Unfamiliar Terrain Research Articles

In a sea of bitterness: refugees during the Sino-Japanese War

The Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937 led some thirty million Chinese to flee their homes in terror, and live--in the words of artist and writer Feng Zikai--in a sea of bitterness as refugees. Keith Schoppa paints a comprehensive picture of the refugee experience in one province--Zhejiang, on the central Chinese coast--where the Japanese launched major early offensives as well as notorious later campaigns. He recounts stories of both heroes and villains, of choices poorly made amid war's bewildering violence, of risks bravely taken despite an almost palpable quaking fear. As they traveled south into China's interior, refugees stepped backward in time, sometimes as far as the nineteenth century, their journeys revealing the superficiality of China's modernization. Memoirs and oral histories allow Schoppa to follow the footsteps of the young and old, elite and non-elite, as they fled through unfamiliar terrain and coped with unimaginable physical and psychological difficulties. Within the context of Chinese culture, being forced to leave home was profoundly threatening to one's sense of identity. Not just people but whole institutions also fled from Japanese occupation, and Schoppa considers schools, governments, and businesses as refugees with narratives of their own. Local governments responded variously to Japanese attacks, from enacting scorched-earth policies to offering rewards for the capture of plague-infected rats in the aftermath of germ warfare. While at times these official procedures improved the situation for refugees, more often--as Schoppa describes in moving detail--they only deepened the tragedy.

The Color of Change in Continental Feminist Philosophy

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) was the first philosophy conference I attended along with my graduate peers. I gave thanks to the universe that at least everyone dressed better than what I had seen at the American Philosophical Association (APA) as a terrified undergraduate guest during a hire—and that the maleness of the philosophical milieu called the APA would recede for a few days. As silly as these two factors may sound in engendering an increased comfort level with philosophical spaces, it really made a difference. There was a uniform that appeared to pervade the philosophical milieu against which my presence in fashion, comportment, and body fell short. It was at SPEP that I found myself able to take up becoming a philosopher; it was among the feminist here that I could begin to think and take up the question of race. For me, it was always easier to talk about race among the Continental feminists than in the larger population of SPEP. But it was also during this time, as it seems to me now, that race as a relevant and important philosophical topic was beginning to flourish in Continental circles, and thus SPEP as a whole appeared much less hostile than the APA venue, though not wholly without hostility to the exploration of race. The Color of Change in Continental Feminist Philosophy

Transnational Connections: Special Issue Introduction

Transnational ConnectionsSpecial Issue Introduction Nathan Perl-Rosenthal and Evan Haefeli Every century, on the anniversary of Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage to the New World, New York remembers its Dutch connection. In 1809 the members of the newly incorporated New-York Historical Society enjoyed a commemorative speech followed by a banquet; the first number of the society’s Collections, issued two years later, reprinted Hudson’s journals of his voyages.1 For the 1909 tercentenary, New York State established a special commission to organize the festivities. Its final report, which ran to an astounding two thousand pages, detailed events ranging from an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to a program of “aquatic sports.” Most of the events hewed closely to the commemoration’s overall narrative, which depicted the active Dutch role in American history as ending in the mid-seventeenth century.2 [End Page 227] Led by New York City’s annual Five Dutch Days program, the state again celebrated its links to the Low Countries in 2009. Yet the quadricentennial differed markedly from the earlier anniversaries. Instead of focusing on the Dutch presence in early New York, the 2009 celebration looked more broadly at the Netherlands and its links with the United States—ranging from tastings of modern Asian-inflected Dutch cuisine to performances by avant-garde Dutch theater and dance companies.3 This shift from commemorating the local to invoking the global corresponded to the fading influence of old-line Dutch families in New York society as well as to the growing cachet that Dutch companies and cities (especially Amsterdam) have in the United States.4 But the shift also reflects the way in which the globalization of the 1990s and early 2000s drew the attention of scholars and the general public to the United States’ deep ties with the wider world. The 2009 conference at Columbia University at which versions of the papers in this special issue were first presented, entitled Cities in Revolt: The Dutch-American Atlantic, ca. 1650–1815, reflected the distinctively international and global spirit of the Hudson quadricentennial. For early Americanists, work on the Dutch has long been associated primarily with the regional history of the mid-Atlantic, where several thousand Dutch colonists remained after the United Provinces ceded its territorial claims to England in 1674.5 Rather than look again at this well-known group and its legacy, Cities [End Page 228] in Revolt explored an equally important and comparatively little-studied aspect of the Dutch role in early American history: the extensive, fruitful links that colonial North America and the early United States developed with the Dutch Republic and its Atlantic colonies from roughly 1680 to 1815. To tackle this topic, the conference moved outside the disciplinary bounds of early American history: roughly half of the participants were scholars specializing in the history of the Netherlands and its Atlantic empire. One goal of this special issue, “Anglo-Dutch Revolutions,” is to share with early Americanists some of the new research on Dutch-American connections that came out of the 2009 conference. The papers we have chosen to present here focus on the first age of revolutions, circa 1760–1815, a period during which the web of exchanges between North America and the Dutch Atlantic played an especially important role in transforming the political and economic life of each region. We also selected the papers with the aim of introducing early Americanists to particularly relevant work by Europeanists working on related topics. The majority of the essays in this issue are the work of historians of the Dutch Republic and empire based in Europe. They include the first English-language publications by two authors and a first publication in an early Americanist venue for a third. To introduce these papers, which necessarily engage with the complex and relatively unfamiliar terrain of Dutch history, we offer an orientation to the history and historiography of the Dutch Atlantic empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second and broader aim of this special issue is to help develop approaches to writing the transnational history of eighteenth-century America in the Atlantic world. In the second part of the introduction, we propose...

Ants’ searching behaviour can be biased by recent experience of familiar scenes: a newly observed interaction between innate strategies and learnt information

Event Abstract Back to Event Ants’ searching behaviour can be biased by recent experience of familiar scenes: a newly observed interaction between innate strategies and learnt information Antoine Wystrach1, 2* 1 University of Sussex, Life Sciences, United Kingdom 2 Macquarie University, Biological sciences, Australia Ants can use multiple sources of information to navigate, but do not seem to integrate all this information into a unified representation of the world. Rather, the available information appears to serve three distinct navigational systems: Path Integration, systematic search and the use of learnt information, mainly vision. There is a strong tradition of interpreting ant behaviour as resulting from simple interactions between these independent strategies. However, here we report on a newly observed behaviour which suggests a sophisticated interaction between the components of an ant’s navigational toolkit. We enclosed an ant nest so that the only foraging location was along a narrow 8m “road” to a permanently stocked feeder. Returning ants could be captured at precise locations, so that we had control of the current state of their path integration system, i.e. how far did the ants think they were away from the nest. These ants were then released on an unfamiliar test ground, where there initial headings were recorded. Ants captured close to the nest, so that they had run-off their path integrated vector, did not show the undirected headings we would expect of ants entering into a systematic search. Instead, these ants backtracked in the direction they had just travelled. Interestingly, ants that ran off their Path Integrated vector by being forced to run the first 4m of the route twice, did show undirected headings characteristic of systematic search. Therefore, we see that only ants that have recently seen the familiar visual surrounds close to the nest, will backtrack when placed in unfamiliar terrain. The ecological function of such behaviour is clear, as it increases their chance of returning to familiar terrain. What is interesting is that the decision-making process requires sophisticated interactions between navigational systems. It involves the compass system modulating the initial direction of the search when in unfamiliar terrain on the basis of the recently experienced familiar view. This raises fundamental questions about the cognitive architectures underlying ant navigation. Acknowledgements I thank Sebastian Schwarz, Alice Baniel, Ken Cheng and Paul Graham for constructive discussions and help on the field. Keywords: insect navigation, path integration, Searching behaviour, sensory integration, Visual memories Conference: Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology, College Park. Maryland USA, United States, 5 Aug - 10 Aug, 2012. Presentation Type: Poster (but consider for Participant Symposium) Topic: Orientation and Navigation Citation: Wystrach A (2012). Ants’ searching behaviour can be biased by recent experience of familiar scenes: a newly observed interaction between innate strategies and learnt information. Conference Abstract: Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnbeh.2012.27.00185 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 28 Apr 2012; Published Online: 07 Jul 2012. * Correspondence: Dr. Antoine Wystrach, University of Sussex, Life Sciences, Brighton, United Kingdom, antoine.wystrach@univ-tlse3.fr Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Antoine Wystrach Google Antoine Wystrach Google Scholar Antoine Wystrach PubMed Antoine Wystrach Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Mathematical analysis of the navigational process in homing pigeons

In a novel approach based on the principles of dynamic systems theory, we analyzed the tracks of pigeons recorded with the help of miniaturized GPS recorders. Using the method of time lag embedding, we calculated the largest Lyapunov exponent to determine the system’s predictability and the correlation dimension to estimate the number of factors involved. A low Lyapunov exponent around 0.02, which proved to be rather constant over all calculations, indicates that the navigational process is almost deterministic. In the distribution of the correlation dimension estimates we found three distinctive peaks, at 3.3, 3.7 and 4.2, indicating that avian navigation is a complex multi-dimensional process, involving at least four or five independent factors. Additional factors, as indicated by an increase in the correlation dimension, seem to be included as the pigeons approach their home loft. This increase in correlation dimension and its fractal nature suggest that the various navigational factors can be included as required and weighted independently. Neither the correlation dimension nor the Lyapunov exponent is affected by increasing familiarity of the pigeons with the terrain. This suggests that the navigational strategy is stable with the same process controlling the flight across familiar as well as unfamiliar terrain.

Black Women in Interracial Relationships: In Search of Love and Solace

According to the most recent U.S. census, twice as many black men are involved in interracial relationships as black women. Do black women consciously resist such involvement? What motivates the relatively few women who are in these types of relationships? And how do they navigate the unfamiliar terrain in intimacy? One of the most popular explanations for black women's involvement in interracial intimacy is the unavailability of eligible black men. This explanation focuses on the dismal statistics popularly discussed in reports that forecast lonely futures for African American females. Craig-Henderson explores another, more provocative explanation. She argues that some black women may disassociate from larger social stereotypes by consciously and strategically making choices that distance them from what is considered characteristic of the typical African American woman. Scant serious attention has focused upon intimate interracial relationships, perhaps because of a general reluctance to deal with two extremely provocative issues: race and sex. As rates of interracial relationships continue to increase, discussions about interracial intimacy are relevant and timely. Craig-Henderson considers the continuing taboo of interracial relationships involving African Americans, the way this taboo is changing, and the way that contemporary race relations perpetuate longstanding stereotypes about race and sex. The book includes in-depth, unstructured interviews with a wide range of black women currently involved in interracial intimate relationships. Each individual discusses their relationships with family members, beliefs about the influence of race in America, unique problems associated with interracial intimacy, as well as sexual attraction, racial identity, and children. Of particular interest to specialists in race, gender, family, and sexual issues, this work is also accessible and appealing to general readers.

An Exposition on Principals’ Influence in Real Estate Negotiation

The conflicting interest between principals’ and the intermediary role played by Estate Surveyors and Valuers during real estate negotiation could prone the latter to influence from these principals’ as evident in valuation. The research which entailed a survey of 159 Estate Surveyors and Valuers in Lagos metropolis was analyzed with the use of descriptive statistics and the Relative Important Index. It was discovered that potential tenants are most apt in influencing real estate negotiation which is usually carried out with the use of reward powers and information power where pecuniary gains are offered to Estate Surveyors and Valuers in order to accomplish their whims while access to information by these principals are also used against the Estate Surveyor and Valuer working in an unfamiliar terrain respectively. The researchers therefore opines that a wakeup call by both the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers and the Estate Surveyors and Valuers Registration Board of Nigeria in curbing the prevalence of this influence will help preserve the integrity of the Estate Surveying and valuation profession.

Democratic Education: An (im)possibility that yet remains to come

Efforts to develop democratic schools have moved along particular rules and standards of ‘reasoning’ even when expressed through different ideological and paradigmatic lines. From attempts to make a democratic education to critical pedagogy, different approaches overlap in their historical construction of the reason of schooling: designing society by designing the child. These approaches to democracy make inequality into the premise of equality, assuming a consensual partition of the world and the need for specific agents to monitor partitioned boundaries, thus reinserting differences as the basis of practice. Democracy, however, according to Jacques Rancière, only becomes visible when its partitioning is challenged under the opinion of equality. Yet, undoing the epistemological dogma of planning embodied in the notions of ‘critical’ and deliberative democracy might also involve confronting the comparative style of thought which provides the epistemological ‘rules’ that insert inequality as equality. Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome and Derrida's justice help extend Rancière's democracy and equality into unfamiliar terrain. What implications might this have for thinking about educational policy and curriculum? The argument, ironically, maintains Enlightenment attitudes about reason and rationality, but while ‘trying’ different epistemological rules and recognizing how the epistemological and ontological fold into one another it provides an alternative understanding of education and democracy.

Strangers in a stranger land: political identity in the era of the governance state

The ‘governance state’ is characterised by radically reconfigured relations between public and private authority such that sovereign political authority comes to be dispersed along several axes of organised power. Paralleling the dispersal of sovereign political authority is a concomitant dispersal of familiar forms of political identity. Individuals and groups become disconnected from the familiarity of their respective social fabrics by the routine operations of a governance state having little or no concern with the nation-building agendas (and their related understandings of citizenship) of the past. The shifts of political identity possible in a context of nation-building states, of settler and postcolonial societies alike, become increasingly harder to effect. The individualising of ethical positions, of relegating such experiences to the sphere of the personal, creates a kind of closure in which resisting the state's authority comes to be interpreted by individuals as simply resisting their selves, their governance-state identities. This is precisely the kind of situation confronting us as contemporary citizens, an unfamiliar political terrain in which we find ourselves negotiating as strangers in a stranger land.

Walking Straight into Circles

Common belief has it that people who get lost in unfamiliar terrain often end up walking in circles. Although uncorroborated by empirical data, this belief has widely permeated popular culture. Here, we tested the ability of humans to walk on a straight course through unfamiliar terrain in two different environments: a large forest area and the Sahara desert. Walking trajectories of several hours were captured via global positioning system, showing that participants repeatedly walked in circles when they could not see the sun. Conversely, when the sun was visible, participants sometimes veered from a straight course but did not walk in circles. We tested various explanations for this walking behavior by assessing the ability of people to maintain a fixed course while blindfolded. Under these conditions, participants walked in often surprisingly small circles (diameter < 20 m), though rarely in a systematic direction. These results rule out a general explanation in terms of biomechanical asymmetries or other general biases [1-6]. Instead, they suggest that veering from a straight course is the result of accumulating noise in the sensorimotor system, which, without an external directional reference to recalibrate the subjective straight ahead, may cause people to walk in circles.

The opening phase of telemedicine consultations: An analysis of interaction

This paper describes communication in the opening phases of real-time, video-mediated telemedicine consultations, using the method of conversation analysis, in three NHS settings in the UK. The literature on interaction analysis in face-to-face medical consultations indicates that physicians' capacity to determine topics in consultations is established in the opening phases of the encounter. This is because patients concede the communicative floor to physicians who claim it for themselves by using well-established patterns of interaction. Drawing on 10 teleconsultations, the analysis shows that, for health care professionals and patients, video-mediated telemedicine is unfamiliar terrain, where communication requires constant negotiation of skills and roles, this complexity being added to by the fact that more than one professional participates in the encounter. Analysis of the opening phases of teleconsultations shows them to involve ‘floor negotiation’ between professionals and between professionals and patients in which they experience discrepancies between suggested ‘frames’, a term coined by Goffman [ Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis. New York: Harper and Row.] to indicate interpretive schemas that allow people to understand the meaning of events in interactions in which they participate. Frame attunement is achieved during floor negotiation through various interruptions, interjections and attachments that professionals produce to defend their agenda. The novelty of the setting also made participants negotiate the physical space in which the encounter took place. We make tentative suggestions for the training of participants, based on the limited evidence of this study, which requires extending by further studies based on direct observation.

Celebrating Disorienting Dilemmas: Reflections from the Rear View Mirror

As a twelve year-old child, I prophetically announced that I would adopt a child. In fulfilling my childhood dream, I netted a precious and unexpected gift--that being a precocious, recently-turned, four-year old granddaughter, affectionately nicknamed 'Sunshine'. When I reflect over the totality of my adoptive motherhood experiences, a continuum of kaleidoscopic-like feelings surfaces--joy, disrupted with anguish; clear-headedness obfuscated with doubt; and excitement, tinged with regret. Yet, in spite the kaleidoscopic nature of my feelings, I consider the decision to adopt my daughter among one of several transformative life events in my adult autobiography. Merriam (2005) explains life events as noteworthy occurrences or benchmarks...that give shape and direction to an individual's life (p. 4). Life events, she further explains, whether planned or unplanned (i.e., marriages, divorces, promotion, birth or death of a loved one, etc) are developmental moments for adult learning. life event as an adoptive mother was triggered rather innocuously; I saw an adopt-a-child poster at a local Wendy's restaurant. This poster was part of a national advocacy campaigned promoted by Dave Thomas (1932-2002), philanthropist, creator, and owner of the Wendy's restaurant chain, and who was himself, an adopted child. When I saw the poster, I recalled my childhood declaration and on a whim, decided to follow up with a 'phone call'. Unbeknownst to me, that phone call was my first step in transitioning from a life of a single woman, free to pursue my world's oysters into an unfamiliar terrain of parenting. Schlossenberg (1989) would identify my seeing the poster, and perhaps even the telephone call as sleeper transitional events (Merriam, 2005, p. 5). Sleeper transitions are best understood as an unnoticed event that instrumentally contributes to a gradual but steady significant life change. Moving through the initial stages of my transition from a single female to the training of becoming an adoptive was a little intensive. But in retrospect, the twenty week training session was a cake walk in contrast to what I was about to experience. After successfully completing the adoption training program, I was handed a book entitled My Turn Now. This book contained hundreds of photographs and biographies of children who were awaiting foster and/or adoptive parents. It was within this book of photographs, that I first saw my then 12-year-old adolescent daughter. The emotional pull of my heart and spirit sealed the deal and initiated the beginnings of a series of unending, multiple, and/or simultaneous disorienting dilemmas. A disorienting dilemma is related to a sense of loss of balance or normalcy complicated by a problem that seemingly has an unsatisfactory solution. According to Mezirow (1998), disorienting dilemmas are also connected to events that have been set into motion, causing a learner to engage in self-examination resulting from feelings emanating from an experience. disorienting dilemmas frequently caused me to critically ask, 'what in the world was I thinking'? But as I reflect over the totality of living through each disorienting dilemma, I have come to realize that it is the 'how' you respond and learn through these moments that determines your power for learning from a life's event. Furthermore, I have come to understand how many of my disorienting dilemmas have helped to shape and inform my philosophical belief and practice as an adult educator. I concur with Merriam (2004) who notes that it is because of these moments, learning can be transformative, ultimately leading one towards mature, autonomous and developed thinking. Today, I characterize my early adoptive mother life event experiences from an interconnected paradigm (Havighurst, 1972; Knowles, 1972; Mezirow, 1989). But in those early days, I described my life event as jumping from the proverbial kettle into the fire. The following two memories (among many) are illustrative of what I struggled with as I worked to understand my new life as an adoptive parent of a twelve-year-old adolescent child. …

Getting Around To It: Revaluing Procrastination

IN 2007, ESC DEVELOPED THE FORTUNATE HABIT Of sponsoring panels at the annual conference of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, the parent association of this journal. In each case (Stephen Slemon's 2007 roundtable on Why do I have to write like that? and Cecily Devereux's 2008 roundtable on Why do I have to read like that?), the contributors subsequently returned to their papers to produce an Esc Readers' Forum on the same subject. We've done so again, and enhanced versions of 2009,s contributions to the ACCUTE roundtable on follow. As in previous years, the roundtable proved to be a lively and well-attended intellectual event. This time around that success was due not only to some truly engaging and thoughtful presentations from our panelists but also to the electricity sparked by the interdisciplinary contribution of respondent Professor Timothy A. Pychyl, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Carleton University and Director of the internationally recognized Procrastination Research Group. Crossing over, expertise in hand, onto the unfamiliar terrain of humanities-based cultural critique, Professor Pychyl foregrounded the pragmatic concerns of social scientists engaged with what can sometimes be self-limiting or even self-destructive behaviours and thereby threw into relief our discipline's tendency to view with skepticism the conceptual frameworks of social (and especially clinical) practices. At the outset, our contributors were invited to consider the idea of procrastination and its histories, politics, representations, and practices. The panelists were asked to present a brief statement on the topic, keeping in mind that because procrastination is a serious issue for everyone-and in particular for academic students and professionals whose sometimes unstructured but ongoing responsibilities require an unusual degree of self-motivation and determined will to reach fruition-it is often pathologized as a destructive cycle of anxiety and guilt, a cycle rooted in matters of unconscious repression, melancholy, and obstructive neuroses. Certainly, in literary discourse itself, characters paralyzed by a destructive inability to act abound-think Hamlet, to cite one obvious example. However, our panelists were also reminded that refusing to act when action is called for might also be considered in many other contexts: as a positive drive toward perfectionism, as a kind of pleasure, as a condition of knowledge and creativity, as a political response to conditions of labour, as a linguistic or rhetorical figure of deferral, as a deliberate politics of conservatism, as a strategy of resistance to the strictures of modernity, as a practised art of life, as a philosophical stance toward questions of temporality and the future, and so on. …

Personality and Emotional Response: Strategic and Tactical Responses to Changing Political Circumstances

Emotions enable people to navigate various political environments, differentiating familiar situations where standard operating procedures are suitable from unfamiliar terrain when more attention is needed. While previous research identifies consequences of emotion, we know less about what triggers affective response. In this article, the authors investigate what role personality has in the operation of the systems of affective intelligence. Using experimental data as well as responses from the 2000 and 2004 American National Election Studies, the authors first consider whether personality affects the activation of emotional response. Next, they explore the degree to which citizen attitudes like openness to information and compromise are explained by personality characteristics and subconscious emotional response. Finally, they consider the implications of these results for our normative understanding of democratic citizenship.

Childhood cancer: a parent's perspective on social support, with a case illustration

When a child is diagnosed with cancer, parents enter unfamiliar terrain, where their basic childrearing tasks are challenged. Life changes from diagnosis onwards, through adjustment and then life beyond the illness. Provision of psychological support for the whole family after primary diagnosis is widely considered essential. The objective of this study was to explore a husband and wife's journey of coming to terms with their child's cancer, and to describe resources they used to get through this ordeal. The method used in this study was a case study, using narrative analysis. The positive influence of a social support group is discussed as the main coping mechanism for this family on their path to recovery.

Activity patterns of urban red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) reduce the risk of traffic-induced mortality

Traffic collisions can be a major source of mortality in wild populations, and animals may be expected to exhibit behavioral mechanisms that reduce the risk associated with crossing roads. Animals living in urban areas in particular have to negotiate very dense road networks, often with high levels of traffic flow. We examined traffic-related mortality of red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) in the city of Bristol, UK, and the extent to which roads affected fox activity by comparing real and randomly generated patterns of movement. There were significant seasonal differences in the number of traffic-related fox deaths for different age and sex classes; peaks were associated with periods when individuals were likely to be moving through unfamiliar terrain and would have had to cross major roads. Mortality rates per unit road length increased with road magnitude. The number of roads crossed by foxes and the rate at which roads were crossed per hour of activity increased after midnight when traffic flow was lower. Adults and juveniles crossed 17% and 30% fewer roads, respectively, than expected from randomly generated movement. This highly mobile species appeared to reduce the mortality risk of minor category roads by changing its activity patterns, but it remained vulnerable to the effects of larger roads with higher traffic flows during periods associated with extraterritorial movements.

Constructing the Transition to Parenthood

How is the transition to parenthood constructed in a context in which fatherhood and motherhood are therapeutically defined? Relying on ethnographic observations of 66 expectant and new parent couples assigned to 13 different parent educator-led groups, we show how, with the arrival of a baby, a sense of transition is crafted and often amplified. Our analysis suggests that just as the overall life course is constructed through language and meaningful gesture, so also the transition to parenthood is constructed through verbal and nonverbal signification. Using a vocabulary of contrast and change, parent edu-cators and expectant and new parents create a collective feeling that they are witnessing a transformation of major proportions. By emphasizing the idea that things are no longer the same, parent educators also establish themselves as authorities whose job it is to steer fathers and mothers through unfamiliar terrain. For their part, expectant and new parents not only listen to but often also replicate the parent educators’ vocabularies and, in so doing, further magnify distinctions between before parenthood and after, and between one stage of parenthood and another. Childbirth stands uncomfortably at the junction of the two worlds of nature and culture. Like death and disease it is a biological event, but the defining feature of biological events in human life is their social character. Ann Oakley (1980:7)

Form and forming a focus: In brief dynamic therapy

The author draws upon the work of Kenneth Wright, outlining the function of the therapist in giving shape to the inarticulate felt experience of the patient. Through processes of mirroring, attunement and identifying narrative patterns, and as an alternative to the making of interpretations, the therapist brings the experience of the patient within the jurisdiction of form, and in so doing contains and holds this experience. The author then turns more specifically to the role of the therapist in brief therapy in establishing a focus for the work, and how this can be seen as a way of containing the patient's inarticulate felt experience. Whether it arises as a crystallization of the focus, a flash, or as a central maladaptive pattern, establishing a focus can be seen as a way of lending shape to the narrative pattern and of making a fundamental connection to the patient's idiom. It can therefore be seen as a containing structure for the work and as a way of bringing the experience of the patient within the jurisdiction of form. The importance of the non-verbal utterances of the therapist in mirroring the patient's feelings is noted and links are made to Osimo's concept of emotional maieutics in which the therapist acts as a midwife to the patient, enabling him or her to give birth to their hidden feelings. The significance of non-verbal experience in the therapeutic relationship is also linked to Balint's notion of a new beginning and Levenson's conceptualization of new experiences in brief work. The paper concludes with a case example that illustrates these themes; in it, the author is perceived as a Sherpa guiding the patient on her journey to explore the unfamiliar terrain of her feelings and their freer expression, within the jurisdiction of form provided by the focus.

"By my absolute royal authority": justice and the Castilian commonwealth at the beginning of the first global age

A study of the kingdom of Castile's judicial administration that brings together political ideas and political action by giving serious attention to how well royal justices were able to handle difficult, prominent lawsuits that raised politically troubling questions and involved major litigants. 'By My Absolute Royal Authority': Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age' is a study of judicial administration. From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, the kingdom of Castile experienced a remarkable proliferation of judicial institutions, which historians have generally seen as part of a metanarrative of 'state-building.' Yet, Castile's frontiers were extremely porous, and a crown government that could not control the kingdom's borders exhibited neither the ability to obtain information and shape affairs, nor the centrality of court politics that many historians claim in an effort to craft a tidy narrative of this period. Castilians retained their loyalty to the monarchy not because of the 'power' of the institutions of a developing 'state,' but because they shared an identity as citizens of a commonwealth in which a high value was given to justice as an ultimate purpose of the political community and a conviction that the sovereign possessed 'absolute royal authority' to see that justice was done. This expectation served as a foundation for the political identity and loyalty that held together for several centuries the disparate and globally-dispersed domains of the Hispanic Monarchy, but perceptions of how well crown judicial institutions worked were a fundamental determinant of the degree of support a monarch could attract to meet fiscal and military goals. This book maps part of this unfamiliar terrain through a microhistory of an extended, high profile lawsuit that was carefully watched by generations of Castilian leaders. Justices from the late fifteenth century to the reign of Philip II had difficulty resolving the conflict because the proper exercise of absolute royal authority was itself the central legal issue and the dispute pitted against each other members of important groups who demonstrated a tendency to give prominence to different interpretive schemes as they tried to comprehend their world. The account brings together political ideas and political action by giving serious attention to how well royal justices were able to handle difficult, prominent lawsuits that raised politically troubling questions and involved major litigants. J. B. Owens is professor of the history and director of the Glenn E. Tyler Collection at Idaho State University, where he specializes in Spanish history and the use of Geographic Information Systems for research and teaching

Article Commentary: A journey into unfamiliar terrain

Article Commentary: A journey into unfamiliar terrain