(Re)tracing queerness: archiving indentureship’s ‘coolie homo/erotic’

The erotic lifeworld of Indian indentureship remains buried. This visual essay probes the ‘coolie homoerotic’ as a creative reflection on the place of the homoerotic and queerness within the trans-oceanic lifeworld of coolie indentureship. It uses the methodology of visual assemblage to creatively and critically engage with a rare archival record of alleged sodomy on a coolie ship, the Mersey, bound for British Guiana from Calcutta in 1898. The author uses the archival document, as a residue of homoerotic possibility, to re-trace and deliberately reconfigure the historically present narrative of indentureship through a seven-image collection entitled Postcards from the Perineum. In critically responding to Victorian imagery of moral-labour discipline, the postcards were produced using techniques such as photography, sketching, painting, crafting and body printing. The aim is to visually and imaginatively open up a space for contemplating an aesthetic-eroto-political field of knowledge production in relation to the violence and indignities of indentureship. In doing so, the essay also suggests that indentureship is a site of contrapuntal queerness, through which we might critically provoke normative understandings of this term.     

Effects of a Mindfulness Task on Women’s Sexual Response

Mindfulness-based interventions are effective at improving symptoms of sexual dysfunction in women. The mechanisms by which mindfulness improves sexual function are less clear. The main objective of our study was to investigate the impact of a mindfulness task on sexual response in women. Forty-one women (mean age = 27.2, SD = 5.6) participated in two laboratory sessions that each included two erotic films and one attention task that were presented in counterbalanced order. Both attention tasks consisted of a six-minute audio recording of either a modified body scan, focusing on genital arousal sensations (mindfulness condition), or a visualization exercise. Subjective and genital sexual arousal were measured continuously during stimulus presentation. The mindfulness task led to greater subjective and lower genital arousal. The agreement of subjective and genital sexual arousal (i.e., concordance) was greater in the mindfulness condition. Trait mindfulness was related to lower sexual arousal but also greater sexual concordance in women. Mindfulness-based interventions that encourage women to focus on physical arousal sensations in the here and now may be associated with women’s improved sexual function by enhancing feelings of sexual arousal during sexual activity and by increasing concordance between subjective and genital sexual arousal.     

The significance of uprightness: parents’ reflections on children’s responses to a hands-free walker for children

The benefits and drawbacks of facilitating independent walking in children with physical mobility impairments, such as cerebral palsy, remain to be determined. This knowledge gap creates decision dilemmas about which mobility practices parents and children should adopt and rehabilitation professionals should foster. These dilemmas are reflected in continuing debates about allocation of time, effort and resources to optimize walking versus encouraging use of manual or powered wheelchairs. Recent studies have reported only modest measurable walking progress for severely disabled children using hands-free walkers. Despite these seemingly disappointing results, parents remained highly motivated to encourage their children to use these walking devices and appraised them very positively. In the present paper, we suggest that parents’ symbolic value of their children assuming upright comportment may explain why they perceive hands-free walkers positively and why they are so motivated to devote much time and effort to improving independent, walking-based mobility of their children.     

Review essay: on Mamdani’s mode of thought

This essay tracks the formation of a global intellectual, perhaps the only one, whose work moves across Africa, America and Asia. Mahmood Mamdani has been a central figure engaging in explaining the most controversial issues such as refugees, popular versus state nationalism, mass killings (Rowanda), settler versus native, colonial citizenship and its governed subject, September 11, the Dafur movement (and its self-indulgence), Imperial Human Rights, decolonizing university and knowledge production (the US as the first and never decololinzed), settler colonialism, etc. Fearless and thoroughly grounded, Mamdani’s mode of thought is to historicize the conditions of the existence of the problematics in question with a theorization emerging out of the analyses. As a whole, Mamdani’s political practices as educator and public intellectual and the body of brilliant work have been inspirational. The essay is written as an introduction to Decolonizing the World: A Mahmood Mamdani Reader, a collection of his selected work, to open the channel of interaction between Asia and Africa.     

The Monster Within: Countertransference Reflections on a Gay Adolescent’s Struggle with Sexual Identity

This paper concerns the author’s countertransference reflections on her work with a gay adolescent who identifies with powerfully destructive internal objects, including Hitler and the Monster. The author describes her countertransference inquiry through which she experiences her own potential destructiveness in order to help accommodate her adolescent patient’s rejected and disowned self states.

Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale: a unique social engagement

Abstract

Art as a social engagement in the West can be dated back to the history of avant-garde art starting from the end of nineteenth century. Rooted in his own cultural background, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s socially engaged art project “Fairytale is more complex than the avant-garde strategy. The work Fairytale established a structure – “1=1,001”. That means on the one hand, the participants can be easily regarded everywhere in Kassel as 1,001 mobile works of art. All of them contribute to an entire work. In other words, the 1,001 people consist of one work. On the other hand, everyone is dealing with their personal issues independent of art. In this sense, the entire work can be divided into 1,001 personal experiences. This structure is based on three principles of Chinese philosophy Taoism – the duality between Yin and Yang, the dynamism between Yin and Yang, and the concept of “uselessness”. Positioning Fairytale within both Western theoretical as well as Chinese philosophical contexts, this essay is to analyze how Chinese philosophy shaped Ai’s strategy of social engagement and his cultural identity – Chineseness.     

Security a la Mexicana: on the particularities of security governance in México’s War on Crime

Social scientists from different fields have identified security as a future-oriented mode of governance designed to preserve the social order from diverse types of global risk through international cooperation, militarization and privatization of the state security apparatus, surveillance technologies, community policing, and stigmatization of identities and behaviors deemed dangerous. This literature has largely been limited to English-speaking countries in the Global North, however, that are relatively “secure.”. To understand how security operates in a different context, this article focuses on the current War on Crime in México using newspaper and magazine articles, government documents, and extant academic research. In México, it is argued, the basic elements of security governance (international cooperation, militarized police, surveillance technologies, law, etc.) are present, but in modified form. Rather than focusing on external risks that could develop into future threats, security in México is turned inward against traditional forms of national economic, political, and cultural life thought to produce harm in the present. This, in turn, underscores security’s unique purpose in the country, which is not to preserve the prevailing social order, but to transform an emergent social order that through globalization has come to threaten the state’s legitimacy. These observations suggest an international divide in the operation of security that leaves those most vulnerable in the Global South to bear the greatest costs.     

Polanyi’s two transformations revisited: a ‘bottom up’ perspective

ABSTRACT

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi offers a ‘top-down’ analysis of the rise and demise of Europe’s unregulated market system. He assumes that changes in the organization of the international economy provide particular kinds of opportunities for states to act which, in turn, shapes the extent to which social forces will be able to influence state policy. Consequently, his analysis focuses, first, on the international institutions created by the self-regulating market system; then on the ‘liberal state’ which these made possible; and finally on how the system impacts ‘society as a whole’. The account which this analysis produces systematically underplays the social struggles which propelled and emerged from the rise of Europe’s nineteenth century system and which ultimately led to its demise. In revisiting the two periods that are the focus of Polanyi’s analysis, this article assumes that states and interstate systems reflect the interests of powerful social forces. Thus, working from the ‘bottom up’, it focuses on the class interests that produced Europe’s market system, the state and international structures which reflected and supported them, and the social struggles that ultimately brought about the collapse of the system. What this ‘bottom up’ account reveals is the centrality of a ‘double movement’, not of market expansion and a protective countermove on the part of ‘society as a whole’, but of dominant classes monopolizing economic opportunities from global expansion, and a rising ‘red tide’ of disaffected workers. This double movement, it argues, better explains the demise of the system and the changes that ensued from it.     

Staking reputation on stakeholders: How does stakeholders’ Facebook engagement help or ruin a company’s reputation?

The majority of studies in public relations continue to examine organization-public relationships from only the organization’s perspective, with few studies focusing on the other side of the communication loop: stakeholders. The current study takes the stakeholders’ perspective to investigate the relationship between active stakeholders’ online behavior and corporate reputation. Modeling 5-year longitudinal social media data, a content analysis was conducted for Fortune 500 companies in the context of Facebook. By examining stakeholders’ Facebook engagement at the two levels of shallow engagement and profound engagement, significant associations were discovered. Active stakeholders’ Facebook-based interactions as leaving positive or negative comments with a company are significant predictors of the company’s reputation score. The findings bring new insights to existing literature and also practical implications to public relations professionals.     

FDI’s Impact on Transitional Countries, Serbia as a Rational Choice: The FIAT-ZASTAVA Case

The privatization process and foreign direct investments (FDI) are among the most important economic issues in transitional countries. FDI has enormous influence on transitional countries that need serious structural changes. In this paper we will study FIAT’s decision to invest in the Serbian automotive industry. We will try to rationalize FIAT’s decision because Serbian car manufacturer ZASTAVA was not the only alternative for FIAT to invest in the Balkans. In order to justify FIAT’s decision we will apply the Mullins model of horizontal and vertical FDI, examine the importance of the cooperating history between two car manufacturers and compare macroeconomic conditions and Global Competitiveness of Serbia and Romania, which was the main alternative for FIAT. Finally, we will also try to explain why FIAT decided to announce the investment at the end of political campaign in Serbia when pools gave anti-European parties higher chances for victory, instead of waiting to see the outcome of the elections.

A PEP grant’s influence on change in a school district: One year post funding

This study examined teachers’ and administrators’ perceptions of the institutionalization phase of the Carol M. White Physical Education for Progress (PEP) grant. A qualitative exploratory single case study (Yin, 2014) was utilized to examine the elements of the PEP grant that sustained or did not sustain after its conclusion, along with elements that were institutionalized and influences on this process. The findings were represented in the following three themes: (a) positive shifts, (b) backsliding, and (c) new directions, each with their own subthemes. Positive shifts includes sub-themes: (a) philosophy, (b) instruction, assessment and curriculum, (c) collaboration, and (d) respect. Backsliding includes sub-themes: (a) wellness team functioning, (b) the loss of PD and collaboration time, and (c) reduced data collection. New directions includes sub-themes: (a) mastery learning, (b) during school physical activity, (c) stress, and (d) administrative support. The factors that were institutionalized were quality physical education leadership roles, change in teachers’ philosophies that influenced their instruction and assessment, and garnered administrative support. These elements were embedded into the physical education program and the school so much so that principals now expect the same type of programming from any new hire.