The ‘First Generation’ in Historical Perspective: Canadian Students in the 1960s

Over the past few years a number of studies have focused on the disadvantages confronted by students who are the first in their families to attend university. Their liabilities include relatively low levels of preparedness, a lack of involvement in campus activities, and low levels of academic achievement. Rather than accepting the universality of this characterization, in this article, these negative characteristics and experiences were viewed as one ‘ideal type.’ Using this ideal type as a reference point, the current study focused on a period in Canadian history in which first generation students were the norm. In an examination of Glendon College, York University, located in Toronto Canada, in the mid 1960s, it was found that the experiences of the first generation did not fit the ideal type. Those who likely were the first in their families to attend university were prepared for their studies, involved in campus activities, and earned good grades. Possible explanations for this deviation from the ideal type include the buoyancy of the economy in the mid-sixties, an expanding university sector, the size and relative intimacy of the College, the way in which high schools prepared students for university, and stringent admission requirements.     

Vladimir Nabokov’s Poetry in Russian Émigré Criticism: A Partial Survey

Scholarship on Radishchev has so far neglected his fascinating letters from exile (1791–1801), using it primarily as source material on the writer’s biography or ideas, instead of analyzing it as a part of Radishchev’s text. The present paper examines how the writer uses his letters to build his new public image, after it has been destroyed by his arrest and trial. But Radishchev also uses them to stage his intimate body, in order to arouse his addressees’ interest and pity. Finally, he at times turns this real body into a rhetorical one, which fulfills different functions, from staging a fictitious intimacy in place of Radishchev’s real one when it is not satisfactory, to serving as a symbolic gift for his protector Count Alexander Vorontsov. The study of this specific issue sheds a new light on the writer.     

Lena Finkle’s magic arc: hybrid influences in the Russian American graphic novel

ABSTRACT

The article examines Anya Ulinich’s graphic narrative Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel and the novel’s use of visual culture from both the author’s Russian and US American backgrounds. The article interrogates the use of history and timelines, Russian art history and Russian art education in Ulinich’s text. It also analyzes other literary constructs that influenced Ulinich’s novel: US American comics/graphic novels and their use of stereotype, and novels by Russian-speaking Jewish American writers, with their thematized Jewishness.     

The Crisis of the Russian Avant-Garde in Iurii Olesha’s Envy

In this essay 1 will analyze lurii Olesha’s novel Envy (1927) as a reflex of the crisis within the Russian avant-garde. 1 will argue that Olesha’s work can be viewed as the author’s perception of the destruction of the avant-garde in the mid-twenties and its replacement by a radically different aesthetic system, i.e., Socialist Realism.

In Envy, the fatal clash between the pragmatic productivism and the earlier constructivism finds its representation in the struggle of the three machines (or constructions—postroeniia—to use the avant-garde term). These constructions are: the communal kitchen Chetvertak’; a mysterious machine, Ophelia; and Anechka Prokopovich’s bed. I argue that all the power struggles among the main characters of the novel are connected to these three machines. The main feature common to these three machines and their design is control over human life. However, if the first two—Chetvertak and Ophelia—are involved in the active struggle for power, the third—the bed—epitomizes passive aggression. The bed mocks their struggle and lies in waiting and finally devours the future discourse, because it is in the bed that the action of Envycomes to its end. Thus, 1 suggest that Chetvertak be seen as a later productionist creation, while Ophelia represents an earlier constructivist avant-garde conception. In relation to the first two machines, the bed represents socialist realism as a stagnating aesthetic vision and the dystopian pretense of paradise attained.     

Business in Social Work Education: A Historically Black University’s Social Work Entrepreneurship Project

The destabilization of the current economy has sparked increased interest in entrepreneurship, especially for underrepresented minority social work students. The entrepreneurial thinking of these social work students entering social work programs at historically Black colleges and universities needs to be fostered in a learning environment. This article describes a historically Black university’s creative social entrepreneurship venture in response to the Social Work Congress’s 2010 imperative “Business of Social Work—Infuse models of sustainable business and management practice in social work education and practice.” The social entrepreneurship project uses the interprofessional collaborative educational model and attempts to provide meaningful and relevant education to social work students interested in social entrepreneurship through the collaborative efforts of the university’s School of Social Work and the School of Business and Management.     

Arthur Ransome’s Rewriting of the Russian Folktale Historicised

ABSTRACT

The young Arthur Ransome’s Old Peter’s Russian Tales (1916) that has today attained the status of a classic is of chief interest here as part of the British–Russian cultural interaction and interconnections at the turn of the twentieth century. In an attempt to historicise the author-translator in his creative effort to rewrite the Russian folktale, this paper focuses on his quest for magic and the collection of fairy stories, resulting from interacting with both place and people. A microscopic analysis of the translator’s life and work in his early years in Russia, via a study of archival material (Brotherton Collections, University of Leeds Library) and other relevant documents, has helped to reconstruct them in a richness of detail that sheds light on the bigger picture of the British–Russian relationship. The translator's gift to his reader, a token of fruitful experiences in this new and exciting fairyland, was, in fact, the product of mediation agency between the two worlds, the role that Ransome had found crucial and realised successfully in practice. As a result, another cultural and emotional bridge was built to interconnect these two countries.     

The ‘Old New Russian Town’: Modernization and Architectural Preservation in Russia’s Historic North West, 1961–1982

Abstract

The emergence of a Soviet preservationist movement, which gained institutional coherence in the mid-1960s, appears to stand at odds with the ideas of rationalization and standardization that informed the Khrushchev-era urban development programme. Yet, as I argue in this article, these two strands of post-Stalin era Soviet culture were not as antagonistic as they may first appear. In Khrushchev’s Russia, the preservation of architectural heritage was rationalized as a means of strengthening the foundations of Soviet society by rooting it in the national past. Rather than detracting from the goal of building communism, cultural heritage was made an integral part of that process, a focus of national pride and source of social solidarity.     

Touch in residential child care: staff’s bodies and children’s agency

This paper concerns the significance of touch in the everyday life of those living and working in residential child care. Public and professional awareness about child abuse has focused attention on the bodies of children and their vulnerability – but the same cannot be said of the bodies of staff members who touch children. This ethnographic study of a Scottish residential child care unit shows such touch to be central to the everyday participation of children and young people in care. On the basis of participant observation, the paper analyses how care workers influence the agency of children and young people by bringing their own bodies into their relationships with them. Based on a relational understanding of care, the paper elaborates on how tender and restraining forms of touch form part of care workers’ professional repertoire of actions. The analysis of various instances of touch in terms of sociology of the body shows how staff members can help to shape children and young people’s opportunities for participation with their own bodies. In conclusion, the paper therefore argues for a professional and reflexive engagement with bodies rather than a general avoidance of touch between care workers and young people.