing in the United States who continue being affected by a continuation of the traumatic effects of the previously suffered oppression in the country of origin for many Latinx women and their descendants.

Pioneers in the Attic: Place and Memory along the Mormon Trail

Pioneers in the Attic: Place and Memory along the Mormon Trail

Gutter politics: Graphic novels in the age of Trump

This article explores the ways in which US graphic novels have responded to, narrated and politically framed the Trump presidency. Analysing a generically diverse range of texts from non-fiction to science fiction, I argue that comics artists were quick to mobilize the medium’s unique qualities in the service of ideological critique. The article offers a detailed account of how publications such as Sabrina (2018), The Hard Tomorrow (2019), LaGuardia (2019) and Welcome to the New World (2020) were developed, shaped and reshaped against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s election victory and presidential term. Through an assortment of formal and stylistic devices – spatial and temporal jumps and juxtapositions afforded by panel arrangement, a weaving together of historical and contemporaneous iconography, the interplay of various textual cues and registers – these graphic novels offered complex portrayals of the impact of Trump and ‘Trumpism’ on various individuals, groups and communities. In different ways, they evidence the medium’s ability to intervene in wider political discourse, construct challenging historical and speculative narratives and offer fresh, resonant engagements with pressing issues of the day.