Story Of Conflict Research Articles

Resources for Early American Studies: Companion Texts, Part III

Resources for Early American StudiesCompanion Texts, Part III Marion Rust and Kristina Bross (bio) Good News from New England edward winslow Edited by kelly wisecup Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014 180 pp. In this third installment of "Resources," exceptionally attentive readers will notice a word missing from the section heading: teaching. Let me explain. A few months ago, my editorial assistants and I were sitting around a pile of recently published critical editions, faced with a familiar conundrum: did we emphasize these works' contribution to the scholar's lair or to the classroom? The answer, of course, is "both." But how capture that duality in a discipline wherein "critical edition" and "textbook" can seem so far apart? Finally, one of us—and I do not remember which—came up with a term we could all agree on: companion texts. So here you have it: six brief critical assessments of the very matter of our field, books that represent the editorial craft in all its variety. From colonial promotional texts to black Canadian studies; from the earliest published native woman author in the United States to Thoreau, Douglass, and Emerson: each of these editions has something to offer us all in the way of intellectual companionship. ________ Good News from New England edward winslow Edited by kelly wisecup Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014 180 pp. In her wide-ranging introduction to this valuable edition of Edward Winslow's Good News from New England, Kelly Wisecup notes the neglect of this key text of New England colonialism. The work is passed over in major anthologies of early American writings in favor of Of Plymouth Plantation (1647) and New English Canaan (1637) (15–16). That neglect is especially unfortunate because, as Wisecup suggests, unlike William [End Page 209] Bradford's and Thomas Morton's focus on conflict—either cross-cultural or internecine—Winslow's account of New England is more nuanced. His familiarity with Algonquian languages and cultures and his willingness to credit native assistance to English colonists, she argues, resulted in a text that "complicates the genre" of seventeenth-century promotional writings (5). She makes a persuasive case that if we wish to read the literatures of New England in their own historical context rather than "in the context of later cross-cultural conflicts," Winslow's work deserves to be included in our classroom discussions (17). We early Americanists have largely moved away from a teleological understanding of American literature in which colonial American literature is understood as a forerunner to the "proper" literature of the United States. But perhaps our syllabi, especially those for our survey courses, do not always reflect that critical view of our field. By putting stories of conflict—particularly native-European conflict—at the start of our literary histories and literature surveys, we continue to foreground works that established the myth of the inevitable triumph of English colonists over the "vanishing Indian." Of course, early Americanists have tried various approaches to complicate our literary histories. Bradford and Morton may hold sway in the major anthologies when it comes to New England, but the Norton, Heath, and other collections also take care to include Spanish, French, sometimes German colonial texts. They include transatlantic approaches and indigenous oral traditions. Nevertheless, I suspect that despite our best intentions many of us jump right into the English tradition, and even if we start with Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca or the Jesuit Relations, few of us sustain a truly multifaceted approach throughout the whole term of an early American literary survey. Whether or not we decide to start with New England, Wisecup's edition of Winslow allows us to apply new critical approaches to English colonial texts. What would it mean to put Winslow's text in conversation with or even in the place of other works? Wisecup argues that if we do, the text demands we grapple not only with Winslow, with his faith, or with his wonder and fear in the face of "New World" challenges, all elements we can find in other promotional and travel literatures coming from New England writers of his day. To do it justice, we also must consider how he...

Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975 by John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco

Reviewed by: Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975 by John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco Michelle Chase John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco. Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 307 pp. The past few years seem to have inaugurated a transnational turn in the growing scholarship on Cuba's 1959 revolution.1 John Gronbeck-Tedesco's Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left is a welcome addition to this trend. In this sweeping exploration of US-Cuban cultural and political relations, Gronbeck-Tedesco describes a shared long-term dialogue, "a larger transnational space of Left culture," constructed between Cuban and US activists (45). Yet this is not necessarily a story of unity. Gronbeck-Tedesco is sensitive to aspects of disagreement or mutual incomprehension—what he calls "gaps in the transnation" (68)—that make this a story of conflict as well as solidarity. Eschewing a teleological tendency to see 1933 as "prelude" to the 1959 revolution, Gronbeck-Tedesco argues instead for conceptualizing the "Cuban revolutions as a historical period—bridging what is usually historicized separately as the 'thirties' and the 'sixties'" (4). This broader historical scale captures intriguing continuities and parallels. Organized chronologically and thematically, the book moves from the internationalism of the old left and popular front to the rise of the new left and "tricontinentalism." Along the way we meet activists, writers, and intellectuals representative of the Generación del 30, afrocubanismo, the Harlem Renaissance, the black power movement, first- and second-wave feminism, and the US "third world left." Throughout, the book pays significant attention to race and gender, two areas where we find perhaps the greatest "gaps" between island and mainland activists. Some of the material covered here may feel familiar, as Gronbeck-Tedesco is building on work by Van Gosse, Frank Guridy, Mark O. Sawyer, and others. But the book's ambitious scope, long historical period, and careful research provide new insights. The chapters on the 1930s are particularly enlightening, adding significantly to the perennially underdeveloped historiography on the 1933 revolution. Here Gronbeck-Tedesco usefully reconstructs the enormous impact that 1933 made on progressives in the United States and beyond. Cuba's 1933 revolution, he shows, became a touchstone in left-wing literature alongside other global conflagrations such as the Spanish Civil War, the Scottsboro case, and [End Page 357] the peasant rebellion in China. Carlton Beals's widely read work The Crime of Cuba (1933) was particularly influential in this regard. In a thoughtful analysis of the book's text and photos, Gronbeck-Tedesco shows how Beals launched a powerful denunciation of Machado while also mobilizing certain condescending constructions of Cuban exoticism and racial difference that echoed tropes from tourist literature and social science. Thus the US left reproduced neocolonial language while professing authentically felt solidarity—an observation equally applicable to the 1960s and beyond. In other ways, too, it is striking how trends we often associate with the 1960s were anticipated in the 1930s. The author shows that, already in the 1930s, Cuba provided an idealized trope of agrarian revolution and mass uprising. Here he carefully reconstructs the way Pablo de la Torriente Brau's 1934 exposé of the agrarian conflict in Realengo 18 entered wider transnational circulation when the US journalist Josephine Herbst published a similar series of articles in New Masses one year later in which she positioned Realengo 18 as "a kind of agrarian vanguard, believing that she [had] discovered in the Cuban hinterland seeds for revolution" (66). Cuba's 1933 revolution seemed to provide an appealing alternative to the Soviet Union, then beset by bureaucracy, political purges, executions, and famine, just as the 1959 revolution initially raised hopes for a "humanist" revolution that might forge a third way in the polarized Cold War world. After 1959, it proves somewhat harder to flesh out individual Cuban cultural figures of the period, as Gronbeck-Tedesco does so well for writers and intellectuals of the 1930s such as de la Torriente Brau, Nicolás Guillén, Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, and Regino Pedroso. In these sections the book largely provides insight into the way US activists or organizations...

Managing Race and Race-ing Management: Teachers’ Stories of Race and Classroom Conflict

Background/ContextResearch exploring suspension and expulsion practices suggests that teachers may play a key role in perpetuating racial disproportionality in school discipline by interpreting student behavior through racialized and racist lenses and by viewing the behavior of students of color as an affront to their authority, resulting in more frequent punishing of Black and Latino students. The problem may be compounded for novice teachers, who are likely to teach in high-poverty, high-”minority” schools where discipline is a pronounced concern for educators.Research Questions/Focus of StudyTo illuminate the role of race in novice teacher interpretations of classroom management, this research explored the following questions: (a) How do novice in-service teachers narrate classroom management and disciplinary moments from their practice? (b) What do their narratives of these moments reveal about how they might negotiate racial difference in the classroom?Research DesignThis study employs narrative analysis of classroom management stories (N = 51) shared by novice teachers participating in a 10-week hybrid online/in-person professional development course focused on race, class, and gender equity in urban schools. Specifically, this article analyzes how race is discussed in these narratives.FindingsTeachers in this study tended to share stories either about “managing race”—narratives about deescalating racial tension or reproaching transgressors of racial colorblindness—or “race-ing management”—stories that read race into incidents in such a way as to reveal latent racial dynamics. These patterns aligned with teachers’ self-identified racial backgrounds, with teachers who expressed a more tenuous racial identity or who described themselves as White tending to focus on managing race, and those who expressed a strong minority racial identity tending to focus on race-ing management.RecommendationsTo address issues of racial proportionality and justice in student discipline and to retain an experienced teacher workforce in under-resourced schools, I offer two key recommendations. First, we must innovatively support novice teachers in reversing insidious trends by offering structured opportunities for critical reflection on management through the lens of identity. In this way, novice teachers can analyze the implicit beliefs at work in their understandings. Furthermore, school leaders and other professional development facilitators must make clear to novice teachers that their competence is not being questioned when we ask them to engage in critical reflection. I discuss specific ways to approach this and offer recommendations for future research.

How do health workers experience and cope with shocks? Learning from four fragile and conflict-affected health systems in Uganda, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Cambodia.

This article is grounded in a research programme which set out to understand how to rebuild health systems post-conflict. Four countries were studied-Uganda, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Cambodia-which were at different distances from conflict and crisis, as well as having unique conflict stories. During the research process, the Ebola epidemic broke out in West Africa. Zimbabwe has continued to face a profound economic crisis. Within our research on health worker incentives, we captured insights from 128 life histories and in-depth interviews with a variety of staff that had remained in service. This article aims to draw together lessons from these contexts which can provide lessons for enhancing staff and therefore health system resilience in future, especially in similarly fragile and conflict-affected contexts. We examine the reported effects, both personal and professional, of the three different types of shock (conflicts, epidemics and prolonged political-economic crises), and how staff coped. We find that the impact of shocks and coping strategies are similar between conflict/post-conflict and epidemic contexts-particularly in relation to physical threats and psychosocial threats-while all three contexts create challenges and staff responses for working conditions and remuneration. Health staff showed considerable inventiveness and resilience, and also benefited from external assistance of various kinds, but there are important gaps which point to ways in which they should be better protected and supported in the future. Health systems are increasingly fragile and conflict-prone, and shocks are often prolonged or repeated. Resilience should not be taken for granted or used as an excuse for abandoning frontline health staff. Strategies should be in place at local, national and international levels to prepare for predictable crises of various sorts, rather than waiting for them to occur and responding belatedly, or relying on personal sacrifices by staff to keep services functioning.

In the Eye of the Storm: Photographs of Russian Prisoners of War in Denmark during the First World War

ABSTRACTIn 1915 prisoners of war escaped to neutral Denmark from German camps. In 1917, in order to support its politics of neutrality, Denmark opened two POW camps where soldiers from the warring countries were nursed. The proliferation of images in Danish archives shows that the prisoners were photographed frequently. Portraits and group photographs were carried by soldiers, sent home and left with new acquaintances establishing new forms of presence in a landscape of distance and loss. Furthermore, the development of documentary photography and mass media brought the images of prisoners into the historical records of Denmark’s neutrality. In this context the collection of the young academic Ingeborg Stemann plays a key part. While working as an aid worker and as an interpreter in the POW camps she collected photographs and written records in order to document the experiences of Russian POWs. Taking her collection as a starting point this article conducts an analysis of photography as a means to strengthen identity and community across time and place. Along with other photographs from the period, it also tells the story of conflicts and tensions in a period of war and revolution as well as in the act of taking photographs itself.

Reading Beyond Cognitive Meaning: Affective Strategies in Novels of the Spanish ‘Memory Boom’

AbstractThe twenty-first century ‘memory boom’ in Spain has resulted in a plethora of narratives in which the Civil War and the early years of Franco’s dictatorship feature prominently. Studies of these works have addressed representations of memory and trauma, recognizing how the authors reanimate the past and narrate stories of conflict and loss to a readership distanced from the historical events. This essay explores four texts, identifying the strategies that have shaped their circulation in the current affective economy. Analysis pays particular attention to text, but also explores the image as formative in the reading experience.ResumenDurante el ‘boom de la memoria’ del siglo XXI en España se han publicado una gran cantidad de libros y ficciones que han utilizado como fondo narrativo la guerra civil o los primeros años de la dictadura franquista. Los análisis de estas obras han abordado sus representaciones de las memorias y el trauma, reconociendo la tarea de los autores en recrear el pasado y en narrar a los lectores, lejanos de los acontecimientos históricos, historias del conflicto y de las pérdidas personales. Este trabajo examina cuatro textos, identificando las estrategias que han influido su circulación en una economía afectiva actual. El análisis presta atención al texto, pero también explora como la imagen informa la lectura de estas historias.

Narrating Violence, Narrating Self: Exodus and Collective Identity in Early Rabbinic Literature

Narrating Violence, Narrating Self: Exodus and Collective Identity in Early Rabbinic Literature

Thinking Beyond Nationalism in South Asia: Reading the Local as Postcolonial in Fault Lines: Stories of 1971

Although the idea of “postcolonial literature” has been contested by scholars like Aijaz Ahmed (1992), Arif Dirlik (1994), Tabish Khair (2001), and Graham Huggan (2001), the growing geography of global Anglophone literatures continues to contribute to the discussions of literatures from non-Western spaces. While the accusation of misrepresentation against post-colonial literature exists in academic debates, the post-colonial, as Robert Young (2012) has argued, continues to complicate issues of identity, representation and in particular, misrepresentation of Islam in a post 9/11 world. Postcolonialism may still be relevant to re-read the conflict of nationalisms in South Asia. By focusing on the events of 1971, which led to the creation of Bangladesh, we can trace the local variant of the postcolonial. The silenced stories of 1971-especially stories dealing with the problematic of minority identity, genocide, and divided political allegiance-can question national narratives. By investigating the otherwise unspoken accounts of the war, which lie hidden under the Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationalist narratives, we can recast the inadequately captured local stories of national conflict. This paper engages the short story collection Fault Lines: Stories of 1971, to complicate Young’s conceptualization of the postcolonial in the essay, Postcolonial Remains. I will analyze events of 1971 as localized narratives with an aim to complicate Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationalisms and to look beyond the nationalistic propaganda literatures from Bangladesh. This strategy of postcolonial engagement with local narratives aims to inform the discussion surrounding the plight of the Bihari community in Bangladesh, the Bengali collaborator of the Pakistan Army, and Bangladesh genocide in the paper.

Conflicts, competition and social support in female-dominated vocational education – breaking or reaffirming stereotypical femininity?

One in four upper secondary school students in Norway experience nearly single-sex classrooms, an unintended consequence of choosing certain vocational study programmes, such as Health care, childhood and youth development or Building and construction. This raises a question about how female students describe their experiences of social relationships and classroom culture within the context of a gender-segregated vocational education setting. Analyses of educational biography interviews reveal that stories of conflict, competition and cultural differences dominate and are often described using derogative or gendered language, such as ‘bitching’, ‘gossip’ and ‘drama’. These stories demonstrate a break with gender stereotypes but, at the same time, accentuate femininity by aligning the behaviour to stereotypical discourses of ‘girl’ behaviour. In their stories, gender loses its importance as a basis for solidarity and commonality when students share the same gender; instead, hierarchies and other differences become highlighted.

“The world’s best minority”: Parsis and Hindutva’s ethnic nationalism in India

ABSTRACTThere is an assumption that nationalist movements which are constituted by an ethnic majority are hostile towards all minorities, so how does one account for such a movement’s affection for one minority and hostility for another? In this paper I explore this question using the case study of a Hindu nationalist movement in India called Hindutva which simultaneously expresses hostility towards Muslims and affection for another minority known as the Parsis. I argue in societies that imagine themselves as plural there is a type of nationalist thought premised upon the existence of both exemplary and threatening minorities. An exemplary minority is imagined as loyal and acculturating, illustrating both how a minority should relate to the majority and why other minorities are threatening. While an historical argument enables the distinction between the majority and minorities, a plural hierarchy of minorities is enabled by mythical stories of coexistence and conflict.

Punk Subculture and the Queer Critique of Community on 1980s Cable TV: The Case of New Wave Theatre

If histories of television recognize it all, the relationship between punk subculture and the mass cultural medium of television is often rendered as a story of misreprentation, conflict, or mutual avoidance. Such studies overlook a rich history of punks throughout North America who produced numerous programs for cable television, especially the non-commercial forum of public access, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Conceiving of TV as a kind of social technology, some punks actively and critically engaged in producing subculture both on and through the medium. This article looks at the case of New Wave Theatre (Theta/KSCI 1979–1983), a Los Angeles–based cable program that featured punk and new-wave bands, performance art, and interviews. It argues that through distinctive performance tactics and production practices, New Wave Theatre developed a form of “subcultural television” rooted in queer “antisociality.”

Parent Perspectives on Child Health and Wellbeing in Same-Sex Families: Heteronormative Conflict and Resilience Building

Measurable aspects of child health and wellbeing for children in same-sex parented families show that these children develop well, overall. Increasingly however, it is understood that stigma can have a negative impact on their health within a same sex family context. The aim of this study is to understand how child health in same-sex parented families is constructed by same-sex attracted parents and what this teaches us about the impact of stigma on child health in this context. Families from across Australia were sampled from a larger study of child health and wellbeing. We used family interviews, which took place between January and August 2013. Thematic analysis was used to identify themes. We report on the data from 11 parents with 10 children. Families presented stories of heteronormative conflict that arose from their position in society. Through family constructs, gender assumptions, discrimination and challenging interactions with institutions this heteronormative conflict had a significant influence on child health, sometimes through the generation of broader familial stress. Resilience building was used by parents to construct a positive environment for child health by combating the lack of understanding and discrimination seen at a societal level. Resilience that is developed to combat stigma provides significant benefits, particularly in a heteronormative world where traditional assumptions about families dominate. The anticipation of stigma, and heteronormative pressures, can stimulate same-sex attracted parents to prepare their children for potential negativity. This should be supported through appropriate school programs and considered political leadership.

The Second Generation of Autobiographical Narratives of Dictatorship: The Year in Brazil

The Second Generation of Autobiographical Narratives of DictatorshipThe Year in Brazil Sergio da Silva Barcellos (bio) In the fifteenth year of military dictatorship in Brazil, in 1979, the creation of an amnesty law allowed for the return of political exiles. With them came their stories of conflict, torture, and displacement. In the first half of the 1980s, autobiographical accounts about the repressive regime began flooding bookshelves with titles written by journalists, intellectuals, and artists who suffered at the hands of the repression. However, much had yet to be discussed and exposed. In Brazil, there was not an effort toward justice through initiatives such as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was not until 2012, with the establishment of the Comissão Nacional da Verdade that the second generation of autobiographical narratives of the period surfaced. Stories and memories of children whose parents were subjugated by military repression contributed a new facet of this dark chapter of national history. Until 1978 real information about the repressive regime was scarce and only with the Abertura, which means "opening" or "distension," that resulted from the revoking of the AI-5 (Institutional Act number 5, of December 13, 1968) did Brazilians start reading and learning about stories of former political prisoners and exiles. Several autobiographical narratives of journalists, writers, sociologists, and left-wing politicians, among others, represented the first contact with recent national history for an entire generation. It was known as the boom of memoirs and testimonies of the military dictatorship era. The first book of the trilogy written by Fernando Gabeira, a former guerrilla member, O Que É Isso, Companheiro?,1 published in 1979, figured in the bestseller lists for three years. Alfredo Sirkis's Os Carbonários received the same wide acceptance. Other titles are worth mentioning, such as Memórias: [End Page 539] Parte I by Gregório Bezerra, Querida família by Flávia Schilling, and Batismo de sangue: Os dominicanos e a morte de Carlos Marighella by Frei Beto. Some of these narratives became mandatory reading for those who wanted to learn about the failed revolution and unfortunate backlashes, such as torture and exile. Most of these authors attempted to offer a passionate autobiographical account while presenting a critical retrospective view on their experiences. Their projects, however, lacked a more dialectic approach. In spite of the many graphic descriptions of the physical and psychological torture inflicted on political prisoners, a cross-checking of their versions of these accounts did not happen then, nor has one happened today. When the amnesty law for political prisoners passed, it pardoned both guerrilla members and military torturers. The archives of the dictatorship were sealed and kept under confidentiality until recently when two important steps were taken toward revisiting the recent past. The first one was the law number 12,527 of 2011, known as Lei de Acesso à Informação, granting relatively unrestricted access to all public information under government care (Presidência da República). Next, May 16, 2011, saw the establishment of the Comissão Nacional da Verdade, whose goals were to investigate and clarify all human rights violations that occurred between 1964 and 1988. The access to documents pertaining to this period revealed a chasm between the different ways lives had been compromised by political and ideological conflicts. On one side, young men and women offered their lives to rebel against dictatorship by either verbalizing their opinion or by bearing arms and confronting the regime. On the other were the memories of innocent children dragged involuntarily into a conflict they did not understand and whose effects drastically marked their lives. a cause greater than one's own life In the documentary No Es Hora de Llorar, Roque Aparecido da Silva, a metal worker and college student, narrates how, during the sessions of torture, he thought about defying the torturers to incite them to beat him to death. Death meant not only the end of pain but also a way to avoid disclosure of the whereabouts of his fellow guerillas. However, after a while, he explains that: Eu não posso dispor da vida como eu bem entendo. Então, eu percebi que eu não podia provocar para...

The Life of God in the Soul: The Integration of Love, Holiness and Happiness in the Thought of John Wesley

In this detailed and engaging examination of John Wesley's pastoral correspondence, sermons, hymns, and other work, David McEwan offers a lively defence of Christian holiness as an entirely relational as opposed to individual endeavour. And if relational, the anatomy of Wesleyan holiness that McEwan presents is based in claiming one's own participation in the love of God for creation and all of humanity, and then engaging in intentional formation by emulating this love for God, neighbour, and self. By his account Wesleyan holiness is deeply personal, yet never private: to love others and to love God is to conform the deepest desires of the heart to God's intention, and thus to be formed in a pattern of life Wesley recognized and each Christian may feel as ‘happiness’. Happiness, by this account, is the patterning of motive and action around an ethic of scriptural holiness lived out as faithful service in day-to-day work, health, discipleship, and relationships. As he corrects accounts of Christian holiness (and their correlative accounts of formation) that might over-emphasize the individual or private, McEwan notes that according to his understanding of Wesleyan theology, the question is ‘not really whether all this is wrong, but whether it is adequate’ (2).Based in Brisbane, Australia, the author is both the pastor of a Nazarene congregation and the Director of Research and Senior Lecturer in Theology, Pastoral Theology, and Practice at the Nazarene Theological College. Much of this work was developed on extended fellowships at the Manchester (United Kingdom) Wesley Research Centre, and it is international in its scholarly attention. In a well-organized, easily accessible progression of chapters McEwan gives an account of God's relationship with creation and humanity, and then considers both ‘challenges’ and ‘helps’ to the formation of the ‘life of God in the soul’. The first chapters offer a systematic treatment of Wesley's thought, and may be compared with other recent explicitly theological accounts of Wesleyan holiness. But this book becomes interesting to a much broader pastoral readership as it makes a methodological transition to applied theology, albeit entirely historical in focus. McEwan tells stories of pastoral conflict and contact to demonstrate the Wesleyan interplay of holiness and happiness across questions like suffering and its role in Christian formation, depression or ‘heaviness of spirit’, and the relation of bodily to spiritual health. At each stage, ample evidence from Wesley's letters and sermons is brought together to give a practical theology of spiritual formation for holy, happy, living. Sustained attention to his pastoral correspondences with particular individuals moves beyond simple thematic treatments of his pastoral approach to give a more holistic, complicated picture of Wesley the pastor. The project may have begun in work for the PhD, but this book develops Wesley's understanding of happiness and counsel toward obtaining it well beyond that base.As a work of theology and history, the book might have been stronger to integrate the systematic sections and the applied, and to distinguish sources from different eras of Wesley's life. McEwan might also have given consideration to present-day pastoral dilemmas in the conclusion: how might the link between holiness and happiness play out in an era of social media and virtual relationship, versus actual? Does the implication that love of the other be given without agenda preclude intentional evangelism? And how might the understanding of a fully relational, Wesleyan holiness aid the work of repentance from the historical sins of white-skin or male privilege, or the systemic inequities of global economics? These are some of the questions that this work provokes, and pastors (including McEwan) perhaps more usually work out each Sunday from the pulpit. This book will be an interesting and earthy read, amply resourcing Sunday-by-Sunday pastoral preachers and theologians alike.

Why Silence? Reporting Internal Conflicts in Ethiopian

Ethiopia and its people have been experiencing internal conflicts that have caused many deaths, destruction of property, as well as other tragedies. The main causes of these internal conflicts were the country’s internal political instability and scarce resources, its historical paths, its geographical location, and the current religious fundamentalism in the Horn of Africa. In this research, these internal conflicts were classified into four groups: ethnic, religious, National Power Regional Predominance (NP\RP), and Other more minor incidents, based on their formation, intensity, and nature. This dissertation’s overarching purpose is to examine how these internal conflicts were reported in selected Ethiopian local newspapers, namely, Addis Admas, Reporter, The Daily Monitor, and The Ethiopian Herald in the period 2005-2013. The sampled newspapers were deliberately selected since they have been published for many years, are interested in dealing with critical issues and current affairs, and have relatively large circulations within the country. Similarly, the period (2005-2013) was intentionally chosen, since there were several conflicts during that particular period. With the purpose of meeting the main objectives of the dissertation, three main research questions were set. These are: To what extent do the selected newspapers cover the internal conflicts? How they do frame the stories, and what are the challenges they face during reporting on these cases. The study answered these major questions by using content analysis, textual analysis, and interview data collection and analysis instruments. The content analysis was used to consider the extent of the internal conflict stories that appeared in the selected newspapers. The textual analysis was also employed so as to discover how the newspapers frame the internal conflicts. The interviews were added to the study to make sense of the reasons for which the selected newspapers reported in the way they did. The study was supported by agenda setting, framing and symbolic annihilation theories. The former two theories were employed to develop the tools of the study, to identify the problems and to support the discussions. The latter, however, was merely used to discuss the data. The study reveals that the internal conflict reporting in the selected Ethiopian newspapers was not only minimal in its number, but also tended to silence cases, by ignoring some of the issues or facts of the events in their stories. The frame analysis also reflects that the texts try to hide some of the important elements of the events relating to the internal conflicts. Two frames, the annihilation frame and the attribution of responsibility, are identified in the study. The study also identifies that the Ethiopian local newspapers and their journalists in general, and in those selected newspapers, in particular, have been facing challenges, mainly in relation to ownership, fear, self-censorship and pressures, which lead the reporters to compromise their professional integrity while reporting on cases of internal conflicts. By looking at the overall findings, the study also outlines the possible practical and theoretical implications in the Ethiopian media, and the media and conflict reporting, more generally.

Why Silence? Reporting Internal Conflict in Ethiopian Newspapers

Ethiopia and its people have been experiencing internal conflicts that have caused many deaths, destruction of property, as well as other tragedies. The main causes of these internal conflicts were the country’s internal political instability and scarce resources, its historical paths, its geographical location, and the current religious fundamentalism in the Horn of Africa. In this research, these internal conflicts were classified into four groups: ethnic, religious, National Power Regional Predominance (NP\RP), and Other more minor incidents, based on their formation, intensity, and nature. This dissertation’s overarching purpose is to examine how these internal conflicts were reported in selected Ethiopian local newspapers, namely, Addis Admas, Reporter, The Daily Monitor, and The Ethiopian Herald in the period 2005-2013. The sampled newspapers were deliberately selected since they have been published for many years, are interested in dealing with critical issues and current affairs, and have relatively large circulations within the country. Similarly, the period (2005-2013) was intentionally chosen, since there were several conflicts during that particular period. With the purpose of meeting the main objectives of the dissertation, three main research questions were set. These are: To what extent do the selected newspapers cover the internal conflicts? How they do frame the stories, and what are the challenges they face during reporting on these cases. The study answered these major questions by using content analysis, textual analysis, and interview data collection and analysis instruments. The content analysis was used to consider the extent of the internal conflict stories that appeared in the selected newspapers. The textual analysis was also employed so as to discover how the newspapers frame the internal conflicts. The interviews were added to the study to make sense of the reasons for which the selected newspapers reported in the way they did. The study was supported by agenda setting, framing, and symbolic annihilation theories. The former two theories were employed to develop the tools of the study, to identify the problems and to support the discussions. The latter, however, was merely used to discuss the data. The study reveals that the internal conflict reporting in the selected Ethiopian newspapers was not only minimal in its number but also tended to silence cases, by ignoring some of the issues or facts of the events in their stories. The frame analysis also reflects that the texts try to hide some of the important elements of the events relating to the internal conflicts. Two frames, the annihilation frame and the attribution of responsibility, are identified in the study. The study also identifies that the Ethiopian local newspapers and their journalists in general, and in those selected newspapers, in particular, have been facing challenges, mainly in relation to ownership, fear, self-censorship, and pressures, which lead the reporters to compromise their professional integrity while reporting on cases of internal conflicts. By looking at the overall findings, the study also outlines the possible practical and theoretical implications in the Ethiopian media, and the media and conflict reporting, more generally.

Conflict between the Individual and Society in The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter can be considered a story of neverending conflict between the individual and society. Here individuality is being downtrodden by the society in the name of Puritanism where religion and law are identical to one another. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl are struggling to find their identities against the harsh Puritan society. The aim of this paper is to show how hypocritical the Puritan society is in applying their ethics when they themselves do not follow it and how the instinctive nature of the soul of the individual has been shattered by the iron grasp of Puritanism. This paper is also an attempt to show that, in spite of all the efforts of the Puritan society, individuals find a way to uphold their mental freedom and thus defeat the society.

Reflexivity on stories of conflict among Latin American teenage school girls in a multicultural school in Madrid

This paper looks at forms of reflexivity and the moral positioning of social actors, displayed in conversational narratives about school conflict, co-produced by Latin American girls during sociolinguistic interviews with a female researcher of Latin American origin, in a multicultural school in the centre of Madrid. Understanding narratives as communicative practices makes them suitable discursive spaces for revealing the moral positioning and moral orders constructed in discourse. These discursive positionings need to be considered in the light of the ethnographic conditions under which such narratives emerge (Patino-Santos, 2016). Herein, I analyse narratives recounting conflicts from two different groups – female secondary school students and their teachers – based on the notion that it is in recounting and evaluating moments of conflict that social actors call upon their systems of beliefs and values. The failure of the girls’ secondary school and all the negative repercussions of such failure are central to problematising the social circumstances in which their narratives are produced.

Shalimar the Clown and the Politics of “Worlding” the Kashmir Conflict

This article analyzes Salman Rushdie’s novel Shalimar the Clown and argues that while Rushdie’s strategies of “worlding” produce a compelling “political elegy” (Mondal 31) of Kashmir and powerfully confront post-9/11 Islamophobia across the world, the problem lies in Shalimar’s memorializing Kashmir as a tragic story of loss and violence. This elides the many ongoing, complex, stories of Kashmir – stories of conflict and suffering, but also people’s struggles to survive, to rebuild, to heal homes and communities.

Loyalist Tattoos and Tattooed Generals in the Song Dynasty

According to Yue Fei’s biography, when the legendary general was slandered and interrogated for treason, he tore the shirt off his body, exposing four characters tattooed on his back: “Exhaust one’s loyalty in service of the state.” This study looks at two components of the Yue Fei story—patriotic tattoos, and tattooed generals—and examines their meaning in the broader stretch of Song dynasty history. Yue Fei was not the Song dynasty’s only tattooed general who came to a tragic end. The Northern Song’s Di Qing was a tattooed soldier whose military merit allowed him to rise to the highest levels of power in the empire. Di Qing’s story makes it clear that tattooed generals were objects of suspicion and ridicule at court due to their military tattoos, a trait that linked them to the criminals and lower class men that manned the Song armies. Though military tattoos sometimes had a loyalist ring to them, they were carried out on a mass scale, and were a characteristic of coercion rather than fervent loyalism. This study shows that underneath the nationalist historical narrative of the Song dynasty, of which Yue Fei is a famous example, there lies a different story of social conflict within the Song state. Rather than a story of Chinese fighting non-Chinese and of traitorous and cowardly officials struggling with loyal patriots, this study offers a narrative of a social conflict between high-born clear-skinned officials and low-born tattooed military men.