Power Of Stories Research Articles

Art Technology Integration: Digital Storytellying as a Transformative Pedagogy in Primary Education

AbstractThe emergence of new media provides new tools for promoting critical thinking and creativity in an environment that encourages collaboration, co‐authoring and sharing ideas and artworks with audiences. Embedding new media in art lessons and integrating art with other disciplines not only promotes visual competence but also transversal competences necessary for the future lives of children. Despite the many benefits that this process entails, there is still no broad integration of new media in art lessons or art integration through technology in primary schools, as teachers are often oblivious of the new possibilities and means of engaging children. However, there is a need to embrace today’s dominant culture of communication if we really want to prepare children for the future. This article is about art technology integration in the primary classroom. It discusses ways of studying important real‐life issues with children and of bridging the gap between school life and daily life. It reports on two case studies with sixth grade classes (11–12 years old) that engaged in a stop motion animation project to communicate messages that were important to the children. Children shared powerful stories, anchored in real‐life contexts and developed critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity skills. The findings contribute to the discussions about arts integration that are grounded in empirical qualitative data. The implications of the study move beyond the art subject itself and highlight how generalist teachers can embrace interdisciplinarity and art integration, and view art as transformative pedagogy in the curriculum.

What About Me? Theorizing Power and Pushback in Advancing Marginalized Identities

In 2012, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) received an NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant to improve the career advancement of women. The National Technical Institute for the Deaf, one of RIT’s colleges, had over 30 Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) female faculty members. The project designated a DHH female faculty team with a budget to conduct a self-directed program of development and networking: the DHH Women’s Connectivity Series. Starting in 2014, other faculty began to request access to these sessions - hearing male and female faculty, DHH male faculty, and faculty of color. They argued that they too experienced marginalization due to issues of gender, race, ethnicity and hearing loss. This article summarizes the Connectivity Series’ story of power, privilege, and pushback. How do DHH women successfully negotiate careers in academia, given the impact of intersectional minority identities (disability, gender, etc.)?

Reading ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’ amongst the Barabaig Tribe of Eastern Tanzania

The Barabaig peoples are vulnerable economic and ecological refugees pushed to the furthest corner of the Bosutu Plains of Eastern Tanzania to eke out a subsistence existence amidst encroaching capital and globalizing forces. In many ways, the Barabaig face struggles similar to those encountered by the tribals in Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha.” In this essay, I offer my own ethnographic research to survey the anguish of the Barabaig peoples who try to hold onto their cultural traditions and ways of life in a world geared towards globalized progress. In so doing, I demonstrate how the construction of tribal songs and mythohistories challenge global dynamics and renegotiate gendered positions within dominantly indigenous patriarchal contested spaces. These powerful stories and songs reflect how indigenous mothers imagine and control their own gendered history and preserve their cultural identity and traditional livelihood.

Narrative stories in Chinese characters: political framing of ageing and welfare reform in China

ABSTRACTThis article analyses narrative stories used by the Chinese government to connect the problem of population ageing to welfare reform. The findings derived from semi-structural interviews and key policy documents suggest the unfolding of the narrative stories of power and stories of rising and stories of decline. The narrative stories in the developmental Chinese welfare state are diverse and stem from different processes than those for the mature European welfare states. The Narrative stories also vary for different policy areas. For inequality and health-care policies, under the master narrative of story of power, state depicts ‘stories of giving-to-give’ to support expansion in the traditional ‘old risk’ type of policies to main population, including the elderly. For long-term care, the power narrative of ’giving-to-shape’ legitimizes the expansionary reforms for a small group of deserving frail elderly. Behind this political framing of long-term care reform lies the story of decline that justifies the modest role of state provision in the organization of long-term care and leaves the responsibility for economic, social and spiritual wellbeing for the society itself. The story of decline in China also gravitates around sustainability of societies rather than around financial sustainability commonly underlining the political debate in the West.

The story of the camera, a case study of an art therapy large group

This article presents a research-based case study on the Art Therapy Large Group on a MA training in Art Psychotherapy, a group that has a similar role to the large group in a therapeutic community. The group situates itself between a large verbal group, an art therapy group and performance art. Photographs, taken as part of the research by staff and students during four consecutive sessions of the group, are presented and related to: a written narrative of the group, to a staff recorded discussion and to notes from a student focus group. The method is an iterative process, moving between the verbal and visual that parallels the process of the group itself. The group revolves around responses to the camera, telling a story of power, gender and desire. The findings are three-fold: firstly, that art making and performance are thinking process in themselves and containing of affect; secondly, questions are raised about the nature of dialogue in group analytically based large groups which is here extended to include the material and the physical; lastly, dominant thinking on educational methods is questioned.

79 “We all have stories to tell”: A qualitative exploration of the healthcare experiences of a community sample of pregnant and parenting youth through digital storytelling

Pregnant and parenting youth (PPY) engage in healthcare two-fold, for themselves and as the gatekeepers of their children’s health. That said, their healthcare engagement has historically been suboptimal and little is known about their perceptions of health and healthcare. Our objectives were: 1) To engage PPY and support the articulation of thoughts, feelings and experiences through digital storytelling; 2) To examine a group of PPY’s digital health narratives; and 3) To explore PPY’s experiences of the digital storytelling process. During two workshop sessions, 19 participants created, produced, and edited their own 1–4 minute short films about any aspect of health. Participants were young mothers (aged 16–20 years), accessing services at a non-profit organization that serves adolescent mothers and their children. The 2.5-day story-making process comprised individual and group work, story circles, discussions, and screenings. Data was collected through pre-and-post workshop surveys, field observations, and two semi-structured focus group discussions. Focus group sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim for analysis. The digital stories themselves were analyzed thematically. Two participants were pregnant at the time of the study, while the remainder (n=17/19) had at least one child. Most young women relied on social assistance as one of their main financial supports (n=17/19), and all of the participants disclosed a past or current history of treatment for a mental health condition (Anxiety, Depression, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Learning Disorder, Eating Disorder). Focus group findings revealed that participants found the digital storytelling process empowering; they were proud of their resulting films and several described the process as therapeutic. While each story was unique and often a number of different themes emerged from each video, thematic analysis of narrative content revealed similarities across stories. Videos highlighted the following narrative threads: resilience, change, and the capacity to overcome obstacles (n=16); motherhood as a source of strength and hope (n=15); mental health (n=10); healthcare engagement in clinical settings (n=8); and past abuse and trauma (n=5). The complex and multifaceted health-related issues discussed in the videos contribute vital context to the gap in the literature regarding PPY experience with health and healthcare. The digital stories add authentic youth voice and have the potential to inform youth-driven health policy and practice changes. The process of combining technology with the voices of this underrepresented population was powerful and digital stories add a very personal lens to young motherhood.

Railroads, Power, and Technological Stories in California

Railroads, Power, and Technological Stories in California

Luminous Road

Luminous Road Speer Morgan Surrealism is often associated with an absurdist worldview and the gloomier aspects of the larger movement of existentialism. Yet André Breton’s defining 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism is playful and hopeful in tone about the power of the human mind and art. Breton uses the word “luminous” twice in the manifesto, first by imagining himself to be living in or visiting the “romantic ruins” of a castle on the outskirts of Paris, a place occupied and enjoyed by the artists, writers, and philosophers he feels blessed to know, who reach that castle by means of a “luminous road.” He recognizes that this is just a fantasy but asks rhetorically “why not” imagine that one might live in such a place. In the second passage he refers to the “luminous phenomenon” of how the mind works and how the spark between two ideas—the association of ideas—can lead to beauty and meaning. In Breton’s thinking and in the larger movement, surrealist ideas arose from new views about both the conscious and the unconscious aspects of the mind and its creative potential. Elements of the surreal find their way into almost every phase of literature in the last century, including modernism, existentialism, Beat writing, and postmodernism. Recently I have noticed an upsurge of belief in the power of the unexpected and the unconscious and of somehow finding new realities through the larger engagement of the whole mind. The surrealist idea of taking elements out of their usual contexts and associations—whether they be persons or settings or objects—is a simplified and resilient model of the broad subject of creativity itself, whether in the arts or sciences. Surrealism believes in the power of the [End Page 5] unconscious or attendant mind and of finding new realities within the dream. Pocket watches don’t hang from trees or have liquid properties, yet such an image may be, in some unpredictable way, exactly what inspires a poet or a scientist toward an important new idea or solution. Over the past century, the practical arts have made widespread use of surreal and expressionist methods. This issue’s Curio Cabinet, “Stage Pictures: Jo Mielziner and the Art of Set Design,” opens with a detailed note from Tennessee Williams regarding the set for his new play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, to open on Broadway in 1955. Williams and Mielziner had previously worked together on A Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Mielziner’s minimalist approach emphasized one or two key images within the play, which perfectly expressed Williams’s lyrical realism. Yet the playwright encouraged Mielziner to push the designs for Cat into the realm of the metaphysical, asking that Maggie and Brick’s bedroom be “roofed by sky” to suggest the mystery of the cosmos. Williams also provided the designer with detailed notes on the huge console—the combination radio, phonograph, and liquor cabinet—that dominates the room as an objective correlative for “all the comforts and illusions behind which we hide,” with the overarching cosmos as a powerful commentary on those illusions. Mielziner’s sketches from the archive at the New York Public Library of Performing Arts demonstrate his skillful interpretation of Williams’s requests. They also show an expressive talent that sustained a fifty-year career and helped transform set design from craft to art. Cat Powell’s powerful story “Manifold Northeast Life and Trust” is about an isolated middle-aged widower working for a once thriving insurance company now in such decline that its multistory office building is scarcely occupied. In his isolation, he notices fantastical changes in his workplace. A pond appears in one of the offices, fish populate it, and then a forest starts to grow. He does less and less of his regular work and more and more tending of the forest and dismantling the offices to make room for it. Later, ghostly shades of dead former colleagues start to appear and populate the building, going about the business of work and interacting with each other. The narrator seems to have made the transition from the necessary labor of supporting self and family in the real world to tending a...

Lawrence VenutiContra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic

thank Janet Hong, whose translation so beautifully captures this tension. Of the ten stories included in the collection , three are speculative (“Waxen Wings,” “Nightmare,” “The Woman Next Door”) while the other seven explore how characters can be haunted even when there’s nothing supernatural about their situation. Taken together, these stories provoke a kind of existential dread that is at once terrifying and familiar. It’s unclear in “Waxen Wings” whether or not the narrator is haunted by an actual ghost of her past self or just a figment of her imagination, but ultimately all that matters is that her efforts to fly have resulted in her disfigurement, reflected in the text’s deadpan style. “Nightmare,” however , explores the nature of memory in the face of violence, with dead bodies appearing and disappearing, until one can’t tell reality from a horrifying dream. In “The Woman Next Door,” one of the collection’s most powerful and disturbing stories, a timid, lonely woman who is ignored by her husband and son befriends a new neighbor. Before her (and the reader’s) very eyes, that neighbor slowly takes over her life, starting with a borrowed spatula. Once again, memory gaps and disorientation turn a seemingly normal life into a nightmare. Ha deftly and relentlessly depicts the neighbor metaphorically sucking the life out of the lonely woman. The unbridgeable gap between men and women and their inability to escape the claustrophobic space of the city informs both “Your Rearview Mirror” and “Onion.” Each of these stories ends with an unlikely couple attempting to flee their respective pasts and getting into horrific traffic accidents. The sights, sounds, and especially smells of the city are heightened in Ha’s text: the same billboard ad shows up in two different stories, while the almost tangible stench of rotting garbage emanates from “Flowers of Mold,” “Toothpaste,” and “Early Beans.” Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal comes to mind, both because of the similarly jarring titles (“Flowers of Mold” and The Flowers of Evil) and because Baudelaire too used a sophisticated literary style to discuss, for instance, roadkill, haunting shadows, and a city’s spiritual and physical decay. Flowers of Mold offers readers an alternative perspective on city life, relationships, and ambition; and while it may be dark and unrelenting, it is also hauntingly lyrical. Rachel S. Cordasco Madison, Wisconsin Lawrence Venuti Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2019. 216 pages. Lawrence Venuti is the lightning rod of translation studies. Among his most enduring contributions to the field is his claim that publishers “domesticate” translated works by expecting translators to strip them of their inherent otherness in order to make them more palatable to American audiences . What’s his remedy for the book industry that, among its many faults, renders translators invisible? “Foreignizing” translations, i.e., retaining of foreign names, diction, syntax, etc.—anything that made the foreign text appealing in the first place. Given the rise of so-called world literature, a bland mush of worn-out plots and stock characters , it’s hard not to agree with him. In his latest upending of entrenched thinking about translation as a practice whose final product is often judged as “faithful” or “unfaithful,” Venuti aims his polemic at instrumentalism, a mode of translation that conceives of it “as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant that is contained in or caused by the source text, an invariant form, meaning, or effect.” In its place, Venuti proposes an alternative model, which he calls hermeneutic. In arguing for translation to become an interpretive act that is both linguistic and cultural, Venuti reminds us that every translator applies, often “intuitively and without critical reflection ,” formal and thematic “interpreters” to the source-text. “The application of interpretants ,” according to the Temple University professor, “guarantees that a translation is relatively autonomous from its source text even while establishing a variety of interpretive relations to that text.” Tracing the origins of the instrumental mode to the Romans and providing examples from more than a half-dozen languages and cultures, including Arabic, German, Greek, and Spanish, Venuti argues that instrumentalism “grossly oversimplifies translation practice, fostering an illusion of immediate access to...

From the Editor

From the Editor John Nieto-Phillips (bio) This issue of Chiricú Journal is unique from its predecessors; it is the first that is not limited to a particular theme. Our first six issues centered, sequentially, on cinema, language, folklore, literature, spatiality, and race. For this number, however, we announced an open call for material covering any aspect of Latinx lived experience, and the response (in terms of submissions) was overwhelming. We received scores of scholarly and creative works that spoke to the exquisite complexity of Latinx lives. From these, we reviewed and selected pieces that, while not directed toward a predetermined theme, do provide a lens into Latinx conditions and identities, as expressed through music, literature, testimonio, and the visual arts. The result is a collection of scholarship and creative production that illuminates the vast and varied topography of our Latinx América. Contained in this issue are scholarly contributions by Daniel Arbino, Laura Elena Belmonte, and Shane D. Hall that, collectively, speak to the power of literature to reveal strategies of survival, resistance, and self-acceptance in the face of colonial, physical and rhetorical violence, and environmental degradation. Articles by Ande Davis and Steven Osuna suggest ways that film and music can help us imagine a future beyond the confines of neoliberal ideologies and state-sanctioned violence. Laís Lara Vanin's moving essay and Mauricio Ramírez's interview of the muralist Juana Alicia render powerful stories of migration and adaptation and political agency. In the Creative Works section, guest editor Alfredo Franco has assembled a magnificent collection of contributions by both established and emerging artists, poets, and prose writers. The stunning artwork of Maria Lau and poignant essay by Eileen Sosin Martínez provide snapshots of a contemporary Cuban landscape imbued with vibrancy and nostalgia. We also are treated to: an inventive set of five poems by Randy John Koch inspired by historical personages and epochs; the abstract digital creations of Argentine artist Rosana Fernández; a fascinating interplay (by way of a blog) between the Puerto Rican poet and scholar Margarita Pintado and the late Cuban poet and novelist Lorenzo García Vega; the spare and potent verses of Brazilian poet and editor Francisco dos Santos; an ingenious reflection, "15 Ways of Looking at a Latina," by Cuban American poet Michelle Lizet Flores; and, not least, a heartbreaking short story, "Katy Kola," by the Peruvian American writer Sara Márquez Durst. The many voices in this creative [End Page 1] section offer readers new frames for comprehending the diversity and complexity of Latinx lived experiences spanning time, distance, languages, and cultures. [End Page 2] John Nieto-Phillips John Nieto-Phillips is Associate Professor of History and Latino Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he also is Vice Provost for Diversity & Inclusion. The author of The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity, 1880s-1930s (UNM Press, 2004), he is the founding editor of Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures (Indiana University Press). Copyright © 2019 Trustees of Indiana University

August Isle by Ali Standish

Reviewed by: August Isle by Ali Standish Natalie Berglind Standish, Ali August Isle. Harper, 2019 [352p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-243341-1 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-243343-5 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-6 August Isle seems like the perfect place to spend a summer, and it would be if twelve-year-old Miranda wasn't stuck there while her ever-distant mother travels away on yet another photography trip. Miranda has to stay with Aunt Clare (actually Mom's friend) and her daughter Sameera; something's fishy about Mom's deliberate obfuscation of her youth at August Isle, so Miranda and Sameera resort to sleuthing to solve Mom's big secret. Things escalate after Miranda breaks into a supposedly deserted house and has to transcribe stories from an retired world-traveler as penance, and one of his stories—a tragic one—may hold the key to Mom's evasiveness and detachment. Standish loads her prose with well-written turns of phrase that realistically relay Miranda's emotions. The kids' summery adventures, from sailing lessons to pie-baking contests, necessarily provide some relief for readers before the tragic secret is revealed. Furthermore, identity crises thematically linger with each character, as Sameera juggles being not Indian enough for her family and not American enough for her friends, Miranda learns to improve herself for her sake and not her mother's, and adults shape themselves around past traumas. Though Miranda's mother's excuse for bad parenting is flimsy and some of the characters could be more fleshed out, Standish still constructs a subtly powerful story about acknowledging the past while defining oneself outside of it. NB [End Page 360] Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Maternal Pain in Miracle Scenes as a Part of Catholic Propaganda in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period

This paper analyses the iconography of the scenes of pain of non-Biblical mothers for their deceased children, which was used as one of the mechanisms of Catholic propaganda in the struggle against the Schism and infidels and exercised through sermons and propagation of the faith in the power of the Eucharist. Local examples (from Split, Dubrovnik and Kotor) are examined in a broader European context. Firstly, an example from the cathedral of Split is analysed. The Miracle in the fiery furnace (better known as The Miracle of the Jewish boy of Bourges) was painted around 1635-1640 by the Venetian painter Matteo Ponzone as a part of a larger cycle composed of ten canvases, which is now placed above the main altar. It is a depiction of a medieval legend, which can be encountered in the collections of Exempla, didactic tales for use in sermons, and has thus had several literary and visual interpretations which are analysed in this paper. The second example refers to the miracles of Saint Vincent Ferrer. While preparing for canonization, Pietro Ranzano of Palermo wrote the vita of Vincent Ferrer, (in which) the centerpiece of which is occupied by two consecutive and psychologically powerful stories. The first story deals with a mother who had killed, chopped-up and cooked her own child (a version of the story of Mary of Bethezuba by Flavius Jospehus), thereby appalling the child's father upon his return from Ferrer's sermon. The topic of the second miracle is a grieving mother who is carrying her dead child in her arms and seeking help from Ferrer. In both cases the powerful Dominican preacher has restored the children to life. Their stories became instantly popular and received their iconographic expression with an explicit depiction of parental pain.

A Yolŋu ‘Bothways’ approach to English and Warramiri literacy at Gäwa

AbstractIn the famous Djuranydjura story from North-East Arnhem Land, when the visiting ‘Macassan’ offers the Yolŋu ancestral dog rice, shoes and blankets, he rejects them all, in favour of his own land and resources. At Gäwa homeland on Elcho Island, this powerful story is reinterpreted to include the arrival ofbalanda(white) teachers, and their focus on English literacy. However, it is not that English literacy is devalued, but that it must maintain its proper place; negotiated to sit alongside the foundational literacy of the land, and Warramiri language itself. An approach of applying such a ‘Bothways’ pedagogy through utilising the ‘Accelerated Literacy’ methodology forbothlanguages and cultures is outlined to demonstrate that strengthened identity is attainable when the community moves together.

Forced Entanglements: Stories of Expulsion, Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Abstract This article explores the contemporary practice of forced detainment and expulsion in Switzerland from two distinct perspectives: the 1995 law on coercive measures that first introduced the practice in Switzerland, as well as the cultural context that led to its constitution, and the documentary Le vol spécial by Fernand Melgar, made some fifteen years after the law was first introduced, which records the law’s consequences for the daily lives of rejected asylum seekers awaiting expulsion. Using Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical work on the states of exception and bare life, I seek to uncover what I call the narrative of expulsion, arguing that narrative politics operates on a number of interrelated levels not only to shape the context and practice of forced expulsion that undergird the asylum politics in Switzerland, and other countries, today, but ultimately also to change the post-enlightenment narrative of the political subject and challenge the efficacy of the Human Rights regime the world over.

New books & media

MarsSection:ChooseTop of pageMars <<Salam: The First ****** N...Baby Loves Gravity!CITING ARTICLES Mars, National Geographic Channel, Imagine Entertainment, RadicalMedia, and Zak Productions, 2018 (2nd season) Ron Howard (Apollo 13, From the Earth to the Moon) is back in the producer’s chair for the second season of Mars, an innovative combination of fiction and fact. The series tells the story of scientists sent to Mars in the 2030s with the goal of creating functioning human colonies. The second season opens with the arrival of the Lukrum Corporation, a mining company whose profit-first approach quickly aggravates the scientists. The fictional scenes are interspersed with real news footage and interviews in which figures such as NASA scientist Tom Wagner offer their perspectives on issues like the long-term effects of life in space. The documentary material is thought provoking and well edited, but it tends to disrupt the fictional narrative—and the story lines too often rely on miscommunications and quotidian personal drama rather than on more interesting challenges of life on Mars. However, science fiction fans interested in space colonization will find much to appreciate in this exploration of what the first Martian colony might be like. The second season premieres on 12 November 2018 at 9:00pm EST. —mb Salam: The First ****** Nobel LaureateSection:ChooseTop of pageMarsSalam: The First ****** N... <<Baby Loves Gravity!CITING ARTICLES Salam: The First ****** Nobel Laureate, Anand Kamalakar, Kailoola Productions, 2017 This new documentary from director Anand Kamalakar and producers Omar Vandal and Zakir Thaver tells the powerful story of Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam (1926–96), who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on electroweak unification. On his gravestone in Rabwah, Salam, a member of the minority Ahmadi sect, was initially honored as “the first Muslim Nobel laureate,” but a local magistrate had “Muslim” painted over—a stark reminder that a Pakistani law declared the Ahmadi heretical in 1974. Salam found that law personally devastating and spent the remainder of his life in exile in the UK. The film combines historical footage with recent interviews to tell Salam’s story. It honors his brilliant science and the struggles he faced as an Ahmadi, but it also does not shy away from his flaws, including his impatient personality. Salam promises to call more attention to a remarkable historical figure. For more information, visit www.salamthefilm.com. —mb BART MOLENDIJK, CC BY-SA 3.0 NLPPT|High resolution Baby Loves Gravity!Section:ChooseTop of pageMarsSalam: The First ****** N...Baby Loves Gravity! <<CITING ARTICLES Baby Loves Gravity!, Ruth Spiro, Irene Chan (illustrator), Charlesbridge Publishing, 2018, $8.99 This colorful board book, the latest in the Baby Loves Science series, opens with a baby dropping food from his tray. From there, author Ruth Spiro and illustrator Irene Chan show how gravity’s pull affects Earth’s movement around the Sun and a ride on a slide at the park. The simple text and engaging art are perfect for toddlers and early readers. —mb © 2018 American Institute of Physics.

The Narrative Policy Framework, Agendas, and Sanctuary Cities: The Construction of a Public Problem

In this paper, we utilize narratives about sanctuary cities as an exploratory case study to suggest further development of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). We propose the inclusion of elements from the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA)—the ideas of focusing events, evidence, policy entrepreneurs, timing, policy windows—and the general agenda setting literature's concept of translation of narratives among different policy agendas to extend the NPF in theoretically meaningful ways. Then we use these ideas in an exploration of recent narratives about sanctuary cities in order to increase understanding of the role of policy narratives and agenda setting within public policy processes. Our exploratory questions and findings demonstrate the usefulness of adding elements of the MSA to the NPF. First, we suggest that an emotionally powerful story can create a formidable focusing event which can be used by policy entrepreneurs, even if the construction of the event is dominated by one media outlet. Second, our preliminary results show that studying narrative policy windows provides a methodological challenge; it is difficult to determine how long a policy narrative remains powerful and relevant. Finally, our findings reveal both similarities and differences of narratives between different policy agendas.

DFTB go to the Harbour

This week the DFTB team have been invited to run a conference within a conference in Sydney. Resus @ the Harbour is a multidisciplinary resuscitation conference combining powerful patient stories with cutting edge care – just the sort of thing we love at DFTB. What can a disparate group of paediatric professionals teach you. Here… Read More »DFTB go to the Harbour

The Time Is Now: Pressure, Guerrilla, and the (Re)invention of Black British Cinema and History

James Williams considers how and why John Ridley's acclaimed 2017 television series Guerrilla (Sky Atlantic/Showtime) 'reradicalizes' early black British radical cinema, specifically Horace Ové's 1975 film, Pressure, the first feature-length work by a black British director. For Guerrilla's fictional narrative about a Black Power terrorist cell in London in 1972 pursues an option that Pressure, about the gradual radicalization of a young black British teenager in West London, resolutely avoids, namely militant violence. A close comparative study of both works in terms of characterization, cinematic style, the depiction of urban space, and the representation of violence highlights the originality and overlooked significance of Ové's pioneering film. It also suggests that Ridley reinvents the story of Black Power in early 1970s Britain in order to intervene in more contemporary debates taking place in the US about diversity and the function of revolutionary violence to effect social change.

Edna’s “Moments of Being” and “Wild Zone” of Female Sexuality: A Gynocritical Study of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

This paper studies Kate Chopin’s reinterpretation of female sexuality and personal autonomy in The Awakening through the lens of Elaine Showalter’s Gynocriticism. It argues that Edna’s struggle with the traditional idea of female sexual abstention, self-sacrifice, and silence symbolizes her insatiable desire to redefine female identity. The articulation of her overt sexuality in the novella offers a new gateway of understanding a ‘female self ’. Edna’s physical autonomy awakens her to a subversive, compelling, dynamic and liberating “wild” female self within. Edna in her journey into the untamed zone of sexuality through “moments of being” catches a glimpse of the forbidden trajectory of self-knowledge. She yearns to reach her selfhood through these utterly individual moments of awareness, intense power, beauty and personal significance. The unfolding of her female interiority reveals a strong connection between wildness of female eros and creativity. Chopin identifies this so called evil, unrestraint sexuality as an elixir of woman empowerment. Edna’s wandering into her sexual wilderness embodies a new female archetype who writes her own story of resistance and power through her body. Edna’s gradual alienation from androcentric idea of chastity, marriage, motherhood, her celebration of female body, and the final rejection of ‘happy-ever-after reality’ evoke a volcanic eruption of a new femininity in the female literary tradition.

Toward tribalography: rewriting the three sisters’ story in Shell Shaker

Despite the fact that Native American history has long been masked and manipulated by the official record and the voice of the indigenous people might as well be distant and dismal, a close and careful listener can hardly miss the strong and emphatic pulse hidden in the massive silence. In fact, Native Americans have never stopped recording their own histories, yet, in a form that might seem foreign to the historiographer—storytelling. This paper attempts to argue that contemporary Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe not only tells a powerful story in her Shell Shaker, but also interweaves a detailed story of her characters with told myth and received history. At the same time, Shell Shaker sets up an example of tribalography for both native and non-native readers. In the book, Howe writes a story which originates from the ancient myth to make a modern form, and thereby anticipates and creates abundance for the future. In the light of her own theory of tribalography, Howe’s Shell Shaker can be seen as, first and foremost, an attempt of rewriting the archetypal Three Sisters’ story.