Children in Educational Residential Care: A Cohort Study of Israeli Youth

Abstract

This article reports preliminary findings from a national cohort study in Israel on the educational outcomes of 82,342 Jewish citizens born in 1981. We compare the educational outcomes of 2002 alumni of youth villages and their peers in the general population with respect to differences among cultural subgroups. The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics generated the database by combining different official data files based on a personal identification number that each Israeli citizen receives. This database covers the entire cohort and includes information on their background and educational status. The findings indicate that the educational status of alumni of youth villages at the age of 27 is less positive compared to that of their peers in the general population. Cultural differences are discussed with respect to the role of youth villages as a means for upward mobility of disadvantaged youth, and implications for policy and future research are suggested.     

Redefining Critical Autism Studies: a more inclusive interpretation

This article explores the definition of Critical Autism Studies and its inclusion in autistic scholarship. There has been critique of recent non-autistic literature for lacking autistic authorship, leading to doubts about its epistemological integrity due to misrepresentations of autistic culture and the neurodiversity movement. This article utilises the work of Arnold, Milton and O’Dell et al. to introduce an emancipatory definition to ensure the discipline is autistic led. In the process, we discuss the nature of autism studies and what constitutes critical literature. We propose Waltz’s interpretation of Critical Autism Studies as a working definition.     

(Dis)Arming the madman: sane supremacy and the Second Amendment

Abstract

The protection of American mental health consumers’ Second Amendment rights is the ‘mad’ liberation issue of the twenty-first century. Federal laws currently dispossess the differently minded of their Second Amendment access and rights to bear firearms. In response to a spate of school shootings, ‘Red flag laws’ are used in an effort to circumvent mad citizens’ rights to self-preservation and defence. In this article I am proposing neither a political-left nor right side of the aisle position, but rather a bipartisan, anti-sanist stance, where I call for an end to America’s contemporary era of sane supremacy that strips the mad citizenry of their rights to own firearms.     

Playing with materiality: an agential-realist reading of SethBling's Super Mario World code-injection

ABSTRACT

This article takes inspiration from Youtuber and software developer ‘SethBling’ and his 2016 ‘code-injection’ (Bling, 2016), in which, using only a standard Super Nintendo Entertainment System controller and in-depth knowledge of the console, he ‘injected’ and executed the code of popular mobile game Flappy Bird (Nguyen, 2013) into a running instance of Super Mario World (Miyamoto, 1990), effectively transforming one game into another through play. Drawing from this I propose a performative understanding of videogames (and software in general) to reinvigorate discussions of software's materiality. Though it is possible to contrast Wendy Chun's (2008a) suggestion that one can view software as ‘vaporous’ against Friedrich Kittler's (1995) assertion that ‘there is no software’, I propose a more holistic approach. Academics and users alike should attempt to see software as living a double-life: as simultaneously solid as it is (metaphorically) gaseous. It then becomes possible to embrace software(s) as performative examples of the entangled ‘phenomena’, suggested by Barad (2007), that produce everyday reality through quantum activity. I explore SethBling's code-injection suggesting that actions clearly reveal software's double existence as both tangible ‘thing’, locatable on magnetic memory, and as a vaporous non-entity. Accepting these propositions together, software can be understood as continuously re-emerging through shared activities. Following Barad, I conclude that this quality is not unique to software, but software – and videogames above all – are a useful tool for understanding a vision of reality that favours activity over materiality as the basis of our existence.     

《红楼梦》悲剧精神的休闲学意义

本文首次尝试从休闲研究的视角探索《红楼梦》的悲剧精神。悲剧精神与休闲学具有一致的终极指向与核心价值,是进行这种探索的理论依据。文章阐述了《红楼梦》悲剧精神的三方面基本内容,初步揭示了它们所蕴涵的休闲学意义:个体休闲的实现必然受到各种条件的制约;不同个体之间的差异性导致的休闲实现之差异,表明休闲具有深刻的人文性;与一定的经济文化和社会阶层相适应的休闲方式,既具有变化的时代性,也具其审美的永恒性。从休闲学视角解读《红楼梦》的悲剧精神,能使我们更具体了解这种悲剧精神所体现的对人自身、人的幸福、命运的思考,认识这种思考所达到的广度和深度;同时,又能使我们更深刻地认识以人的自由为指向的休闲生活对于人类生活、幸福、命运的意义。     

Enclosure,writing, and resistance: revisiting the prose of Daniil Kharms

The author argues that discipline – operating through the distribution of individuals by means of enclosure and surveillance – is crucial to understanding Daniil Kharms’s prose of the 1930s. The author focuses on three of his mini-stories, first looking at mechanisms of surveillance in “Dream,” examining their effects upon the psyche that have material impacts on the body of the individual. Then he turns to a trajectory of enclosure that operates from the urban commons (“Trial by Lynching”) to the home (“An Unexpected Drinking Party”). The centripetal trajectory of enclosure ends in all cases at the body as the endpoint of discipline and, ultimately, the site of Kharms’s “grotesque resistance,” challenging the enclosure of the body from the point of its confinement. He also looks to how paper – as theme in and medium of Kharms’s work – operates within these spatial dynamics. He draws upon Harold Innis, who associated the rise of print in the United States with the “space bias” of communication. Reading Foucault and Innis together, Kharms’s short prose works can be understood as a contestation of the space bias of print media in the Stalinist era, prompting Kharms’s retreat to the contours of the body as a site of struggle.     

Global Identifications: The Social Identity Behind the Globalised Sociocultural Anthropologist

My social identity as a diasporic Korean American male sometimes engendered doubts about my competency as a cultural anthropologist of South Korea. Such ethnonational gatekeeping by my ‘native’ Korean colleagues laid bare broader critiques of ‘the West’. Paradoxically, they also prompted re-entrenchments of nativeness (and implicitly, non-nativeness) by my colleagues despite their increasingly ‘non-native’ transnational identities. These embodied cultural boundaries are less visible (and arguably less consequential) to those viewed as recognisably non-native Asian (for example, white, Euro-American) or native Asian. But they are markedly visible and relevant to diasporic subjects who fit less comfortably within both boundary-enforcing classifications. The figure of the diasporic anthropologist reveals presumed racialised and gendered markers of difference—chiefly the unmarked but organising role of whiteness—conveniently subsumed under categories of ‘the West’ and ‘Asia’. Consequently, recent calls for ‘global anthropology’ against ‘Euro-American academic hegemony’ that fail to address this essentialising tendency, although important, remain inadequate.     

“信达雅”标准下《谈读书》两种译本的解读

文章在“信达雅”翻译标准视角下,对培根散文《谈读书》的两种译本进行比较与鉴赏。分析译者如何跨越语言的障碍、文化的差异,做到形式与内容的和谐统一,体现老一辈翻译家精湛的翻译技艺和严谨的翻译态度,从而进一步指导翻译实践活动。     

海合会国家与美国的安全合作

美国插手海湾事务,客观上使海湾各种力量重新趋于平衡。美国主导海湾防务,必然会按照美国意志行事,以使海合会国家的安全利益服从于美国全球战略利益,这与海合会国家寻求美国庇护的初衷产生了矛盾。随着时间的推移,这种矛盾越发凸显,海合会国家的不安全感也越发强烈。虽然这些问题目前不会阻碍双方安全合作的进程,但会影响双方全面合作的深度。     

简论郭沫若与蜀学传统(下)

郭沫若同胡适、鲁迅一样,都是学贯中西、既往开来的文化巨人,是中国文化转型期的旗帜性人物。文章从地域文化影响导致的文化感受差异入手,认真分析了郭沫若与鲁迅在反思民族文化传统方面的不同思维方式和形成原因,以及郭沫若与胡适在建设中国现代学术文化方面的不同建树和深刻影响。由此得出结论,认真研究郭沫若,不仅是蜀学向新蜀学的拓展,也是国学向新国学的拓展。